Alienware X51 R3 Review: Console-Sized Gaming PC Gets Skylake Infusion

Name: Alienware X51 R3
Brand: Alienware

by Dave Altavilla and Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, September 09, 2015, 01:15 PM EDT

Alienware X51 R3 Software And System Tools

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The software side of the Alienware X51 R3 hasn't changed a whole lot, but that's not necessarily a shortcoming. Alienware's standard Alien Command Center suite offers lots of configuration options from three different lighting zones that can be configured a wide variety of hues, to thermal controls, overclocking and application profile configuration, which allows you to configure specific performance and lighting setups when you kick off a certain game title, for example.

At idle, you can see the X51 R3 runs rather cool and definitely quite. It's not completely silent machine in this state but it's very close. Stock settings that were delivered to us offer a slight factory overclock of 4.4GHz max turbo on the CPU (4.2GHz stock). Under these settings above, all was completely stable and unoffensive to the ear. What's more impressive is that it takes a fair bit of load to get the X51 R3 to an more audible level and even then we've heard louder small form factor systems to be sure. More on this shortly as well.

And finally, Alienware added full integration of their Graphics Amplifier external graphics and PCI Express connectivity technology to the X51 R3. As you can see here, when the Graphics Amplifier is connected, the on-board graphics card inside the Amp, takes over all graphics requests of the system, whether gaming or just idle on the desktop.

And under the hood of the Graphics Amplifier Alienware sent us, we had a rather beastly NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X installed. It definitely added significant punch to our gaming performance, which we'll show you shortly. To be fair, this configuration obviously adds to the overall footprint (and cost) of the X51 R3's configuration, but still it's an expansion option at your disposal. Of course, we'll dig into the benchmark numbers with and without Alienware's Graphics Amp, next...