Alienware Area 51: A High End Gaming Monster

Posted Jul. 22nd, 2010 by Jeremy Ashburn

One thing’s for sure: Alienware really knows how to make an upper end gaming rig. This Alienware Area 51 (A51-2443CSB) Desktop is a top of line gaming and rendering machine. It’s processor is the Intel Core i7-920 which is one of today’s fastest four core cpu running at 2.66GHz. It also has a ripping ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card (1GB of memory), 6GB of (DDR3-1333) RAM, and a ginormous 1.2TB hard drive. Dave Dave Altavilla at HotHardware reviewed a similar Alienware desktop with just a slightly faster processor (3.33Ghz i7-980 X) and absolutely loved it. On DiRT2 the machine easily cranked out 133-135 fps at 1920×1200 with highest visuals enabled. Sweet.

Buying the Alienware 51 (A51-2443CSB) will cost you a lot of pretty pennies – about $2100 to be exact. You certainly get what you pay for though in terms of sheer power. It’s an outlet item which means that you’ll have to buy it online and have it shipped to the store.

Review Summary
It’s easy to see why Dave Altavilla at HotHardware loves this system. Even though this full tower chassy weighs 84 pounds it’s a beauty! Dave explains that when you take a look at the outside of the case you can see it has a really cool muscle car feel. The case has a really cool high end ventilation system with fins sticking out of the top. Looking just below the fins reveals the USB, E-SATA, and FireWire ports. Inside one can see that the system has impeccable build quality. The Intel Core i7-920 4 core processor (which produces 8 threads of processing power) uses a water cooling system to keep the system temperate at stable levels. Opening an internal doors reveals the twin ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics cards which, combined with the 6GB DRR3-1333 RAM, produce ultra high-end 3-D rendering.

The back side of the desktop reveals a wall that can store up to 6 different hard drives. The system itself comes with 2 1.2TB 7200RPM drives operating at Raid 9. Alienware also has really cool software which acts as as a command control center where you can keep an eye on the temperature thermals, system speed, hard drive speed, cpu pump speed, and adjust the venting. You can even change the color of the case LED/Lights! The back of the system has a legacy keyboard and mouse ports, optical Audio output (Coax & TOSLINK), 6 usb ports, 1 Firefire, 1 eSata, 2 Gigabit Ethernet. 7.1 HD surround sound with 4x DVI ports.

Dave explains that the system can easily handle every modern 3-D game. He says it handles Dirk2 gets 133-135 fps at a 1920×1200 resolution with high-end visuals. That’s pretty amazing performance for this brand new DirectX 11 game.

User Opinons:
The Alienware Area 51 ( A51-2443CSB) now has 11 reviews with a 3.7 Star rating at Bestbuy.com. And now some recent opinions:

This is a 4 core processor, most games havent been made to fully use 2 or even 3 cores yet. Games like Crysis or other of the elite powerhouse games will use your processor but it wont use 3/4 of the processor power. You will need a really good graphic card, from Alienware website you can upgrade it to the HUGE 2GB GDDR5 ATI card, im not a big PC gamer, but hardcore PC gamers drool over this graphic card, its one of, if not the best graphic cards available from ATI.The processor speed is MORE than enough, but in order to play games you need a great graphic card and RAM as well, (6GB should be enough, but more is always better to ‘futureproof’ the CPU).I wouldnt go higher than 6GB or 9GB of RAM just in case a new RAM technology comes out, you dont wanna spend money on 24GB or RAM (which costs well over 1000 dollars) just to have DDR4 (or whatever it may be) come out in a 2-3 years.ENJOY THIS COMPUTER, the only thing you’d need to upgrade in 5 years is the graphics card to play future games.
It is true Alienware do cost a little more than other machines, but there some hidden extras on this machine which do help out a lot.

Area 51 come standard with Liquid cooling, 1000w power supply. This computer also has RAID0 disk drives and upgraded ram. This computer can easily take a second video card or other upgrades. Also it will last longer since it won’t overheat with the liquid cooling. Nothing hurts electronics worse than heat.

You get what you pay for a lot of the time. This computer weighs a whooping 84 pounds compared to 13 pounds for your normal computer.

HotHardware Video Review