The Beast Has Arrived: Alienware Area 51 R2

Not from this world.

Today was a sad day, I said goodbye to my faithful Acer Predator G3620 that has been the backbone of everything from this blog to just my personal usage. After a recent power supply failure and the massive influx of new games and peripherals that are a bit too much for the Predator's old GTX 660 and 3rd generation i7 to handle, I began to look elsewhere. I initially wanted to upgrade the Predator to a new 6th generation i7, max out the RAM at 16 GB, and chuck in a GTX 980 TI but because of the limitations of the custom motherboard designed specifically for the Predator, that was about the most I could do. However miracles do happen, and a deal came by that I couldn't pass up. That's how I wound up with this monster of a computer, an Alienware Area 51 R2.

Move over runt.

I'm going to say first off that I think buying pre-built computers of this caliber is just plain dumb. Alienware is pretty notorious for overpricing their hardware when you can build an equally capable rig for notably less. So I did the math before pulling the trigger on this computer, numbers I can't exactly remember but all I know was that buying the exact same computer from Dell, brand spanking new was massively expensive in true Alienware fashion. A refurbished rig from Dell of similar spec was less but still stupid pricey too. I priced out a custom build with all of the same or similar components and it ended up being over a grand less than the refurbished model which is clearly the route to go if you have enough brain cells to distinguish price differences. My Area 51 is also a refurbished rig, I couldn't tell when it showed up at my door honestly, and it cost me several grand less than the custom build so that justified the purchase enough. Sweet.

The whole case is built out of aluminum and the entire rig weighs in at around 62 pounds. You get carrying handles on each end of the odd triangular full tower to help ease the headache of transporting this thing. Another neat feature is that you fully customizable case lighting that interestingly responds to certain games like Battlefield to name one. At the front you get a slot loading disk drive, headphone and mic jacks, plus two USB ports and a microSD slot. In the back you get LED lighting that lights up your ports for better visibility under your desk and whatnot. There are also the panel release latches in true Dell fashion at the top. It's nice having no screws.

It's whats inside the case though, that's whats really impressive. The Area 51 packs 32 GB of RAM, three GTX 980s in Tri-SLI, and a watercooled Intel Haswell i7-5960X octa-core processor. All this is linked to a custom ATX motherboard and powered by a custom 1500 watt modular power supply. The fans are all placed to maximize airflow efficiency through the case which also helps explain the triangular design. You can butt it up against a wall and the fans wont be obstructed.

The other side is where the disk drive and hard drives sit and it has room for three 3.5 inch drives and two 2.5 inch drives. Out of the box you get a monster 4TB Western Digital HDD and a 512 GB Samsung SSD for the OS which so happens to be the still god awful Windows 8.1. The disk drive is a combination Blu-Ray, DVD, CD-ROM drive that's writable to all formats. I made some tweaks to the whole storage setup before hooking the computer up.

I pulled my old Seagate 2TB drive out from the Acer and tossed it into one of the free bays in the Area 51. This greatly reduced the headache of switching computers and I just transferred all my files onto the main 4TB drive. I also chucked in the 500 GB Seagate from the Acer and installed it into the last bay effectively making the total storage space of the computer roughly 7 TB; totally unnecessary amount of storage but oh well. Luckily Alienware included open SATA cables for any extra drives you might want to install so props to them for that. I also went and upgraded to Windows 10 and by the time I was done with all the setup, the computer basically felt like the Acer did but with a ton more horsepower under the hood.

The computer ships with little bloatware on it. All that's comes on it by default is McAfee Antivirus which I promptly deleted after it began blowing my notifications up as usual, PowerDVD, and the Alienware Command Center. This software basically allows you to toy around with damn near every aspect of the computer from colors, temperatures and overclocking. This thing monitors basically every temperature spot on the computer from each individual GPU to the hard drives. Really helpful if you intend on overclocking.

Which you in fact can do for the CPU and DRAM within the program. I never experimented with overclocking yet so I didn't mess with it but this looks to be a relatively straightforward process through the Command Center. I don't know if you can overclock GPUs through here and I'm pretty sure you can't anyways but there are enough guides on how to do it I'd imagine. Playing around with the settings in this thing is pretty fun though, especially if you know what you're doing.

As for it's game performance it pretty much just bulldozes through everything I throw at it. Total War Rome II to name one, a game that even on some of the lowest settings the Acer was having a headache running it; the Area 51 just smoothly runs it maxed out on Extreme. This rig is ideal for 4K gaming and I'm thinking about getting a 4K monitor to take advantage of all the extra power I got, and the Oculus Rift I got ordered should work just fine too. This is by far the most badass PC I've ever personally used and I highly doubt I would have wound up with it in the first place if I didn't luck out in my searches. It's the total definition of overkill and it's expensive as hell to boot. You should honestly look elsewhere if you really REALLY want a new high powered gaming computer, namely in the custom build market, but if you can find one of these that's mathematically cheaper than a custom build priced out, it might be worth considering. It's a completely unnecessary, excessive, over the top piece of hardware, but holy shit is it something else. So long Acer, I won't miss you for long.