Alienware Area 51 R2 Upgrades

Upgrades? I don't need upgrades!

So to my absolute disbelief, I actually found myself dissatisfied by the performance of my Alienware Area 51 R2 for the first time in my two years of owning it. Yeah no kidding, this monster that weighs somewhere north of 60 pounds and has not one, but three GTX 980s crammed into it managed to put a frown on my face, and I have nothing but my heavy use of VR to thank for it. This left me with only one option that I haven't resorted to for years: it's time for a rebuild.

It looks cool as hell, but that's about it.

So to clarify, this computer is more than capable of running virtually everything I've thrown it's way so far and there's only been a small percentage of games where I couldn't just turn the dial all the way up to Ultra and call it day. The culprit? It's the SLI setup, which essentially allows you to link multiple GPUs together and have some ludicrous power at your disposal, along with an awfully sexy set of completed internals. The problem is that SLI support has been dropping in recent years meaning that the said games that aren't running at their peak tend not to support it. VR of course works perfectly fine on one GTX 980 but one game finally convinced me that I was time to part ways with the SLI setup: Elite Dangerous.

This convinced me SLI sucks.

Elite Dangerous in VR has some of the most ridiculous minimum requirements I've ever seen for a game; a GTX 980 is the goddamn minimum! Being the partial idiot I am, I didn't find this out until after I put hundreds of hours into the game before people finally put me straight and said SLI does not work on this game, and you're sure as shit not going to run it well with your settings. Okay fine, I'll just play on my monitor which actually works great, apart from the head scratching graphics crash I'll run into on occasion. In the meantime I was thoroughly convinced I had to dump SLI. It consumed loads of power, put out crap-loads of heat, and just flat out didn't have any benefit over running a single, high powered card for my uses. So I went hunting for a 1080 Ti and in the meantime, prepped "The Beast" for a new set of guts.

SLI be gone!

The problem is that finding a GTX 1080 Ti is borderline impossible with how screwed up the GPU market has been thanks to the gold rush that has been Bitcoin mining. The cards that are out there there have obviously been price gouged to all high heaven so I had no choice but to be patient and hope to get lucky. I had no plans of giving my money to these scalping dickheads anyways. I went a ahead and stripped the Area 51 down to just one GPU which made me realize just how much space these things took up. Interestingly enough, when I hooked the machine back up and fired Elite up, I noticed something interesting, those graphics errors had completely stopped. So the fact that I ditched two extra cards made the game run more stable? I guess I was on the right track.

*internal screaming*

Yet miracles do happen and after weeks of scanning NowInStock for any signs of life, I snagged an EVGA SC2 Hybrid for MSRP, holy smokes. Essentially you have an air cooled heat sink for the VRAM and a water cooled system for the actual GPU chip. I decided to go with the Hybrid card in hopes I'd lower temperatures and have the whole thing run a bit quieter, but this left me with the dilemma of finding a place to mount that massive 120mm radiator setup. So I got to tearing into the machine once again and popped out the last GTX 980. The Area 51 uses these interesting mounting brackets for the GPUs for added support but the Hybrid lacks the mounting holes that these factory Nvidia cards have. So I simply did away with them. I mean it's not like I plan on moving this colossal thing around anyways.

Got gaps? No problem.

Removing those cards also opened up six PCI slots in the back of the machine so I had to cover them with something. I opted for these Maximum Steel vented PCI slot covers painted in a nice black finish. They just slot right into place, screw them down, and presto. They look much cleaner than the usual unpainted pieces of metal tacked into these slots and having extra venting is never a bad thing either.

Stay cool.

At this point, the new GPU fits just fine, but this left me with finding a suitable place for the radiator. Now the Area 51 has a free space for another 120mm fan but because this machine didn't come with one, it's been sealed off by a sheet of plastic and the mounting bracket that fits onto it is unfortunately rare as hell. So I had to sacrifice a fan to finish the job,something I wasn't too concerned about since the whole machine was going to run a lot less hot with the new GPU. Since heat naturally rises and this new radiator was technically an exhaust fan, I decided to remove the top intake fan and ramp up the bottom intake fan slightly to help compensate a bit for it's absence. This left me with the daunting task of hacking up a rare mounting bracket to fit the massive new radiator but thankfully it all fell into place quite nicely. 

Ka-boom.

The Area 51's 1500W modular PSU offered more than enough power to keep all the new gear running and after tidying up the cables and hoses, the build is done! The BIOS screamed at me for a second when it detected that the top fan was missing but a quick setting change told it shutup. From there I did the usual part of setting up drivers and making sure there wasn't any weirdness going on before I put the thing through it's paces but thankfully everything was working fine.

Liquid cooled power.

The GPU idles at around 35 degrees Celsius which feels about right, whereas under the full brunt of games like Fallout 4 and DOOM at 3440 x 1440, it only peaked at around 48 degrees which is outstanding to say the least. Let's not forget that the game not only look absolutely stellar but they run smooth as butter too. Elite Dangerous VR, which as I've already shown as being the most graphically intensive game I've ever run peaks at around 60 degrees and runs fantastically at practically maxed settings with supersampling and HMD image quality set to 1.5 which would have been a pipe dream on the GTX 980. Those cards in their SLI configuration would regularly break 90 degrees under load while constantly throttling their fans, putting enough heat out the back to make the metal struts in the back of my desk hot to the touch. The 1080 Ti in comparison feels a bit quieter under load although it does still push a good amount of warm air out through the radiator. Case temperatures with the removal of the top intake fan are still in good shape although I'm definitely putting another intake fan in this thing as soon as I can find another bracket.

Back in action and better than ever.

End result of this build I feel is a solid success as this computer absolutely demolishes everything I've thrown at it so far and it does so without complaint. Like before, it's still a pretty ridiculous amount of power but with SLI gone, it's now completely unchained from any sort of limitations I'd have run into in the past. There are some things I may change later on, one of course is adding the second intake fan but the other is possibly swapping the positions of the CPU and GPU radiators since the GPU radiator pushes quite bit more heat out and I'd rather not have it blowing up into my arm all the time. I may also switch the CPU radiator from a pull configuration to push like the GPU radiator so dust doesn't cake on the thing as much. Other than that, I don't see myself having to mess with this thing for a long time now and I'm very happy with how it turned out.