Event Coverage

Dell's Formidable Alienware Notebooks & Desktops

By Andy Sim - 9 Oct 2009

Enter Area 51

The Area-51 Desktops

There's more in the can if notebooks aren't your cup of tea. Besides the M15x, Dell's offering a number of gaming PCs as well. The Alienware desktop suite comprises of two models - the Area-51 and Area-51 ALX. These systems are expected to brandish top of the line components, including an overclocked 3.86GHz Core i7 processor to satiate you hungry gamers out there.

How does quad-GPU power sound to you? Well, Dell is shipping the Area-51 desktops with dual 1.8GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 graphics cards with SLI enabled. Hmm, don't you just love that alien crest on its chassis?

Furthermore, the Alienware bunch will land on earth as a quad-core package. What do we mean by that? Well, besides its deployment of the quad-core Core i7 processor, the Area-51 line also combines dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 graphics cards to form a cumulative quad-GPU solution. That's a double quad CPU and GPU whammy if you get our drift. Additionally, these PCs also cater for multi-GPU support, meaning that it supports both, NVIDIA SLI and ATI Crossfire technologies in the mix. The Area-51 innards also encompass a cold-plated liquid cooling unit to cope with the processor's overclocked speeds.

To prevent overheating, the 'multi-fins' are situated at the top of the chassis to allow hot air to dissipate. Dell has christened this feature as the 'Active Venting' louver system. How fancy.

The Area-51 desktops come with a 21.5-inch Alienware AW2210 LCD monitor and TactX gaming mouse. By the way, these rigs are also capable of housing six SATA2 drive bays. We reckon that's more than enough space to house your hard drives?

The desktop systems will come skinned in two colors, Lunar Shadow and Cosmic Black. There are more perks too. The Area-51 systems also feature an Active Venting louver system (see photos above), internal 'theater' lighting, and a strategic layout of internal components for easy user upgrades. If you are wondering, the Area-51 and Area-51 ALX actually share a similar form factor so there's really nothing to distinguish them cosmetically. Their main differences lie with their components within, like different processor speeds for example. The Area-51 comes with an overclocked Core i7 975 3.60GHz CPU, while the Area-51 ALX goes one-up with a faster Core i7 processor running at 3.86GHz. There's no word on their local pricing as yet, but don't expect these babies to come cheap.

Alienware M15X Desktop : Key Specifications
Alienware Area-51 & Area-51 ALX Desktops
  • Colors: Lunar Shadow or Cosmic Black
  • Processor: Overclocked Intel Core i7 975 3.60GHz (8MB Cache) quad-core processor (and overclocked to 3.86GHz for the the ALX model)
  • Graphics: Dual 1.8GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 - NVIDIA SLI Enabled
  • Memory: Up to 12GB DDR3 1333MHz in Triple Channel mode
  • Hard Drive: Massive storage featuring 7,200 and 10,000 RPM hard drives as well as Solid State Drives.
  • Bays: Six SATA 3Gbps compatible hard drive bays
  • Optical Drive: Dual Drives including a 6X Dual Layer Blu-ray Disc Burner
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