Alienware's X51 R3, Revamped With Skylake and Maxwell, Tested and Torn Down

MojoKid writes: Alienware has been relatively quiet for the past 18 months or so with respect to their X51 small form factor gaming systems. However, Intel's recent Skylake processor launch and NVIDIA's further optimizations in their Maxwell GPU architecture have given the company a fresh suite of technology to work with to enhance performance and reduce power consumption. As such, the Alienware X51 was given a complete overhaul of the lastest technologies, all of which play very well with the tighter power budgets and thermal constraints of this class of machine. Alienware calls their new machine simply the X51 R3, as it's the third revision of the product. One of the more unique design changes that Alienware made was to the graphics riser card which plugs into a X20 PCI Express slot on the motherboard. This is a rather unique approach to design efficiency which allows the Samsung NVMe M.2 gumstick Solid State Drive in this machine to ride along shotgun with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960, on the side of a custom riser card. Performance-wise the machine is capable of strong standard compute performance on the desktop and in the latest game titles it's able to offer up playable frame rates up through 1440p resolution with high image quality settings. Not bad for a console-sized small form factor PC, actually.

Water cooled? No thanks

[fustakrakich]

Don't need a computer pissing all over my table..

Re:

[RogueyWon]

I've been using water-cooled home desktops for around 6 years now and I've never had so much as a single drop of water escape from them. There are lots of myths about water-cooled PCs; that they leak, that they don't travel well and so on. But if you put them together properly and exercise the normal care while carrying them that you would exercise when carrying any other piece of expensive electronic kit, they are absolutely fine.

High margins for not-quite-top-tier performance

[RogueyWon]

I've had an Alienware PC before. My current machine is a self-build, but the two before it came from Alienware. They've historically had a lot of strengths; the build-quality on their desktops is excellent, the cases are a joy to work in, they don't (unlike Dell-proper) load the machines with crudware, you get proper OS reinstall media and there is a degree of reassurance from having the backing of a major player like Dell behind the company you're handing over several thousand dollars to.

That said, they've been on a downward trajectory for a while, with their margins (always considerable) hitting stratospheric levels and the latest kit often taking a long time to appear as options on their builds. I'm thinking of replacing my current PC (well, case, PSU, motherboard, CPU, RAM, and probably graphics card - my storage and optical drives are fine) in 6-9 months time, once the Nvidia 1000-series (or whatever they call it) is available and was looking at the Alienware site just a couple of nights ago to size them up.

But there's absolutely no way I could justify buying from them right now. Even leaving aside the base prices, there are some serious holes in their offering. They didn't, when I checked less than a week ago, have the Nvidia 980Ti as an option on graphics cards. On lots of other components - CPU in particular - they would tend to offer something not-quite-good-enough as part of the base package and then charge a huge margin on the optional upgrade.

We have a fairly competitive market for high-end components and pre-built systems here in the UK. With half an hour's shopping around, I was able to find reputable places I could get equivalent or better pre-built systems than those Alienware was selling for almost 1,000GBP less than Alienware was asking.

Re:

[RogueyWon]

Falcon are an option, but are US based which would mean getting the thing shipped transatlantic. I'm currently favouring a UK-based firm called Novatech, who massively outcompete Alienware on price. Won't be buying for 6-9 months, though (barring sudden hardware failures), so plenty can change in that time.

Here's my review

[slashmydots]

I have a slightly earlier X51 alienware desktop sitting in my repair shop right now. Why? Because it came with a severely damaged image from Dell. It's an overheating piece of crap that hits 81C GPU temp on a furmark test. There's no room for any upgrades, they're difficult to service, and cooling is a joke. They basically use enclosed pressure vented cooling from an all aluminum low profile CPU cooler. It's a stock intel cooler fan too so you can kiss that goodbye after all that back pressure. Overa