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Upgrades Hardware Games

Alienware's Triangular Area-51 Re-Design With Tri-SLI GeForce GTX 980, Tested 138

Posted by timothy from the where-are-you-priorities dept.
MojoKid writes Dell's Alienware division recently released a radical redesign of their Area-51 gaming desktop. With 45-degree angled front and rear face plates that are designed to direct control and IO up toward the user, in addition to better directing cool airflow in, while warm airflow is directed up and away from the rear of the chassis, this triangular-shaped machine grabs your attention right away. In testing and benchmarks, the Area-51's new design enables top-end performance with thermal and acoustic profiles that are fairly impressive versus most high-end gaming PC systems. The chassis design is also pretty clean, modular and easily servicable. Base system pricing isn't too bad, starting at $1699 with the ability to dial things way up to an 8-core Haswell-E chip and triple GPU graphics from NVIDIA and AMD. The test system reviewed at HotHardware was powered by a six-core Core i7-5930K chip and three GeForce GTX 980 cards in SLI. As expected, it ripped through the benchmarks, though the price as configured and tested is significantly higher.
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Alienware's Triangular Area-51 Re-Design With Tri-SLI GeForce GTX 980, Tested More

Alienware's Triangular Area-51 Re-Design With Tri-SLI GeForce GTX 980, Tested

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  • It's a space heater. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Patricia ( 643 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @08:36AM (#48250183) Homepage

    I think I had a space heater that looked just like that once.

    • I realize you jest, but having a gaming computer that puts off a fair bit of heat isn't a bad thing in parts of the country during the winter. The waste heat is hardly wasted at that point. Gives even more reason to overclock as well.

      • I may be mistaken on my understanding of heat and efficiency, but I believe that if you have electric heat in your home the "waste" heat from a computer costs the same per preferred unit of heat.

        If gas is cheaper than electricity for you like it is for me that doesn't really help as much, but if you have electric heat you may as well run Folding/SETI/Bitcoin/whatever during the cold season.

        • It is your misunderstanding, unless by electric heat your mean resistive heat?

          Baseboard heaters are the same efficiency, go ahead, run as server farm. Their Coefficient of Performance (COP) is essentially 1.

          But a modern electric heat pump (last 10 years) should give you at a COP of at least 3, meaning for 1 kw electricity, it will pump 3 kw of heat into your house.

          So heating your house with computers will triple your heating bill/energy usage.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            First of all, not all of us (few maybe?) live in homes with modern heat pumps.

            Second, that's not the right way to look at it. If you're using computers to heat your home and do nothing else, then yeah that's stupid. If you're actually doing something, then in some sense, the work that computer is doing is what you were paying for the electricity for... therefore "waste" heat that is augmenting your home's heating system is "free" heat.

          • Last I looked, commercial heat pumps were not really better than resistive heating at OF (-18C) or lower, and there are places in the country where it gets colder than that fairly often during the winter. We burn natural gas for heat.

            • That makes sense. A heat pump gets a large amount of its efficiency because it only outputs a small amount of heat at a time and is turned off a large portion of the time. When you have to raise the temperature that much, or maintain it with that much of a difference outside it would have to output a much larger amount of heat and run continuously.
          • COP cannot exceed 1 dumbass. You cannot magically turn 1KW of electricity into 3KW of heat. With an ideal heating element(AKA non-existent) you could turn 1KW of electricity into 1KW of heat, no more.

            • Oh my, what a dumbass I am.

              I've only turned 1kw of electricity into 1kw of WORK instead. Work moving heat against a gradient from outside the house to the inside.

              God I'm such a dumbass I never learned anything about phase change heating/cooling systems.

              I sure couldn't have looked this up on wikipedia by typing "heat pump COP" into Google and clicking the first link!

              http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]

              Wow am I stupid!

        • While that's certainly true, if you're going to run your computer anyway, you can capitalize by reducing your energy costs elsewhere. Having a more efficient source of heating simply means that your savings are not as great, but you can still save money.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cdrudge ( 68377 )

        That might ok in the winter when you can make use of the heat. But in the spring/summer/fall when you don't want the extra heat, or worse when you're running an air conditioner, you're just undoing the advantages gain during the winter.

        Plus electric resistance heat is about the worst way to heat a home from a cost per BTU perspective.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      I read your comment first, then I clicked on the link. Holy crap, you're right. And I'm sure that the people who go all jizz over this probably made snide comments about Apple's new Mac Pro being a big black trash can.

      There's nothing else like it on the market currently.

      Yeah, I wonder why.

      Alienware might call it Triad, but we'd actually call it pretty bad-ass.

      OHAHAHAWAHAAHWHAHAAAAA! I call it pretty dumb-ass. lol Alienware. A few weeks ago I was at a small lan party thing and one guy brought his Alienware monster that was about the size of a humvee. He actually wanted to put it on top of the table, but we managed to get him to

  • looks more like a skewed protruded hexagon.

  • Phew. (Score:2)

    by grub ( 11606 )
    I was missing my MojoKid/HotHarware clickbait.
    Thanks!

  • Prebuilt desktop PC's? Gross. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Build your own PC, don't be a clod.

    • That's why I came in this thread - one of the reasons I like building my own machines is the complete lack of bloatware. How are Alienware machines in that regard, since they're controlled by Dell are they packed with useless shit I don't want or need? Is it finally time for me to order something pre-built, or is the landscape still basically the same?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I've had two gaming rigs from AlienWare, one pre-Dell. Neither one came with bloat-ware. They have the OS, drivers, usually the GPU's special software (which may or may not be bloat-ware to you, I don't find it useful personally), and little else. They're quite clean.

        Gaming rigs are different than office and home machines; they're sold to a specific audience that goes bonkers over things like that, and the companies want their product to sell. Consequently, you don't find extra crap like pre-loaded anti-vir

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by qwak23 ( 1862090 )

        I have an Alienware laptop, it came with some bloatware, but not as bad as others (mostly dell crap, backup, performance scanner, etc). At the time of purchase Alienware was still shipping windows 7 as the default OS after everyone else had shifted to 8. It was a little pricier than similarly spec'd laptops on the market, but I was able to customize it and get exactly what I wanted (14" 1600x900 screen, decent GPU/CPU, etc). A little heavy, but the overall design is nice, power cord in the back center,

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by _merlin ( 160982 )

        Dell only packs the bloatware onto consumer machines. My Dell Precision T3610 had absolutely no bloatware (but the OS install was a bit weird so I reinstalled anyway), and neither did my PowerEdge R420 (no OS at all).

  • Fuck it, I'm out (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This website continues to feature less and less interesting content and more and more click-bait and advertisements masquerading as articles.

    I knew the end was near when Slashdot featured that one-sided Gamergate writeup that shat all over gamers, right around the same time all the other big media-controlled blogs were doing the same thing.

    I've been reading and giving you page hits since 2003, but I'll be damned if I'll do it anymore.

    • Re: Fuck it, I'm out (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      *waves*

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by u38cg ( 607297 )
      Actually, it's about ethics in games journalism.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Holi ( 250190 )

        That's why I don't get it, when have their ever been ethics in in gaming journalism?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

          Back when the gaming journalism was run by the console manufacturers. Back then, they weren't even pretending not to be advertisers for the publishers! :)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tnk1 ( 899206 )

          There are certain ethical guidelines in gaming journalism. For instance:

          1. When being paid off, be sure to politely sniff and lick the hand of your benefactors when they bend down to pet you.
          2. Remember, there are no bad games, only former game journalists who are unemployed for saying that there are.
          3. Writing games is hard. Make sure that you thank them by ensuring they get at least seven out of ten points for effort. Every time.
          4. Encourage yourself to think of the surprise that your readers will

      • > it's about ethics in games journalism.

        LOL. That's funny.

        _That_ would BE news if there were any!

      • It would be if you had included a woman's home address.

    • This is not even the first slashvertisement for this ugly space inefficient design. I'm not going to link the other one because they don't deserve the clicks.
      I'm eligible to disable advertising, but I have not done so because I get at least some enjoyment out of the site and I know they get money for impressions even though I have never clicked on one. But now the Cox Contour advertisment auto starts audio blasting at random times such that I can't leave slashdot running in my browser. That is beyond poor

      • Same boat here.

        When they were doing the pop-up thing at the bottom of the page, I tried the disable advertising, but that only killed the normal unobtrusive ads that never bothered me.

        But about the second time the audio ad blasted me out of bed in the middle of the night, I began remembering to close /. when done. I wonder how that played in the marketing meetings afterwards. Who am I kidding? We know it never came up..

      • This is not even the first slashvertisement for this ugly space inefficient design.

        Do you mean the one that said it's shaped that way so that when you put it against a wall it isn't against the wall, or something stupid like that?

        • That's the one. Was that a different case? If so, then I halfway retract my complaint.

          • If I'd had the faintest intention of thinking about maybe considering buying one I might remember *it*, rather than how dumb the slashvertisement (I mean article) was.

            Could be the same one turned 180 degrees. Choose your axis.

    • Even better is the bit about the angled face making it easier to draw cooling air in.

      You just outed yourself as paid marketing fluff, Slashdot and hothardware, because nowhere have I ever seen it more efficient to draw cooling air downward against the rising heat gradient.

      BS.

  • Thank God I don't feel any need to buy anything that ugly. I'm not sure who are the most profoundly stupid about aesthetics here - Dell/Alienware or their customers. Buy here's a clue for those of you thinking of buying one - when you're tired of looking like an over-privileged tween who got hold of daddy's credit card, get a real case that's worth that kind of money. Simplicity and elegance win every time over ugly, overpriced bling.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      As someone who owns an Alienware laptop, I assure you that the quality of the build is second to none. I imagine that their desktop PCs are similarly well made and not everyone has time to waste building their own, unless perhaps you're a kid who "got hold of daddy's credit card" and you don't have any real responsibilities.

      • How is the tech support? Is it as good as the Precision workstation group?

      • not everyone has time to waste building their own, unless perhaps you're a kid who "got hold of daddy's credit card" and you don't have any real responsibilities.

        You don't have time to spend four hours one evening assembling the parts? Not even if it saves you $1,000 off of a similarly configured prebuilt?

        • Some of us will gladly pay to avoid four hours of frustration, followed by 6 more unplanned hours of troubleshooting. Do you change your own oil in your car? Make your own peanut butter? Bake your own bread? Build your own furniture? Don't you know how much money you could be saving by doing all these things yourself?!?

          • Do you change your own oil in your car?

            Always, as well as most of the other work on the cars.

            Make your own peanut butter?

            No but I haven't eaten peanut butter in close to 20 years, I do make my own jams though.

            Bake your own bread?

            Yes and I love the smell that lingers for about a day after doing so.

            Build your own furniture?

            Yes because I can't find good furniture for prices that aren't extortion level priced. That and you try finding a solid walnut desk.

            While I understand the need to make things other people's problems there is a real sense of accomplishment when you do something your self. Once you get good at doing t

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by qwak23 ( 1862090 )

            I had a much longer response typed out but lost it.. meh.

            DIY isn't always about saving money, sometimes it's about customization and getting exactly what you want. I baked my first loaf of bread ever last night (without aid of a bread machine), total labor was about 30 minutes spread across 4 hours. I mixed fresh chopped spinach into the dough and topped it with some shredded chedder that was in the fridge and needed to get used. I now have spinach chedder wheat bread to make lunch with for the rest of t

          • You know, I'd be much happier about it if it had been only four hours of frustration followed by only six unplanned hours of troubleshooting, without the need to get different components when something mysteriously didn't work.

            I have enough money to live quite comfortably, now and after retirement. I'd like more time. This means that I pay people to do some jobs I don't like to do that would take up more time than I like.

      • Confirmation Bias is your friend.

  • Dumb (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Russ1642 ( 1087959 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @08:52AM (#48250315)

    Buy a computer because you like the shape of the case. It's how you guarantee quality.

    • Indeed. The highest quality case would be shaped just like a spherical cow. I have so postulated.

      PROBLEM SOLVED!

    • Buy a computer because you like the shape of the case. It's how you guarantee quality.

      I love my wife too much to put this thing in our home.

  • Is this a post or an ad? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    k-ching!

    • This is Slashsdot mate, not PhD Comics. Gaming is also geeky, and if you don't know and/or crave Alienware, I have good (bad) news for you... You need to get out of the lab more often :D

  • Despite the hype they make about the unencumbered airflow front and back, I seriously have my doubts on a system that has a pump-in fan so close to a pump-out fan.

    I mean, look at the top triangle tip [hothardware.com].

    In their defense, there are 2 extra fans below, but some fluid dynamics graph would be nice for prooving good thermals exist there.

    • Oh, nevermind, it actually makes sense because the top fans are supposed to heat the fluid circuit, which renders my point of air traveling throughout the case moot.

  • Nice Advert, shame about the detail (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dan Askme ( 2895283 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @09:04AM (#48250405) Homepage

    Motherboard:
    Custom Alienware Area-51
    Power Supply:
    Custom Alienware 1500 Watt

    These "Dell" minimal/cheap profit driven components worry me. As with all Dells, they skimp on quality.
    Whatever the warranty is, add a day. Thats how long your PC will last before you need to pay over the top prices for "custom" replacement parts.

    The only "good" parts in this package is the GFX cards and CPU. The rest is just cheap profit driven components. I mean, look at the stock ram without heatsinks, look at that "custom" motherboard. How cheap can you go lol.

    Monitor is 8ms response time....... On a system marketed at "hardcore gaming". Only Dell!

    Review (Advert) also lacks:
    - Psu specs (number of 12v rails, efficiently, etc)

    This product is such a gimmick. I feel sorry for those who are unable to build their own PC's with higher quality components, whilst saving 50% on the price.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      heatsinks are just not needed on ram, they are crap and usually make the temperature of the ram higher rather than lower.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tibit ( 1762298 )

      I don't know where you get your Dell components, but I've had only good luck with eBay - they usually are quite cheap when the market gets flooded with off-lease corporate systems. Sure it won't be that rosy for a limited-market gamer/workstation system, but still, Dell is possibly the most affordable PC brand when it comes to aftermarket replacement parts.

    • I went to the build site because I wanted to disagree with you. I was thinking that the base of $1700 might not be too bad for both an infinitely upgradeable case along with a decent gaming PC to get started with.

      So the stock power supply is 850 watt; you'd want the 1500 watt since it is proprietary and you can't count on getting one a year or two from now. So you pick that for an extra $200, and guess what?

      The stock AMD Radeon R9 270 with 2GB GDDR5 is "only compatible" with an 850 watt PSU; you have to go

      • The 1500 watt power supply isn't really needed though, nor the need to consider triple-SLI / triple-Crossffire.. you win benchmarks but suffer even more latency and quirks than double-card setups. Unless you're building a military flight simulator it may be best to forget about it and then 850W PSU ought to be enough.

    • I'm going to disagree with you, on the internet. Let it begin. Dell will actually vary their product quality based on the intended use. I stay away from Inspiron and Latitude lines. I will buy a precision machine (both desktop or mobile) but mostly I use their server hardware and it runs like a workhorse with no issues. I know people who are still running 2950 gen I's with no issues (even though they should upgrade). If a user is paying a premium price it's highly possible that Alienware has quality compon

      • but to just label everything Dell makes as cheap is incorrect.

        I worked in a PC repair shop for 5 years. Most of the PC's we had for repair by the customer was Dell (yes i'am aware of popularity increases that number).

        Nearly all the Dell systems we had were PSU failures just after their warranty expired (13months +). The others were motherboard failures.
        We never had a Dell PC with a broken HDD or CPU, mainly because Dell couldnt profit from making a cheap counterpart.

        They are cheap.
        Look at a "custom" Dell motherboard if you get the chance, notice how most of it is empt

    • Shame that the case looks like it's made from the plastic used in $10 cases. Instead of ABS, or metal or something that wont break by looking at it sideways.

  • $4649 as configured? (Score:3)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @09:04AM (#48250409)
    Granted, this $4649 is for a system with three graphics cards, but only one CPU socket! That one CPU is a hex core, but still, if you're making a fantasy computer for the stupid rich that want "the best there is", you should have at least dual Xeons.

    • Except that Xeons cost nearly double the money for equivalent processing power. Their only real advantage is the ability to n-gang them. You may as well step up to the 5960 with 8 cores (33% more cores for - you guessed it - double the cost, though an extra $500 wouldn't have busted the bank). The knee in the curve is just too steep.

      It is a shame that you can't get a dual i7 board with all the work done in software (binding a process to a particular CPU, so that any given process is limited to the resources

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Holi ( 250190 )

        Clock speed and not core count is what you want for gaming. Few games make efficient use of multiple cores, and even the ones that do are not going to scale up to many cores well.

      • I have an 8 core i7 on my home-brewed home machine, and I have to say this: neither the Windows nor the Linux scheduler efficiently load balances across eight cores, and furthermore writing my own custom software which efficiently load balances across eight cores isn't easy. I can load up all eight cores, sure, by spawning huge numbers of threads, and have computations complete faster than they would on a single core - but of the order of three times faster, not of the order or eight times faster. Spawning

    • Games these days make far more use of the GPU than the CPU. Still, when I build a system, I want it to be versatile, so I will put in the CPU that just got bumped down in to second tier pricing by the latest whizbang CPU. I find the price of this unit astounding. A homebuilt with the same components and a better looking case with better airflow can be had for half of that.

  • this triangular-shaped machine grabs your attention right away.

    Looks ugly and boring to me.

  • I liked the part about the triangular PC case.

  • So much jealous (Score:3)

    by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @09:27AM (#48250623) Journal

    Wow, there's so much jealous in this thread.

    I am curious, for those who have owned Alienware since Dell acquired them - how is tech support? Are you thrown in with the consumer rabble, or so you get priority support like Dell provides with it's Precision workstations?

    • First rate for me with a laptop about a year ago. Daughter had spilled some liquid on the keyboard. They had a tech at my place in two days, he replaced the keyboard ran some tests and finished. Now I will add that I am in Maine couple hours from Boston Ma. Was pleased with the tech and the quick response. com
  • It looks like it was inspired by the ass-end of a 1983 Mercury Capri.

  • Too newsy (Score:5, Funny)

    by Thanshin ( 1188877 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @09:46AM (#48250823)

    I find this piece of advertisement to be too article-shaped.

    The tone is way to sober and objective. If you read carefully you'll find that some of the data are actually facts! I refuse to accept this kind of newsy look-at-me-writing-articles crap in Slashdot.

    If we start accepting this kind of posts, soon we'll end up having news for nerds. Or even stuff that matters, god forbid.

  • I'm delighted to learn that a company has taken PC's from the era of the box shape. It's akin to the invention of the metal guitar. Alienware is WAY too expensive for the speeds they offer but this is real innovation and they deserve many kudos.

  • Thank you for having the guts to try something new and different.

    It's so tiresome to always have Apple be the one that experiments with design, followed by everyone else copying whatever Apple did whether or not it was a good idea. When Apple introduced their gumdrop iMacs, everything else went translucent. Microwaves. Clothes irons. It was absurd.

    eg: We recently got a bunch of PCs, and they included mice copied from Apple's absurdly-flat mighty mouse or whatever they call it. Had to throw the damn th

  • Those are not 45 degree angles.

  • (Sits down at new uber-Alienware.)

    "Jimmy, why aren't you doing anything?"

    "All the current MMOs suck. The only fun ones are ancient and boring, like WoW, or dead, like City of Heroes."

    "There will be a CoH clone soon."

    "Maybe. In two years. Everything now is a god damned action pew pew MMO with no soul. Ever feel alone in a crowd of a few dozen other players? Somehow these fuckers manage it with trivial soloability."

  • I have read on a website some details and im here to relate it for you.

    "With 45-degree angled front and rear face plates, that are designed to direct control and IO up toward the user, in addition to better directing cool airflow in, while backside warm airflow is directed up and away from the rear of the chassis, this machine grabs your attention right away. There's nothing else like it on the market currently. Alienware might call it Triad, but we'd actually call it pretty bad-ass.

    I would definently bu

  • Its nice but as far as I can tell, there's literally no game out or coming that will stretch one 980GTX, let alone 3, so why do/buy this?

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