14 DAY TRIAL // Alienware, a brand owned by Dell, is known for its high-end computers that also look really good, but most of them have a problem in the price department, costing a fair bit more than some stronger but only slightly less embellished PCs. That's not the case for the Area-51 though.
In a way, the Alienware brand has justification for the prices its products demand. The desktop and laptop PCs are smaller than most others on the gaming front after all, and it takes a certain inventiveness to get everything to fit and run at manageable temperatures.
Looked at it that way, the tag of $1,699 / €1,699 is pretty reasonable, both because of and in spite of the size of the case.
The chassis would qualify as a mini tower under the right circumstances, but it's not really shaped as one. Instead, it's more of an irregular hexagon.
The shape was quite important, since it provided that little extra space needed to cram everything essential to a PC and still keep everything the same height as a normal monitor.
The Alienware Area 51
Launched along with the Alienware 13 gaming laptop (which we'll check out separately), the PC is powered by a six-core or 8-core Intel Extreme Edition Core i7 central processing unit.
A 6-core chip is the “basic” choice, but the best configuration demands the Core i7-5960X Unlocked 8-Core Processor which can reach 4.0 GHz with Turbo Boost.
For graphics, you can cram up to three AMD Radeon 290X or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 graphics cards inside the small case, or a pair of NVIDIA GeForces Titan Z Graphics (for quad-GPU via SLI).
For memory, there is support for 32 GB of DDR4 quad-channel RAM clocked at 2,133 MHz. Furthermore, storage comes courtesy of a SATA III 6.0 Gbps SSD (up to 512 GB) and an HDD (4 TB).
Add to that Killer Gigabit Ethernet NIC LAN, Intel 802.11ac dual-band Wireless WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 and you're all set for a few years. Microsoft's Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit operating system runs everything.
As for the case itself, it owes its unusual size and internal architecture to the Triad industrial design, which focuses on thermal management and ergonomics according to the press release.
Both front and rear ports are easy to access, while people who love to customize their PCs themselves can use any of the front and rear ports to remove or change whatever parts of the PC they wish.
Availability
Orders of the Alienware Area 51 should become possible through the Alienware website over the course of today (October 28, 2014), if they haven't already started. Some countries might not be covered by the shipping service before the winter holidays though. Obviously, to get the best options like above, you'll have to shell out more than the starting price, but that's the same as everywhere else.
