Performance
Desktop computers used to be the only way to fly, but in recent years, the laptop has well and truly taken over. These days, you can get a relatively thin portable packed with performance that will do the job, evident from what we’ve seen out of Razer, and HP, and Acer, and Alienware.
In fact, Alienware was there before most of them, and it has been making gaming desktops for a while, too, so it knows a thing or two about this area.
With the Area 51, we’re seeing a change in design from the conventional full tower the company would rely on, with a reinvention of the design into something wholly unique.
Forget the tall box, even with the slant Alienware always provided on the machines, this tower is more of a triangle, or a chunky triangular prism, anyway, with a design that you won’t get confused for anything else. No way.
Bryan de Mayas, Alienware’s Director of Product Marketing, told GadgetGuy that it has been a project the company has been working on for over three years, and that “the new Triad design is an abolition that combines cues from old Alienware and new with a design that focuses on performance and ergonomics.”
Yes, the design is called “Triad” for a good reason: it has three main points, and really resembles a triangle with cut off edges.
That said, it’s still easy to see how it goes down, with a bit that is clearly the bottom, and sides that are clearly the front and the back.
In case you’re not sure what they are, the front is the section with the Alien-head power button, optical drive, and tall grille, while the back is the part offering plenty of ports and where the back of the cards sit. Easy.
Along the top of the computer towards the back is a little switch to release the sides, with each section popping off.
On the left side, you’ll find the guts of the computer, with a motherboard rotated slightly to match the design of the Area 51 machine and pre-installed components.
In our review unit, you could clearly see the power supply at the bottom, the big graphics card, three large fan units at almost every corner (with the exception of one missing where the power supply was), and a rather unusual looking CPU cooler with pipes leading into the a radiator block near the top of the casing and sitting just in front of one of the fan sections, likely because, you know, it needs to be kept cool.
With the right side removed, there are several bays for hard drives — five that we could see — with cable sorting built into the body, too, useful if you’re not a fan of cables going all over the place.
And on each side, you’ll find a small bit of silicon and jumpers connecting to special lighting, with the nine Alienware lighting zones configurable and controllable by the included AlienFX software.
From a design point of view, what makes this computer particularly special beyond the rather unorthodox design is the custom cooling solution built into the machine — the liquid cooling — and the setup of the fans, which Alienware suggests will take the hot air pushed out from the back and cool the insides, pushing it out the front and stopping the computer from overheating.
So does it work?
Yes, yes it does.
Switch on the system and you’ll be greeted by Windows, provided you have a monitor because guess what, there’s no monitor included in this package.
You shouldn’t be surprised by that, mind you, because this is a tower only, though it does come with a keyboard and mouse because, you know, it’s nice to include bits like that when you’ve spent this sort of change.
