Verdict: A brand-new case brings the alien bang up to date
When a big cardboard box chock-full of new PC first arrives, the first thing you want to do is rip it open and show off your new rig. In these early stages of PC ownership, it's all about first impressions, and Alienware fans know that there are few better ways of getting your family's attention than perching a large green alien head on the coffee table. Custom PC will always champion the benefits of sourcing the cheapest components and building your own PC, but there's a lot to be said for a well-built, unique-looking system landing on your doorstep, all ready to coo over and show off to your mates.
The Area-51 7500 is housed inside the brand-new Alienware chassis that succeeds in the impossible-sounding task of being more compact than the previous design while having more room inside for the components.
Thankfully, though, it still looks like an alien. The organic-looking plastic outer shell of our review sample came in a bright, lustrous green that says 'look at me', but is nevertheless gorgeous. If the Cyborg Green isn't for you, then you can opt for the similarly themed Conspiracy Blue, Saucer Silver or Space Black. It's probably safe to assume that the directors of Alienware love 'The X-Files'.
There's plenty of features to keep you entertained after you plug it in as well. Our review model sported the £90 'AlienIce' system lighting upgrade, which means that, using the supplied AlienFX software, the alien heads on the side and front panels can be customised to glow in various colours, as can the lighting above the optical drives and behind the front 'gills'.
This PC isn't just about esoteric styling and overly expensive gimmicky features though. An autopsy on the Area-51 revealed that its brain is a 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, the fastest dual-core CPU in the world. Its graphics abilities are provided by a blisteringly fast GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card, while 2GB of 800MHz Patriot PC2-6400 RAM and an Asus nForce4 SLI X16 motherboard promise that these components will be sufficiently nourished with data to perform at their best. The Area-51's powerhouse is a titanic 700W PSU, which takes up a lot of room, but ensures that the PC can be upgraded with more power-hungry components for some time to come. Needless to say, we were quite impressed.
Unlike the Dell XPS 700, with its dodgy build quality and confusing BTX internal layout, the Area-51's chassis feels very solid, and internally, it sticks to the familiar ATX design. The front door slides smoothly to the left and pivots out of the way to reveal a DVD writer, a 28-in-1 memory card reader and a floppy disk drive.
The side panel is just as impressively designed, with a clamp that allows you to fit an extra 120mm fan without the need for any screws. Rather than plugging this fan directly into the motherboard or PSU, there are metal contacts at the bottom of the side panel and the chassis that provide the fan and glowing alien head with power when the side panel is in place. This is an innovative yet brilliantly simple solution to trailing cables and it shows that real thought has gone into making this PC easy to use.
The Area-51 has two case fans to keep the high-end components cool. Importantly, the intake fan has plenty of ventilation, thanks to the mesh covering of the gills at the front of the case, and both Vantec Stealth 120mm fans offer relatively high airflow. The case fans are all but inaudible when the side panel is shut; however, this brings us to our main gripe, as the Area-51 is nevertheless a very noisy PC. The culprit is the AVC aluminium CPU cooler, which incorporates a small whiny fan that produces an annoying noise, which frequently fluctuates in pitch as the fan speeds up and slows down depending on CPU load, making it very distracting. If this was our PC, we'd feel compelled to rip out this heatsink and fit an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro, and this shouldn't be necessary with a pre-built system that costs more than £2,700.
Alienware's website allows for a huge range of different configurations, and when it comes to storage, you can, of course, opt for one (or several) 150GB Western Digital Raptors. Our review model boasted a more interesting option: the much larger and pricier 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10. This hard disk offers amazing performance that's similar to the Raptor, thanks to its high data density, courtesy of new-fangled perpendicular recording. It also blows away the Raptor in terms of capacity.
PERFORMANCE
After showing off your PC to everyone around you, it would be embarrassing if it then proceeded to limp laboriously through the latest games. But rest assured - this PC was built for playing games and it excels at this task.
The GeForce 7950 GX2 is more than capable of playing games at the native 1,920 x 1,200 resolution of a 24in TFT, although, as you can see from the high-resolution gaming feature, you'll need a couple of them if you want to opt for Dell's enormous 30in TFT. Prey and F.E.A.R. were child's play for the Area-51, with the 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU helping the system to achieve super-smooth frame rates with gorgeous high levels of detail throughout. However, because it doesn't benefit much from two GPUs in SLI, Need for Speed: Most Wanted proved to be a slightly tougher test. Even so, the game was still perfectly playable at 1,920 x 1,200 with high AA and high AF, with the frame rate never dropping below 28fps, so this shouldn't be too much of a concern.
Performance in our Media Benchmarks was excellent too, as you'd expect from a system containing a £700 CPU and a £250 hard disk. Reminiscent of Neo turning to the side and fighting with only one hand in 'The Matrix', the Area-51 was supremely confident in our benchmarks, easily completing them before we had a chance to return with a cup of tea, which suggests that we may need to concoct some tougher tests. In the Paint Shop Pro test, it returned a score of 1.94, which is much quicker than that of the Scan 3XS HC2-7950 with its overclocked 3.19GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800. The Alienware's advantage is attributable to the performance of the new Seagate hard disk. If your PC can beat the Area-51's overall score of 1.94 then you're allowed to feel smug.
However, this sort of performance is well within the range of an overclocked Core 2 Duo E6700 CPU. We were eager to see how the Area-51 would cope when it came to overclocking, especially given the fact that the Area-51 offers BIOS-based system tweaking, unlike the disappointing Dell.
Unfortunately, the Area-51 coped very poorly indeed, with most of the blame lying with the passive cooling on the motherboard's chipset and VRMs. Situated just above the baking GeForce 7950 GX2, the passive Northbridge heatsink was painfully hot to touch and, as all of the motherboard's heatsinks are linked with a heatpipe, this heat is effectively being dumped on the VRMs, which isn't good news for stability. The Area-51 started to flake out in our tests when we tried to raise the FSB any higher than 275MHz (a CPU speed of 3.03GHz). We would suggest that the optional 120mm side fan is a necessity if you plan on serious overclocking.
At 3.03GHz, the Area-51's overall score increased from 1.94 to 1.98, but when it comes down to it, this is nowhere near what you should expect from an X6800. James managed to hit 3.66GHz when we reviewed this CPU.
Furthermore, you should be able to raise the multiplier of the X6800 to 12, but the Area-51 BIOS limits the CPU to a multiplier of 11, which is like buying a Ferrari with a speed limiter.
CONCLUSION
If you want a PC with all the latest premium overclocking components, such as the lightning-fast Core 2 Extreme X6800, then you should really be thinking of building your own PC, as this is the way to ensure that you'll be able to overclock them as far and as fast as they can go.
However, the Alienware Area-51 is a fantastic basis for a gaming PC; it's well built, offers a good upgrade path and looks great, especially if you're a Ridley Scott fan. If you spec up this machine with a more modest CPU, such as the 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo E6600, and a 250GB hard drive then you'll still have great performance and loads of storage space for £880 less. Of course, if you don't have a 24in TFT, you can easily get away with a cheaper graphics card as well - which may be advisable, considering that Nvidia's new high-end card is just around the corner.
Alienware offers high-quality components with a chassis that makes them fun to use, and the company doesn't charge ridiculous amounts to upgrade your system from the basic model, making the Area-51 a better PC than the Dell XPS 700 in every way.
