Alienware Area-51 7500 November 26th, 2006 | by Brandon King


Full Review

Editor's Choice

Features and Design
 
One of the icons of the gaming PC community is the Alienware PC. Sure, building your own system might be cheaper, and to some more fun, but nothing earns respect like a huge, honkin alien head for a PC case. The Alienware case has always broken away from the norm, and the most recent case is no exception. You want lights? You got 5 software customizable ‘zones’ of multi-LED goodness. You want cooling? Four strategically placed fans and CPU liquid cooling good enough for ya? Wanna make that case pretty? Choose from a variety of colors, all sporting no less than three alien heads. Now that’s style!
 
We configured our system with the following:
 
            Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66 GHz)
            2GB DDR2 400MHz RAM
            750GB Seagate Hard Drive
            Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 single slot SLI card
            NED DVD+-RW +DL Drive
 
The Area-51 7500 uses the Asus P3N32 motherboard with two 16x PCI Express slots. The front mounted ports include two USB 2.0, one FireWire, headphone and microphone ports with backlit labels for easy access in the dark. On the back you have ports galore. 2 PS/2, Digital Optical out, Digital Coax out, parallel, eSATA, 7.1 analog outputs plus microphone in, 2 USB 2.0 ports and 2 gigabit ethernet ports. Internally, there are two 16x, two 1x, and one 4x PCI Express slots, along with two legacy PCI slots. There are four internal SATA on-board that support RAID 0, 1, 1+1, 5, and JBOD, supporting native command queuing. Two extra SATA connectors used by the Silicon Image controller chip. One odd side-effect of this is that in order to add an extra hard drive, you have to configure it to be recognized as a striped array of disk size = 1. There are 4 DIMM slots, meaning a max of 8 GB of memory, though Windows XP will only support up to 4GB, but at least this system is Vista upagradeable. There are two IDE connectors and one floppy connector.
 
The P2 chassis is truly an innovative leap in case design. Sure, it may take some getting used to, having a gigantic, glowing alien head as your office centerpiece, but once you get past the gaudy exterior, the engineering really shines through. The front drive door pulls forward, then rotates to reveal 5.25” bays with two overhead LEDs for lighting. The Alienware insignia on the door’s front side doubles as the power button. Below the door are the “always exposed” front mounted ports. The alien eye-like front grills hide behind them yet more LED’s and the 120mm intake fan. Along the side, as the ‘eyes’ stretch to the back of the chassis, the grill conceals two more fans. The rear of the unit has the water cooling output fan. Alienware has removed the cord management system found on the P1.
 
Alienware Area-51 7500
The front door opens to reveal the DVD writer and open bays
 
The access door has a simple latch opening mechanism, and is perhaps the easiest to use we’ve seen. The door mounted fan uses a clever contact connection system instead of wires to make access even easier. We were amazed by the cable tying job inside the case. You’d think every available connection was used, and all the cables cut to the exact length. But, when we went to install a couple more internal hard drives, we realized that the system builders not only tied a tidy system, but the unused cable leads were located right where they were most useful.
 
Alienware Area-51 7500
Alienware Area-51 7500 in Grey

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