You know I've got a pretty heavy computer at home, it's got a 4090 in it, it's in a fractal torrent,
it's got some hard drives, but when I saw that Alienware was sending us the Area 51 desktop
and that it was 76 and a half pounds, I just knew that I had to unbox it.
For the non-Americans out there, that's about 35 kilos.
All in one giant computer.
Oh boy let's get this thing out of the box. There's not too many markings on the box, but we've got this cool A51 logo on the front
and then we've got four clips. Sorry about that, there's six clips, they've got one on each side
here as well. Oh man, this thing's enormous. Okay, let's see if I can get it out. Well wow,
there's like some extra foam too. Okay, we'll get to that in a sec. Let me see if I can
lift it out of the foam. This is going to be the hard part because it's heavy, heavy because the foam.
There's a 360 mil rad for the AIO that's hooked up to the CPU, so that's some of the weight.
And then it's also got a 1500 watt platinum power supply because you know we've got the
top of the line spec version that cost a pretty penny. We'll talk about the price later
because right now we're actually, I want to finish unboxing it. We've got
this giant accessories box. What's in the Alienware box? It's, you know, it's a minor thing,
but I kind of wish this had the little Alienware logo on the box, just that you
remembered that this is what it was for. Warranty car stickers, you could put one of these stickers
on yourself and then you'd always know that it's your Alienware accessories box. As for cables,
this looks like, oh no, you guys put a nice 1500 watt platinum power supply in and I know
that this cable's fine. I get it, it is perfectly adequate, but there's something about it. When you
put it into this configuration where it's all slim and flimsy, that it just doesn't feel as strong
as like a big thick C13 power cable. What else we got? We got a mouse,
little freebie cheap mouse that'll get you gaming. If you don't have a mouse already,
they're fine. And then it looks like this is our Wi-Fi puck. So we got a little
antenna adapters here. We got the puck there, sticking it back, popping on top, you're good
to go. And then, I bet you it's a keyboard. Please, please, please, please, please. It is.
So to pair with your free mouse, you get a free keyboard. It's membrane. It's fine. It was free.
You know, I kind of wish at this price point because this thing is expensive. I wish that it
came with like one of their Alienware accessories, but it's better than nothing. At least we can
turn this on. But let's take a look at the computer. This is one hell of a big computer. They got the
cheese grater on top, kind of looks like the old Mac Pro. And then there's actually an absolute
ton of IO on the front. We've got two USB-A ports, two USB type-C, a dedicated headphone and dedicated
mic jack as well. And that's just on the front or top IO. On the back, it's funny because this is
a proprietary Dell motherboard. And we'll talk about that more later. But it's actually really beefy.
We've got two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-C ports, and then six more USB type-A at various speeds.
We'll put those on screen for you. And then we've got Spediff, good old Spediff, line in and out,
and then LAN. I think it's two and a half gig LAN as well. I really like the cool Area 51 designation
along with the model ID. It does look admittedly pretty empty. I think that's just because I'm
not used to seeing like four essentially USB type-C ports. We'd have probably HDMI. Oh, that's
what's missing. Oh, there's no HDMI or DisplayPort. So, I mean, we have an Intel 285K, not the KF,
so it should have integrated graphics. Alienware. Include my HDMI or DisplayPort ports so that I
can get video out of my CPU that has onboard dedicated graphics, please. It's a minor complaint,
but it's a complaint. And then we've got a full-fat 5090 in here. So, we've got three DP 2.1 ports,
should be USB-R20 with DP 2.1B, and then we've got one HDMI 2.1 port. And then I actually missed
our Wi-Fi antennas because they're all the way down here instead of integrated directly into the
motherboard. There's probably some kind of like daughter board down here. We'll take a look later,
but that's where you plug your Wi-Fi in. Very nice. Yo, and then there's some kind of... Okay,
this is really... You probably have to undo the screw first to make this turn,
but it looks like once you undo that screw, you can like... There's also a little lock here,
and there's these guys too. I don't know what those are. I just got really excited about them
after seeing the rest of the IO. All right, but next up, let's take the foam out, take the peel
out. We got a GPU thing that we got to take out after shipment. How do we... All right, that just
rips out of here. I want to open this lock. I really want to know what this lock does, so I'm
going to unscrew it. As much as they might try to make it tool-less, and they do a good job,
in some cases, it's clearly not... Okay, that worked fully tool-less because I needed... Oh,
that was cool. That scared the hell out of me. I thought I... For sure, these were just going
to like fall off, but they don't. So when you do that, don't worry about it. They just come out,
and they just pull it off like that. That was great. Thanks, Alienware. That was actually really cool.
No problem. You guys are going to love this or hate this. I don't know.
Yeah. That's my best peel ever. The whole thing is positive pressure. Every single fan is intake,
and I can't remember the exact sizes we've got, but we've got a 360-mil rad with, I think,
3120s at the top, a couple of 180s at the front here, and then I think, yeah, there's a couple
of 140s here for the power supply, feeding a bunch of air into our GPU. Now let's take a look at what
else is on the inside of this bad boy. We got our... Yeah, there's our cooler. Apparently, it can do up
to a 420-millimeter radiator, and I believe it because we've got a bunch of just kind of dead
space over here. And then as for the rest of our system, we've got this crazy overbuilt anti-sag
bracket, but I mean, it makes sense. Dell Alienware is sending this to people who they don't think
we're ever going to take this thing apart as evidenced in our latest Secret Shopper, and so I
can understand why they don't want you to touch the graphics card. They want this thing to arrive in
one piece with zero issues, so they don't have to fix anything after the fact. Other than that,
we've only got two slots in our motherboard for our DDR5 memory. It is running at like 6400
megatransfer, which is good, but the cast latency is like 44 or 46, which is bad. But we'll talk more
about that later. Underneath here, we've got our Intel Core Ultra 285K. I know AMD's kind of king
of the scene right now, but the reality is at 4K with a 5090, a 285K will do you well enough. It's
not CPU-bound, so it should be fine. And then as for the rest of the case, I kind of wish they routed
this power a little differently, maybe go down and under. I don't know, maybe go over through here,
so it's with the rest of the cables instead of down through the brace. It's not the end of the world,
but like now the brace is connected and I don't like that. Other than that, we've got a very
clearly, actually really like how labeled this is. We've got this SSD M.2 solid state drive
label and slot. Our SSD is under there. It's a two terabyte Gen4 drive. We've got our little
Wi-Fi card here that goes down to our antenna here that I found, so not, I mean it's kind of a
daughterboard, I guess. It depends on how you think about it, but what else have we got? What
secrets are you hiding? There's a lot of stuff plugged in. Like all of our, pretty much all of
our headers here are full. End up here too, so there's a lot plugged in right now. So Alienware
is going a lot more non-proprietary and just off-the-shelf parts. Like most of this looks very
standard. The problem is they're still using 12 VO for their motherboards and so you don't get this,
where's the ATX 24 pin? It's gone. And so the one problem, it is a standard, there's like
two motherboards that use 12 VO, but if you want to ever replace, keep the graphic card,
maybe the memory and some other stuff, but you want to replace the board and maybe the chip,
you're going to either have to replace your power supply as well. And it's a 1500 watt platinum
power supply, so I really don't want to do that. Or you have to specifically buy a board that uses
12 VO instead of the ATX 24 pin. There are out there. There's not many of them, but technically
you can find one. Let's take a look at the cable management in the back.
Now the next thing I want to do is take a look at this power supply because it's huge and it's
also got this giant bracket, like holding it in place. So we're going to remove this guy and
take a look at the label just to make sure we're getting what we paid for. Hell yeah, look at 80
plus platinum, maybe. And then looking at the back, yeah, looks pretty normal. Like I said,
you're not going to find an ATX 24 pin power connector off of this guy. So I'm going to upgrade,
you're going to have to upgrade that too, but at least it's easy enough to remove. You just take
this bracket off and then you can take it out through the back. No problem. One neat feature
I didn't really talk about is this kind of open air part because yeah, the front is solid, but then
you get in here and you've just got these two big fans with a very easily removable filter. I might
add. That's actually super easy. It also looks, I'm not sure if it's on the other side too. No,
on this side though, it looks like there's a strip of diffused lighting. I'm not 100% sure,
but we'll find out once we turn it on after a word from our sponsor, Saley. First thing
I'd like to point out is I was right. This is some nice beautiful diffused lighting and yes,
I absolutely did plug in our peripherals into the top USB ports because I'm crazy like that.
Let's take a quick look and see if we're actually getting what we've paid for. CPU,
there's our Core Ultra 285K. As for memory yet, we've got our memory running at 6400
megatransferors per second. XMP was enabled by default. However, there were a couple of issues.
One, rebar or a resizable bar was not enabled by default. If you reset your computer like a full
wipe on the motherboard, you're going to also not have it enabled because it's not on by default.
We're going to enable it because it's not going to care about it in too many games, but the ones
that it does care about, you're going to look at like a 10 to maybe even 15 or 20% performance decrease.
So definitely make sure to turn that on. And then, okay, what else do we want to add or
remove programs? They've got, you know, they're pretty typical like Alienware command center.
You know, I'm not going to fault them for that. That's fine. And while we've already uninstalled
it, it did come with McAfee. So, you know, there's not a lot that I will highly recommend that you
just uninstall and rip out of your computer as soon as it shows up, but McAfee is probably like the top
like number one program to just absolutely get rid of. I'm part of the Adams family.
I've got a $40.90 at home. It's a great card. I don't want to spend this much money on a $50.90.
It's very expensive. This computer costs a lot, but a giant chunk of that price is at least at
this price point, there's different configurations, but a giant chunk of that price is just going to
this guy right here. So, you know, let's play some games on it and see, I mean, I got a 4k monitor
right here. Let's hurt me a little bit and make me cry because I want a $50.90 level of performance.
I just don't want to spend $2,000 US dollars on a graphics card. That's your whole computer should
cost like two grand like hell. Yeah. What are our settings? What did it start me at? Custom.
I don't know what custom is. Let's go to ray tracing overdrive. Sure. DLSS transformer model. I don't
want to go to auto. I want to go to quality. That's good enough for me. Ray reconstruction. Ray
reconstruction is on. Framegen off. I don't like it. I don't like Framegen, but all the RT stuff,
except I'm not going to turn on actually, no, $50.90. Let's turn on path tracing. Why not?
We've only got 80 field of view motion blur, always off. Oh, baby. The sub 60 frames a second,
it's barely, it's like 53, 55. This is why they try to tell you to use Framegen and I'm not going
to do that. But you know, the nice thing is our 1% lows are actually pretty solid. They're only a
little bit behind our averages at like 50, high 40s. So as much as I'm poo pooing this, it's very
playable and it looks incredible. So I'm just going to tweak settings a little bit to get us
somewhere closer to 60 plus because I actually am a little disappointed that I do have DLSS on
and I'm still sub 60. Honestly, I'm not going to touch anything else. I'm literally just turning
the path tracing off and let's see how it does now. Let it settle down. Oh yeah, 85, 80 with 1%
of like 80 to high 70s. So this is great. Path tracing looks incredible. Ray tracing in the right
circumstances can also look really good. But the problem is this is on a 50.90. So I can guarantee
to you that my 40.90 isn't going to be running Cyberpunk 4k Ultra. Now to be fair, while expectations
from gamers have risen over the past few years when it comes to like playing at certain resolutions
and certain frame rates, this computer costs $5,150. And so in my opinion, if you're paying over $5,000
for your computer with about 2,000 of that, at least going to your graphics card, I think those
expectations are a little fair. And then on top of all of that, because you're also getting like
two terabytes of storage and some decent amount of RAM, you've got a pretty cool case. Like it's
enormous. You're putting this down and you're not moving it like ever. It weighs like 80 pounds full.
But it's pretty sick. I really like the tempered glass side panel. I like how easy it was to take
the panels off. I really love this diffuse lighting. Is it on the other side? It's not on the other
side. That's my only complaint. Alienware. Come on. I know people will probably never see it,
but put it on the other side. I love that the Alienware logo is not only the power button,
but it's lit up nicely in their classic like Alienware blue. And while I'm over here, one thing
I completely forgot to mention is while most people probably aren't going to tinker with these, if you
do want to, there's handy QR codes in pretty much every little spot where you might have to do something.
And if you follow those, it'll give you detailed instructions on how to like undo that part or
reinstall it or whatever, which is actually really cool in terms of customer support.
And while you're paying a lot for this Alienware computer, and it might look sick and it might
be what you want, take a look at these results from the lab. Overall, pretty solid. It cools
decently fine with the 360 mil AIO. And in terms of gaming performance, we only tested three games,
but the only one that wasn't like basically neck and neck with our 285k system was F one,
which did not have rebar on. So like I said before, if you're buying one of these systems,
perfectly valid decision, I'm happy for you that you have so much money to spend.
But definitely, oh my God, enable rebar, please in the BIOS, make sure you do that.
Please make sure you do that. I'm Ploof. This is ShortCircuit. This is Alienware's Area 51
gaming desktop. And it is very cool. If you like it, there are many other configurations.
It goes, it starts way lower than the price we looked at today. This is a top end spec.
Go check it out and check out another ShortCircuit. Maybe what was the last one? You know,
the Yggdrasil. That one was sick. That had like a tempered glass side panel. That had like this
cool vinyl wrap on it that looked all stained glassy. It was really cool.