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 12 lb, I just
knew that I had to unbox it. For the non-Americans out there, that's about 35
kilos. Oh my god.
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 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 uh 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 and because the phone
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 cuz, you know, we've got the topofthe-line spec
version that costs a pretty penny. We'll talk about the price later. Uh because
right now, 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 card 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 uh Wi-Fi puck. So, we
got little antenna adapters here. You got the puck there. Stick it in the
back. Pop it 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 cuz this thing is expensive. I wish that it came
with like one of their Alienware accessories. But, uh, it's better than
nothing. At least we can turn this on. Uh 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 uh Mac Pro. And then there's actually an
absolute ton of IO on the front. We've got two USBA ports, two USB type-C, a
dedicated headphone, and dedicated uh 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. Um, but it's actually really beefy. We've got two Thunderbolt 4
ports, two USBC ports, and then six more
uh USB type A at various speeds. We'll
put those on screen for you. And then we've got um SpIif, good old Spiff, uh,
line in and out, and then uh, LAN. I think it's 2 and 1/2 gig LAN as well. I
really like the cool Area 51 designation along with the model ID. Um, 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 a Intel 285K, not the KF. So, it should have
integrated graphics. Alienware. Include my HDMI or display
port 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 UHBR20 with DP2.1B.
And then we've got one HDMI 2.1 port. And then I actually missed our Wi-Fi
antennas cuz 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 I 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 uh take the
foam out, take the peel out. We got a GPU thing that we got to take out after
shipment. Uh, 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
toolless, and they do a good job in some cases, it's clearly not. Okay, that
worked. Fully toolless cuz 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. Uh, but
they don't. So, when you do that, don't worry about it. They just come out and
then you 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 uh 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, uh 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. Uh, apparently it can do up to a 420 mm
radiator. And I believe it cuz we've got a bunch of just kind of dead space over
here. Um, and then as for the rest of our system, we've got this crazy
overbuilt uh anti-sag bracket. But I
mean, it makes sense. Uh, Dell Alienware is sending this to people who they don't
think are 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 6,400 mega transfer, which is good, but the cast latency is like 44 or 46,
which is bad. Um, but we'll talk more about that later. Underneath here, we've
got our Intel Core Ultra 285K. I know
AMD is kind of king of the scene right now, but the reality is at 4K with a
5090, a 285K will do you well enough. Uh
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. Um,
other than that, we've got a very clearly actually really like how labeled
this is. We've got this SSD M.2 solidstate drive uh label and slot. Our
SSD is under there. It's a two terbte Gen 4 drive. We've got our little Wi-Fi
card here that goes down to our antenna here that I found. So, not a daughter. I
mean, it's kind of a daughterboard, I guess. I don't know. Depends on how you think about it. But, uh, 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 and up here too.
So there's a lot plugged in right now. So Alienware is going a lot more
nonproprietarian just off-the-shelf parts like um most of this looks very
standard. The problem is they're still using 12vo 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 12vo, but if you
want to ever replace, keep the graphics 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 12vo instead of the ATX 24 pin. They 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 cuz 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 that. 80 plus platinum, baby. Then looking at the back. Yeah,
looks pretty normal. Like I said, you're not going to find a ATX 24 pin power
connector off of this guy. Uh, so if you
want 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 uh this kind of open air part because
yeah, the front is uh 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 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, SLY.
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more and get a $3 discount on all s plans, even sale ultra. Now, time to
move this computer. Oh my god. 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. Uh, 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, yeah, we've got our memory running at 6,400 mega transfers
per second. XMPP was enabled by default. However, uh, there are a couple issues.
one rebar or resizable bar was not
enabled by default. And if you reset your computer like a full uh wipe on the
uh motherboard, you're going to also not have it enabled because it's not on by
default. So, we're going to enable it um because it it's not going to care about
it in too many games, but in the ones that it does care about, it's 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. Um, and then, uh, okay, what else do we
want to Oh, 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 uh to just absolutely get rid of. I'm part of the Adams
family. I've got a 4090 at home. It's a great card. I don't want to spend this
much money on a 5090. 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. Yeah. I mean, I got a 4K monitor right here.
Let's hurt me a little bit and make me cry because I want a 5090s level of
performance. I just don't want to spend $2,000 US 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. Frame gen off. I don't like it. I
don't like frame gen. But all the RT stuff except I'm not going to turn on
actually. Ah, no. 5090. 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 frame gen. And uh 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 cuz 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 uh
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 5090. So I can
guarantee you that my 4090 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,
um, 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 lb full. Um, but it's
pretty sick. I 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 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 andneck with our
>> 285K system >> was F1, 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. Um, but
definitely, oh my god, enable rebar, please. in the BIOS. Make sure you do
that as Please make sure you do that.
I'm PLO. This is ShortCircuit. This is Alienware's Area 51 uh 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. Uh go check it out and uh check
out another ShortCircuit. Maybe uh what was the last one? You know, the Indrasil. That one was sick. that had
like a tempered glass side panel um that had like this cool vinyl wrap on it that
looked all uh stained glassy and it was it was really