Alienware Area 51 ALX (2006 pre Dell) restoration/upgrade

[AlienALX]

Hi all. Me again. As you know by now I'm a bit of an Alienware fan. I have been ever since I first saw their very early Area 51s in Best Buy when I lived out in the USA. I now have three Area 51s.

 

Firstly and the most modern is this, my Triad.

 

 

 

It's been pretty heavily modded, as a stock case does not allow you to fit two rads like that. You can find the log for that one here -

 

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/399004-rise-of-the-triad/

 

My second Alienware is my 2009 Dell Area 51 ALX.

 

 

 

Which I lovingly restored here -

 

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/377283-alienware-area-51-alx-restoration/

 

OK so a bit of back story. If you're not interested in this and don't really like Alienwares then feel free to skip through the pics TL;DR etc.

 

Back in 2000 I walked into Best Buy in the Deptford Mall in Deptford NJ. As I walked past all of the boring beige pre built computers something caught my eye. It was the Area 51 using the Chieftec Dragon chassis. I immediately fell in love. When I got home I was browsing the internet and I found out that the case Alienware had used was indeed the Chieftec Dragon. The only major difference was that the Alienware one had "ALIENWARE" down the front panel. Any way, I immediately bought a blue Chieftec Dragon and the love affair began.

 

My time in America was pretty rough. I had all sorts of immigration problems because of 9/11 and it took almost four years before I was able to work, drive and earn a crust in the USA. During that time I used money I had saved before I got to America but it ended up running out and my wife supported me for nearly two years.

 

I remember when the first Aurora came out using the original Predator case. I used to sit on Alienware.com pricing up dream rigs and drool over them. The first ALX was absolutely incredible.....

 

Fast forward to 2007. I had been split from my wife for two years and was working as a manager in a restaurant. I was just about keeping my head above water and I wasn't very happy. I decided to finally leave the USA in 2008 after nearly nine years of living there... When I got home the leash was off and I finally had some cash. I went on Ebay and found a "scratch and dent" Area 51 in green and after about a week of waiting I finally, after so many years, had my very first Alienware...

 

In early 2009 I managed to find an Area 51 ALX (chrome accents, black interior, alu as opposed to steel etc) on Ebay and rebuilt my rig into that. Here is a few photos, circa 2009.

 

 

 

And the inside.

 

 

 

At the time the spec was as follows.

 

Phenom 2 940

Noctua low profile 120mm cooler.

4gb Corsair Dominator DDR4/800

Asus M3A32 MVP Deluxe WIFI

Radeon 5770 CFX

Nvidia 240 for Physx

 

And so on. Then Dell released the newer, more compact Aurora and I wanted it. So I removed the graphics cards from the rig and all of the Noctua fans apart from one and sold it to my nextdoor neighbour in 2010. I stipulated with them when I sold it to them and asked if they ever got rid of it to give me first dibs.

 

Let's move forward to November of 2015. I was sitting at my desk and the phone rang. It was my old neighbours, who I had not seen in years (I have now moved). They said I could have it back ! 

 

So I got the rig back in mid November. Whilst my neighbours had done a great job of cleaning the outside the inside of the rig was absolutely filthy. Try and imagine five year's worth of dust. It looks a little bit like this..

 

 

So the next job was to strip down the rig. I chose to replace the fans in the rig. They were cheap £2 things I threw in there to sell it. I decided to use Cougar Vortex throughout the rig (140mm smoked intake with two orange 120mm providing the CPU cooling and exhaust). Here is the rig stripped down and cleaned. It took me an entire day to get it to this stage.

 

 

And the motherboard. This was after it had been removed, cleaned and the Cougar fan fitted to the Noctua cooler.

 

 

The next job was to order a new power supply. Whilst there was nothing really wrong with the Alienware unit it was incredibly old (IIRC the date stamp on it was 2006) and was not 80+ of any sort and ran incredibly hot when under full load. I waited for Black Friday, then pulled the trigger on this. It cost me £36 (I had a £10 code from a friend)

 

 

I also decided that I wanted to fit an SSD. The main aim was to use this rig on my 65" TV so I wanted it to boot fast. Again Black Friday came to the rescue, with a 240gb Sandisk costing me a mere £39 delivered from Amazon.

 

 

I also decided that I was going to rebuild the rig for gaming on the TV. When I sold it to my neighbour I bought a £40 graphics card and put that in there so it desperately needed something more powerful. After scouting the for sale threads on a few forums for a couple of weeks this came up for £120.

 

 

The only thing left now was the CPU and memory. I put up a wanted thread and after a week or so managed to get a Phenom 2 1055T for free (hex core) and 8gb of DDR2 800 for £20. I then fitted the CPU and set up a ghetto rig to test and overclock it.

 

 

And checked it over..

 

 

And I was now confident that it had enough CPU grunt for modern games (whilst accepting that it would bottle neck slightly but wasn't worth another £200+ to switch it out with a new board, CPU and ram).

 

Now the keen eyed Alienware fans among us (that would be none then ) will notice that these cases do not come with cable management. So that means no holes, no wire trunking ETC. I did all of those mods back in 2009 when I had the rig. You will also notice that the machine has a full set of orange and black cables. These are excess out of my old monster rig.

 

The only part of the rig that I did not sort out back then was the large hole where all of the cables used to run through at the front. So out came the tools.

 

 

Mark.

 

 

Cut.

 

 

Cover.

 

 

Get out plotter and cut graphic.

 

 

Then it was on to the PSU cover. Graphics.

 

 

 

Fit.

 

 

Icon.

 

 

And finished.

 

 

Then it was onto the main trunking. When these units were designed Alienware ran all of the LED cables through the bottom of the rig and into the control board. I decided to make some trunking to cover it all and painted it black. The paint had gone dry and looked horrible so I repainted it, then moved onto a design for it.

 

 

And cut.

 

 

And fit.

 

 

The only thing I did end up needing was an orange sleeved SATA cable. I chose the Bitfenix Alchemy one as I love the paracord on these.

 

 

And then, some time later.

 

 

 

And it was done

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[fire219]

Really well done! That old girl looks nicer than most new Alienware systems...

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

Looks better than my phantom. That's for sure.

[Theguywhobea]

Damn dude, you always do such a great job with these cases. Keep up the good work, I always look forward to these kinds of posts from you.

[AlienALX]

Really well done! That old girl looks nicer than most new Alienware systems...

 

Yeah I have to admit it does. It was the last case Alienware (like proper Florida based Alienware) designed. When I sold it I immediately really regretted it (as I have done with any Alienware I have sold) and really missed it over the years. The nice part is I have pretty much a duplicate of every electronic part it uses too as I had a badly damaged case I scrapped

 

I'm currently using the rig on my 65" TV. It does do 4k but the GPU could never handle that so I set it up @ 1080p and then in Fallout 4 I am using Nvidia DSR to increase the resolution to 1440p. I was quite impressed with how well the GPU handles it tbh. Everything maxed, Godrays and shadows on low, happy days