We rarely cover gaming rigs here at Pocket-lint, but there's something so iconic and, well, downright insane about the Alienware Area-51 that we couldn't resist. Or maybe the Greys have taken over our brains.
Far from flying in from a land far away and making its home in a US desert, the space-age Alienware Area-51 could setup base in your home, if you have the space and ego to show it off.
You'll also need money, as the starting price of £1299 will quickly escalate when you cram in all the top-of-the-line kit.
Every Area-51 comes equipped with a factory-overclocked eight core 4.0Ghz Intel Haswell-E Core i7 K-series processor, but you can build from that by loading plenty more in besides. Liquid cooling, DDR4 memory, Gigabit Ethernet, multiple AMD/Nvidia graphics cards, even multiple hard drives - it's all available here.
The two side panels to the Area-51 come off with ease for access to graphics and RAM on the one side, hard drives on the other. There's space for three full-sizegraphics cards (AMD Radeon 290X, Nvidia GeForce GTX, or even dual GeForce Titan Z) and up to 32GB quad channel DDR4 2133Mhz RAM to ensure mad-crazy power. Up to four storage drives can be accommodated should you need them too.
The six-sided shape of the Area-51 means graphics cards' fans won't be pumping heat directly to a wall should the Area-51 be positioned as such, instead giving more breathing space for those heavyweight gaming titles to bring everything to the boil without needing to worry. Except for your electricity bill, that is.
Front and rear ports are also easily accessible, as the Area-51 can be literally tilted forward - it's really heavy though - to gain access to the rear. There are eight USB sockets to the back, an additional two to the front making 10 in total. Blu-ray, SD card, headphones and microphone 3.5mm jacks also all feature to the front. If you want to go the whole hog with audio then a optical out to the rear can be synched to a system for extra boom in the audio department.The exterior also shows off Alienware's usual coloured lighting, which adapts based on what you're running, alongside the recognisable Alienware "alien face" logo. The black slatted front panel doesn't exude the kind of geeky cool of the side panels, but does its job just fine - it's plastic, after all, for keeping the heat at bay.
Seems like the Alienware Area-51 has got the power to abduct you and place you in a gaming world like no other… if you've got the cash to fill its innards with the best kit on offer.
