Alienware Area-51 5300 Internals

The heart of the system, the LGA 775 3.2ghz Prescott underneath the mighty cooler. This heatpipe design as you can see extends to the rear of the chassis and hot air is expelled out the back as it rises along the pipes via the large cooling fan. But how well does the cooler work?

With the aid of CPUcool (above) you can see the temperatures under load immediately after a gaming session, while CPUcool isn't 100% accurate (I measured 3c higher with a diode) around 57c for a fully loaded Prescott is still very impressive especially in the confines of such a diminutive chassis. Ambient room temperatures were around 25c. Alienware do not supply monitoring software such as CPUcool with the system however, so any monitoring outside the bios (which ill come to later) would be left firmly in the user's hands. I wouldn't really consider this an issue for the "average" user but I personally like to see how efficiently heat is being displaced.

The boys in green are powering the graphics department with the excellent BFG being the manufacturer of choice. The decision of 6800 GT over Ultra is a good one, as the GT is single slot, runs cooler and has a a slightly lower power overhead while retaining the 16 pipe design.

The card remained at all times well under 80c even when overclocked (more on that later) which is perfectly within tolerances for the PCB and NV Core, it is positioned to the left rear of the chassis next to the wire mesh so it is able to suck in cool air directly to the core without chassis ambient temperatures affecting the cooling.

Yes there certainly isn't much room in there ! However the memory modules are a 512mb DDR3200LLA2 (low latency) matched pair with tight timings of 5-2-2-2, another good choice on behalf of Alienware for this specific system.

Cabling:

A good overall job by the Alienware engineer this time with everything neatly routed throughout the system, you can see with the last picture above just how little room they have to play with.

Power Supply:

Yes, you read it right, the whole system is powered by a 250W Shuttle supply, while this figure might seem to many as a sure sign of poor stability both my colleague Stuart and myself have found Shuttle power supplies to be class leading for their relatively modest figures. All figures in the bios show virtually reference readings across the board, with 5v-5.014, 12v-12.08v and 3.3-3.298v. Remember it may be 250w but it's putting out 16a on the 12v rail, quite extraordinary! After three days of extreme stress testing (which the average user will never inflict upon his system) I can safely say this power supply more than meets expectations. I've actually had similar system components fail under the same stress testing with a 450w Qtec power supply. Be aware, high figures are certainly not an immediate sign of quality.

 

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