32 | MAXIMUMPC | JUN 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
W
e’re pretty sure that three years ago somebody uncrated
this Alienware Area 51 PC and was amazed by the rig’s
unearthly technology and out-of-this-world gaming per-
formance. Today, it’s about as special as a bucket of mud.
That’s a sad comment on how far the Athlon 64 3000+ inside
the Area 51 has fallen. Today, this Venice single-core Athlon 64 is
probably best suited for web browsing and email. Don’t believe us?
In our ProShow Producer benchmark, the lowly Pentium 4 created
our photo slide show in about an hour. It took the A64 3000+ almost
two hours!
The rig’s GPU, a GeForce 7900 GTX, is not the original videocard
that came with the system, as the machine’s other parts are vintage
2005 and the 7900 GTX came out the following year.
The Area 51 is an interesting upgrade challenge. It’s the opposite
of the Dell, which had a fairly serviceable CPU but a complete dog of
a GPU. The Alienware has an almost useful GPU but a total dog of a
CPU. The benchmark scores back this up. Against the new $500 rig,
the poor Athlon 64 doesn’t stand a chance. The Alienware PC is able
to redeem itself only in the gaming tests, in which even the ancient
7900 GTX outstrips the budget 8500 GT.
So here’s where it gets tricky. Our fi rst instinct was to drop in
a Socket 939 dual-core processor and a second GeForce 7900 GTX
card. That gives you dual cores and SLI, man! But is that the right
upgrade? Read on.OPERATION UPGRADE
Our upgrades put the spookiness back into this old Area 51 machine
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CASE STUDY 3
R
emember our third rule of upgrading:
Does it make sense? With the Alien-
ware Area 51, it does and it doesn’t.CPU AND MOTHERBOARD
Upgrading the CPU was job one
on the Alienware box. At first we
figured, heck, let’s just drop in a
Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and
call it a day. Then we looked at prices.
On Pricewatch.com, the cheapest new
4800+ was $439. Even on eBay, 4800+ procs
were moving for about $100. That’s for a
used processor. Our second option was that
little darling the Opteron 185. A 2.6GHzdual-core 939 CPU, this chip works perfectly
fine as a stand-in Socket 939 Athlon 64 dual
core. Prices for this chip, however, are closer
to $280. If we got a paper route and
saved our money, we’d be better
off buying a $500 bargain PC
instead of buying this proc. Even
with the Opteron 185 or 4800+,
the box would still be a chump
next to the Pentium E2160 in the
$500 machine.
That tipped the scales for us. The
situation clearly called for a more thorough
overhaul. Thanks to Alienware’s use of
industry-standard ATX parts, an extreme
makeover was not only possibly but quiteeasy. We replaced the Athlon 64 3000+/Asus
A8N32-SLI combination for a Core 2 Quad
Q9300 and MSI P7N-SLI Platinum. Intel’s
$300 Q9300 is based on the new Penryn
core and is the class leader of cheap CPUs.
The $175 MSI P7N-SLI Platinum mobo uses
nVidia’s nForce 750i chipset and gives us the
SLI option, as well. In a nutshell, we’re talk-
ing budget SLI with full quad-core Penryn
support. We, of course, recycled the 2GB
of DDR in the box, but it’s not like DDR2 is
expensive today. In fact, it’s even cheaper
than DDR.
Thanks to our CPU/mobo upgrade, we
went from a slide-show encode that took al-
most two hours to one that took 21 minutes.Our Alienware Upgrades
TOTAL
UPGRADE
COSTS:
$
1,