What to do with an Alienware Area-51?

O

OhSigmaChi

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 27, 2019
Messages
194
So today I happened upon an Alienware Area51 7500-R4 in impeccable condition. It was less the GPUs and RAM and HDD, but everything else was there, including the cpu liquid cooling. It does appear to have an after market PSU, but I haven't removed it to confirm. The case itself (which is the main attraction) was pretty flawless.

I did some basic poking and prodding, everything looked fine, EVGA 680i SLI mobo looked good, I replaces the TIM on the CPU and chipset, dropped in a 8800 Ultra I had on the shelf and it posts to BIOS just fine. Pump was moving water through the loop. I could have installed an OS with little issue.

But should I bother? I could pick up a couple of 8800 GTX cards pretty reasonably, and drop an old 7200 rpm HDD in it, all for less than $60 and it would basically be a perfect time capsule.

Or I could drop in one of the i7-4770Ks and z87 mobos I've got laying around in the basement, pretty sure there's a gtx 970 floating around on a shelf down there too. Throw in an SSD and boom, pretty relevant modern gamer, in a CRAZY old case.

What would YOU do?
 
I would toss it lol.....i know for a fact i tossed my old 8800gtx away cause i had no use for it. You need to so what YOU want to do and like spending time doing
 
primetime said:
I would toss it lol.....i know for a fact i tossed my old 8800gtx away cause i had no use for it. You need to so what YOU want to do and like spending time doing
Click to expand...

I'm assuming you man to "toss" the original components (because there's no way I could throw away this amazing case), which I get. There is something almost sacrilegious about gutting a pre-Dell Alienware. I already have one "old school rig" I might keep this and get rid of that.

Honestly I just like to tinker, and restoring this old war-horse to it's former glory would be just as satisfying as dropping a 9900K and a 2080ti into it.
 
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