Our upgrades put the spookiness back into this old Area 51 machine
We’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 performance. 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 first 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.
Comments are closed on this article
vacuous_one
June 01, 2008 at 9:22am
So, where are the specific specs on the $500 reference machine? Sure, the performance results are there and the generic specs are there, but what did you actually use? Brands, part numbers, etc? Or, do we just have to trust you that it's possible to build it as stated?
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