one week ago at our
first-ever
LTX
2017 We previewed, for real , AMD Threadripper performance thanks to Alienware
But come on Linus. That was just a preview! You only did one benchmark! You're such a tease...
I know.
But that was then and this is now
Alienware has arranged for their system to be
exclusively reviewed before the formal embargo lift for Ryzen Threadripper
So let's uh rip it open
*side panel hits disk*
♪ intro music ♪
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Now, we usually focus on Pre-built desktop PCs where there's something truly
standout about them. Otherwise, we'd be reviewing every Best-Buy special that hit the shelves
Back in 2014 the cool thing about the all-new Area 51 was the rotated motherboard tray and the
Triad design with RGB lighting
And design wise...
Not much has changed. If you liked it then, you'll like it now and vice versa.
What stands out now though is the internals so let's pop the panel and show you around
The irony of a DVD burner on something that's trying to look like Alien technology isn't lost on me
But the rest of the i/o is what I would describe as suitably
Futuristic, we've got dual USB 3.0
audio, and a card reader at the front with lots more USB 3.0 at the back including a type C port
Opening up the other side reveals that these aliens are the type to
Cram everything under the bed when their alien mom asks them to clean their room
And we also find a trio of three-and-a-Half inch hard drive mounts
and a companion dual two-and-a-half inch mount for a SATA SSDs
Perfectly adequate for future upgrades
What's not perfect about the case is its
unwieldiness. The chassis itself makes generous use of steel. Which makes it strong, sure, but also super heavy
considering that there's only a single hard drive and a single 120 millimeter AIO cooler in there
and there aren't any obvious
handholds making it quite difficult to get a grip on it
a combination that
Uh..
Totally has no relevance whatsoever
To instances in the past where in things may or may not have escaped my grip through no fault of my own
Anywho...
All of these systems come configured with AMD Ryzen Threadripper in the
1950X
Variant. We're talking 16 cores
and 32 threads on this CPU that also happens have 40 megabytes of cache
Seriously, it has more cash than the 286 era hard drive that a fan brought to LTX for me to sign
It also features
64 PCI Express lanes. Allowing it to run up to three graphics cards at full PCI Express
16x gen 3 speeds for 3-way crossfire or for workstation use
with plenty of PCIe lanes to spare for the on-board Wi-Fi
Sata controller for Hard Drive
And an m.2 slot that houses a 256 gig Sandisk A400 NVMe SSD
So now then let's meet the challengers
Our X299 test bench with its Core i9 7900X Skylake X CPU is the most obvious
Analog from the blue team given its similar price
but we'll be including results from our mainstream platforms as well
Kicking things off then our our gaming tests which should surprise no one this is an Alienware after all.
With Rise of the Tomb Raider we're looking at pretty similar
but slightly worse performance overall
While our synthetics put it pretty much on par with the Core I9
We are planning to run more thread refer gaming benchmarks.
But those will have to wait for the full review
Moving on to productivity. We see pretty much what we expected to see. Major wins in multi-threaded workloads
the biggest victories though come in Blender
it's time to render beats out the CoreI9 testbench by
37 seconds in the BMW test and by over 2 minutes in the classroom sample.
DAYUMN!
I don't pull that off very well, do I?
Anyway, we do have to note though that we found that our Centauri X Cooler
Really struggled to keep Threadripper fully chilled and running its best
And after swapping in our own with a fresh application of thermal compound
So then, who is the Area 51 Threadripper Edition 4?
At 4,000 US dollars as specced, to be brutally honest
We're not quite sure. I mean there are actually a lot of exceptions to the conventional
wisdom that it would be cheaper to build your own gaming PC
Like Dells own also AMD based Inspiron Gaming Desktop that we'll be reviewing soon.
But the Area 51
costs like a boutique system with some significant drawbacks
An unexceptional motherboard with only four DIMM slots rather than eight, and limited overclocking options
Unsightly exposed PCBs on the RAM
And exposed bare steel, on the to Alienware's credit, beefy and modular
1500 Watt power supply along with, and this is by far the worst one frankly,
inadequate cooling the area 51 runs almost as hot and loud as a laptop under
synthetic load and at this size
And weight, there's no excuse for that
Bottom line then. If you really want the Area 51 as a status symbol
Alienware is the first place you can get your hands on a
pre-built thread Ripper system, but understand that the early adopter tax you'll be paying is in more than money
I am fully expecting boutique systems built around this platform for this price with better cooling and
cable management in the coming months.
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