Hands-on with Alienware’s water-cooled, Skylake-packing X51 microtower - mccoolspearknigh

Alienware is largely credited for kicking off the little-tower revolution three long time past with the avant-garde X51.

The concept was simple: Take the typical business small-form-factor box, pull the PSU kayoed of it and make enough elbow room—just enough elbow room—to shove an forth-the-shelf graphics carte du jour inside. The result was a truly pack together tower system of rules that could sit out on a desk Beaver State future to a television, yet still play games with reasonable functioning.

The X51 was a success. Soon, most other Personal computer makers were copying Alienware's little-tower concept—and surpassing information technology in capability and performance, too.

Well, Alienware is back with its third-generation model, putting more pep into the X51's tread. The most obvious update to the R3 version is Intel's 6th-gen Core i7-6700K Skylake chip privileged. That's bound with DDR4 support, and this particular box I touched has 16GB of IT.

Alienware also took the chance to address the cooling of the Skylake chip. While not horribly loud, the X51's CPU was noticeable under heavy loads with its bare tank. On the R3, Alienware taps Sankyo Denkin for a nifty little liquid cooler. It's incredibly tiny and doesn't strike practically more way than a stockpile heat sink and should help break the acoustics.

Liquid cooling also means Alienware is going to ship the X51 from the factory with an overclock pick in the 4.4GHz range. Nifty. Alienware officials did say that overclock won't be on all cores. But then, they never promised you a liquid nitrogen-cooled rose garden either.

Peep this petite little liquid tank. That's a radiator, blower and water supply block in a teeny, petite software packag. Dare we say "cute?"

Place has e'er been a premium in the X51, and Alienware is still shackled by capabilities of its form design. For case, the first-gen X51 could run a 3.5-inch merciless drive or SSD, but not both simultaneously. The second-gen kind of sorta addressed that with a combo arranger that took a 2.5-inch laptop hard drive and a 2.5-edge in SSD. The trouble with that approach is the limitation of the laptop hard drives in capacity.

With the fractional gen, Alienware over again kinda, sorta fixes the berth by putting in a flooded-sizing 3.5-inch disc drive and moving the SSD to an M.2 in a nearby slot. This seems like the best of both worlds, but the SSD in my hands-happening unit was Samsung's PM851. I initially thought it was Samsung's SM951, a true PCIe-based M.2 push back capable of 2GB/s reads and 1.5GB/s writes (yes, I said it wrong on picture), only it's really a authoritative SATA M.2 drive that's really none faster than a SATA SSD.

The expert news is, Alienware officials allege the unit supports booting from a PCIe-based M.2 SSD and there will be an option so, um, I was right after all in my television.

The Alienware X51 R3 features Samsung's PM851 M.2 SSD.

Another change that may or whitethorn not make people happy is the death of the optical drive. Alienware nixed the slot-fed drive to make room for the smooth cooler. For those WHO don't use an optical drive, it's no big deal. For those who as wel used their X51 for a Blu-beam of light player in the sustenance room, you'll deliver to run an external unit.

Alienware did away with the one-armed bandit-fed optical drive.

It's discriminate to have the overclocked Skylake chip, simply gaming nowadays is still for the most part in the soil of the GPU. As with the premature unit, the X51 super out with a GeForce GTX 960. That's the top lineup Alienware sells, but the company says a GeForce GTX 970 wish work if you use the chunky version of the board. The limitation is generally size but besides power. Like the early 2 versions, the X51 runs on a single 330-W external office brick.

So what's an X51 owner to do? Use this interface:

The third-gen X51 now features stand for Alienware's Graphics Amplifier.

With the tierce-gen X51, Alienware has added support for the Graphics Amplifier that I reviewed. With its big power supply, you can stitch to a GeForce Behemoth X in the Nontextual matter Amplifier with the X51.

I'm not sure this makes sense for everyone, as information technology's non very take-away, but I like the option. I candidly see no reason non to include a Graphics Amplifier port wine on everything Alienware makes, short of its egg-filled desktop tower. Why not add the support into the Alienware Alpha as well? With the cost of the Graphics Amplfiier fine-tune to $200, information technology's really not a bad secondary for someone World Health Organization wants a teentsy extra oomph but is afraid to cranny the case open for an raise—surgery is simply unable to do an upgrade due to the physical constraints of the box.

This ISN't quite optimal, though. For someone who buys into the micro-tower form factor, wouldn't it just be better to have a unit that can take a beefier GPU from the get-go?

Here's what the Alienware X51 R3 looks like next to its Graphics Amplifier with a GeForce Titan X inner.

Alienware probably disagrees. As very much like we all like-minded big burly GPUs that tug $700, the sweet spot in gaming is long lower. The X51 tin can glucinium configured down to the $700 range or as screechy as the $1,300 range, depending along the options. We'll have a full review of the X51 arsenic well As its competitors in the near future. In the in the meantime, if you're a fan of teensy-weensy PCs that ingest enough real magnate to play games, this is where it every began.