AlienALX
Active member
Hi guys. Please note this will be a quite long winded affair. It's not a custom build and it won't contain many, if any, case mods. It's just me restoring what I feel to be one of the best cases ever made. The quality just oozes from every crevice. It won't look terribly nice inside but it never did. However, this case is all about the outside.
Just think of this as a more electronics based build log, rather than one with lots of shiny parts.
About a year ago now I gave my Area 51 ALX to my step son. It was his 21st and after buying my dream rig I simply had too many rigs and had to get rid. I hate selling stuff I would rather give it away free (to family and friends of course) so at the time it was no biggy. However, I did regret it a little because the Alienware is just so lovely and well built. Not only that but good examples are incredibly rare (due to the size and weight they are so easy to damage) and when new at retail this was a rig that starts at £2700 minimum.
So any way, enough digressing. I originally bought the chassis along with a 1200w PSU in 2010. The rig was originally manufactured in 2008 and was sold as a dream rig (I ran the Dell service code and saw the specs. 980x, two 5970s etc).
When I got it it was pretty much mark free and in mint condition. Everything worked too, there was just a cold boot issue with the PSU that would happen every couple of months or so. When I gave it to my step son it had a hex core Westmere ES chip in it clocked to 1.8ghz with two 670s and so on. I took out the 670s and put those into the Dark Carnival AMD rig and gave him that as a replacement.
Since then I have been going to and fro over it. I had to cut into the left side panel because the 670s were over heating which kinda ruined the originality of the case. This sucks, and was why I have been humming and harring as to whether I should keep it or just take it to the dump. However, after doing some digging I found a new side panel on Ebay USA for $20. Sadly it will cost me around £100 to get it here, but I feel it's worth it.
After rigorous testing I found that the PSU was definitely at fault. A while back I bought some cables (braided extensions) and the 24 pin was wired up incorrectly and caused a short, buring out three 12v wires. I took them from anothter unused rail and all was well again, but it seems the PSU never fully recovered. This is a big issue, as the internal IO board that controls the front panel, roof vents and lights uses a proprietary power connector. This means you can't just fit a standard power supply, as nothing would work.
Bummer... Here is the IO board in question. It's about half the size of a ITX motherboard to give you some idea of the scale of it.
As you can see it's quite a complex beasty and has a 10 pin proprietary power connector. After many hours of running search strings through Google I finally managed some success, and, dug up these two images.
They are both identical, aside from the fact that one clever little person correctly identified that one of the 5v lines is a 5vSB.
SB stands for "Stand By" and is used for "Power On" features, such as keyboard power on and/or mouse power on.
Setting +5v rather than +5vSB eliminates the possibility of using those features.
Thankfully when inspecting the 24 pin ATX connector we come across this...
Note, one pink 5vSB. So the upshot of this is that I *should* be able to basically buy one of these (already ordered)
And then strip into the wires, running the Alienware's 10 pin connector from it..
Here is the rig here (well, this is not my pic but this is what it looks like)
Here is where the PSU mounts. I will probably have to hand make some sort of plate to adapt it to take a regular PSU.
Proposed specifications.
Intel 2ghz Ivybridge ES, 8 core 16 thread 60w.
Ram - TBC
Motherboard - custom painted Gigabyte X79 UD3
Graphics card - MSI Titan Black 6gb
Hard drives - TBC, though I have about 8 spare]
SSD - 100gb Intel 320 series
Power supply - Corsair RM 750
Mods - possible internal painting, carbon 5.25 cover possibly with a screen in.
One more shot for now. This is the right side panel where all of the hard drives go.
It's an amazing feat of engineering. You really would think it couldn't be any better, then you realise that it's all completely lit with LEDs that connect to a battery pack, so even with no power going into the rig it still lights up.
As I mentioned before, this won't be a terribly exciting log. Well, not unless you are into electronics and the hacking of. I will post pics as I go
Yeah I know, TL
R
Just think of this as a more electronics based build log, rather than one with lots of shiny parts.
About a year ago now I gave my Area 51 ALX to my step son. It was his 21st and after buying my dream rig I simply had too many rigs and had to get rid. I hate selling stuff I would rather give it away free (to family and friends of course) so at the time it was no biggy. However, I did regret it a little because the Alienware is just so lovely and well built. Not only that but good examples are incredibly rare (due to the size and weight they are so easy to damage) and when new at retail this was a rig that starts at £2700 minimum.
So any way, enough digressing. I originally bought the chassis along with a 1200w PSU in 2010. The rig was originally manufactured in 2008 and was sold as a dream rig (I ran the Dell service code and saw the specs. 980x, two 5970s etc).
When I got it it was pretty much mark free and in mint condition. Everything worked too, there was just a cold boot issue with the PSU that would happen every couple of months or so. When I gave it to my step son it had a hex core Westmere ES chip in it clocked to 1.8ghz with two 670s and so on. I took out the 670s and put those into the Dark Carnival AMD rig and gave him that as a replacement.
Since then I have been going to and fro over it. I had to cut into the left side panel because the 670s were over heating which kinda ruined the originality of the case. This sucks, and was why I have been humming and harring as to whether I should keep it or just take it to the dump. However, after doing some digging I found a new side panel on Ebay USA for $20. Sadly it will cost me around £100 to get it here, but I feel it's worth it.
After rigorous testing I found that the PSU was definitely at fault. A while back I bought some cables (braided extensions) and the 24 pin was wired up incorrectly and caused a short, buring out three 12v wires. I took them from anothter unused rail and all was well again, but it seems the PSU never fully recovered. This is a big issue, as the internal IO board that controls the front panel, roof vents and lights uses a proprietary power connector. This means you can't just fit a standard power supply, as nothing would work.
Bummer... Here is the IO board in question. It's about half the size of a ITX motherboard to give you some idea of the scale of it.
As you can see it's quite a complex beasty and has a 10 pin proprietary power connector. After many hours of running search strings through Google I finally managed some success, and, dug up these two images.
They are both identical, aside from the fact that one clever little person correctly identified that one of the 5v lines is a 5vSB.
SB stands for "Stand By" and is used for "Power On" features, such as keyboard power on and/or mouse power on.
Setting +5v rather than +5vSB eliminates the possibility of using those features.
Thankfully when inspecting the 24 pin ATX connector we come across this...
Note, one pink 5vSB. So the upshot of this is that I *should* be able to basically buy one of these (already ordered)
And then strip into the wires, running the Alienware's 10 pin connector from it..
Here is the rig here (well, this is not my pic but this is what it looks like)
Here is where the PSU mounts. I will probably have to hand make some sort of plate to adapt it to take a regular PSU.
Proposed specifications.
Intel 2ghz Ivybridge ES, 8 core 16 thread 60w.
Ram - TBC
Motherboard - custom painted Gigabyte X79 UD3
Graphics card - MSI Titan Black 6gb
Hard drives - TBC, though I have about 8 spare]
SSD - 100gb Intel 320 series
Power supply - Corsair RM 750
Mods - possible internal painting, carbon 5.25 cover possibly with a screen in.
One more shot for now. This is the right side panel where all of the hard drives go.
It's an amazing feat of engineering. You really would think it couldn't be any better, then you realise that it's all completely lit with LEDs that connect to a battery pack, so even with no power going into the rig it still lights up.
As I mentioned before, this won't be a terribly exciting log. Well, not unless you are into electronics and the hacking of. I will post pics as I go
Yeah I know, TL
R 
So, what to do.. Well, those of you who know me and have read some of my logs may remember I did a build called N-Fenix. I was tight on funds so I had some crappy unbranded ram, but I brought it to life using these.
