The chassis is not an Alienware creation, as other companies such as Sager or Rock are using it in different guises, without the copyright Alienware front section and with their own little modifications. We will be reviewing a Rock laptop soon so keep your eyes peeled for that.

To cool a Prescott processor, multiple hard drives and a high end Graphics card, such as the 6800 go requires some serious airflow, this chassis does not disappoint. We have four fans, one over the ram (middle in image below), one over the GFX (bottom right), and two over the middle left section which force air over the motherboard and CPU.

"So how loud is this beast?" I hear you ask, well as its all thermally controlled this varies depending on room ambient, processor load and increases in chassis temperature over extended game playing periods. I will say at idle its no more than whisper loud, but after thirty minutes playing Farcry you can certainly hear the fans whirring all over the chassis.

Ill remove the covers of the various compartments. Lets start with the Nvidia 6800 go compartment.

A single 50mm fan, which under extreme load can make a fair amount of noise, no we arent quite reaching Nvidia 5800 levels, but its certainly noticeable when playing a First person shooter over a sustained period of time. If you place your hand to the vent on the left of the machine, next to the video card you will find some HOT air being expelled, this gets so warm that even the desk under the laptop chassis can be almost hot to the touch.

The center section of the chassis is reserved for the memory modules, in this we have 4x512 meg Corsair DDR2-533 modules, as you can see the fan in this section is the largest of them all, this fan is also used for mofset cooling and will force air from the center outwards horizontally across the motherboard. The modules are Samsung k4t51083qb-gcd5 "Samsung's new 512M DDR2 SDRAM is considerably smaller (at 100mm^2) than their previous generation (at 160mm^2). The competing Elpida DDR2 device is 130mm^2." This is top of the line DDR2 laptop memory and no corners have been cut by Alienware with this selection.

The hard drives I choose arent the fastest, that being 4,200rpm models, but they are in raid 0, so therefore should be slightly faster than a single 7,200 rpm drive with the benefits of running a little cooler. These fit in the case in a vertical stacking system with brackets holding the drives in place.

Last but not least we reach the Prescott Cpu cooler, which is a massive copper heatpipe solution which spans horizontally across 7/10 of the length the case in three joined "parts", This is tested to cool even a Prescott at 3.6ghz, the fans in the middle of the case force air downwards over the heatpipes, cooling them and forcing the warm air out the rear of the chassis. After a sustained full load session the air being expelled from the case is extremely warm.

Special thanks to John (aka prodigal jenius) for this flash work on the cooling diagram

We generally take these cooling ideas for granted, but this really is quite ingenious in its execution. If you look even closer in the middle top image you will see the designers have used a slightly larger and more powerful fan to cool the first (hotter) heatpipe section and placed another smaller fan on the outer edge to help cool the third (and obviously cooler) heatpipe section.

Unfortunately Alienware dont supply any monitoring software with the laptop and if you are like me you wont like to be "in the dark" when it comes to CPU temperatures. After many attempts to find a program capable of getting diode temperatures from this particular system only one worked, that being CPUCOOL.

Idle temperatures are reading in the mid 50s which for a limited air space and a hot running Prescott is quite spectacular (would you even have thought a year ago cooling a prescott in a laptop was even a possibility?), even under load in a warm room ive yet to see 70c and under hours of stress testing I failed to see one lock up or instability issue due to heat, very impressive cooling and the horizontal heatpipe design works exceptionally well.

After 30 minutes of stress testing, the temperatures of the CPU have only raised into the mid to high 60s, well within the tolerances for the durable Prescott.

 

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