 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 rip it open. Music TunnelBear for Teams makes it easy to secure your Wi-Fi on any network and comes with priority support and easy team management. Try it for free at the link below. Now we usually focus on pre-built desktop PCs where there's something truly stand out 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, audio and a card reader at the front with lots more USB 3 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 3.5 inch hard drive mounts and a companion dual 2.5 inch mount for SATA SSDs, perfectly adequate for future upgrades. What's not perfect about the case is its unwieldliness. 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 totally has no relevance whatsoever to instances in the past wherein 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 to have 40 megabytes of cache. Seriously, it has more cache 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 three-way crossfire or for workstation use, with plenty of PCIe lanes to spare for the onboard Wi-Fi, SATA controller for hard drives, 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 are 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 Threadripper 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 Core i9 test bench by 37 seconds in the BMW test, and by over two minutes in the classroom sample. I am! 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 for? 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 Dell's 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 wait, 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 Threadripper 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. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit the like button, get subscribed, and maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there, we have our t-shirt store where you can buy cool shirts like this one. Yeah, I'm wearing one. And our community forum, which you should totally join.