Alienware Area 51 R2 Cooling Upgrades - 360mm CPU Radiator Install

 It's been about five years since I've done any major upgrades to my good ol' Alienware Area 51 R2. Of course, when you're maintaining a PC of this age, the components are inevitably going to start showing it. Recently I noticed my CPU temps were abnormally high, even at idle. Regardless of how hard I ran my fans, they never dropped. I've wanted to deal with this tower's cooling setup for a while now - mostly in relation to replacing the noisy-ass stock fans, but now I no longer had an excuse to keep putting it off.

Initially I was content with just replacing the stock CPU cooler with another 120mm, single fan all-in-one liquid cooler, but I decided that I wanted to try my hand at overclocking the i7-5960X CPU to around the 4.0 GHz mark. Now, I had never OC'd a CPU before and while I found my old chip was more than capable of handling my target clock speed, I learned that a 120mm radiator would be woefully inadequate for the job. 

Funny, considering Dell tried to make the process of overclocking the Area 51 as painless as possible with it's baked-in (and unless you need to change the color of your case lighting - frankly, pretty useless) Alienware Command Center. Yet the computer in it's stock configuration is just barely scraping by on it's original 3.3 GHz setting. Well, this is Dell we're talking about after all. It's amazing that they seem to have only gotten worse over the years.

Most sources recommended that the bare minimum you should consider for cooling an overclocked i7-5960X was a 240mm radiator. The problem is that the Area 51's factory fan mounting positions completely prevent you from mounting anything but 120mm cooling parts. And, as I briefly mentioned in my last post about this machine on my old blog; it is completely impossible to mount a radiator to the front fan brackets without cutting them up first - if you can even find spares on the secondhand market.

Luckily, I found several users on the Alienware subreddit and Dell's forums that managed to shoehorn a 360mm radiator into the front of the chassis with an almost perfect fit. Two benefits I immediately saw from this: first it would be a less awkward fit than a 240mm radiator and second, the larger surface area would hopefully make up for the less-than-optimal ventilation in the front of the case.

However, there wasn't much documentation on these builds so I was effectively going in blind. The gist of what I read was that I'd have to expose the metal chassis underneath the plastic cladding in order to drill mounting holes for the radiator. On any traditional desktop tower, this would be a breeze - mostly because it's more than likely been done already. But no, I get to grapple with Dell's "ingenuity" instead.

My parts for this build were Thermaltake's Toughliquid 360 AIO cooler and a two-pack of Toughfan 12s - the same kind used in the cooler. Tools needed were a drill, a screwdriver, some strong snippers. and an assortment of Phillips, hex, and Torx screwdriver bits. 

The first order of business was to gut the case of all it's old cooling hardware, including getting the GPU out of the way. This was easy enough given Dell's love of using latches and other weird tool-less mounting solutions, but they still managed to sneak quite a few screws into the mix. One in particular that I spent too much time tracking down was for the PCI fan bracket in the bottom right corner of the case. The screw was actually in the underside of the case, of all places.

Unfortunately, things would only get worse once I started tearing the case down to it's metal chassis. There are six hex screws holding each piece of black cladding to the chassis, and they are clipped together on the underside of the 'handles' on each end. Pull those off, and you're left with the face panels on the front, rear and bottom, which are held on by Philips screws and clips located on the inner lip of the inside of the chassis. 

This all doesn't sound too bad on paper, but bear in mind that the only way to remove all of this shit is by constantly flipping the entire heavy ass case around to access screws and remove panels. You also need to be mindful of the flimsy little cables that connect the case lighting to the motherboard, and the Wi-Fi antenna on the top of the chassis, being careful not to crush or pinch any of them. Honestly, this thing rivals a first-generation Mac Pro case in terms of needless complexity, and that sucks.

While the case was apart, I took the time to also drill out the rivets holding the little triangular shaped brace in the bottom of the case. This was formerly part of the massive front GPU bracket that bore the load of the three GTX 980s that used to be in this system, especially important while these things were being shipped. This piece is small enough to where it doesn't really matter if you keep it or not, but since it's no longer being used, I figured I might as well get rid of it.

But once all the plastic is off, it's smooth sailing for the most part. Lining up the 360mm radiator is a breeze - it's damn near a perfect fit with little to no wiggle room. Putting the screws in is a less perfect endeavor. Some of the top holes line up and can be used, but on the lower set, you'll have to snip and file a bit of the grill away in order to make room for the screws. You'll also have to file down a bit of the underside of the black plastic front plate where it contacts the screws, so it continues to sit flush with the chassis. Note that I only used four screws for the entire radiator. Why? Because I'm lazy, and it's all going to be hidden anyways.

Mounting the PCI fan is also a bit on the messy side. The new radiator takes up so much space that it's no longer possible to use the stock fan bracket, so I had to just mount it directly to the chassis. Simple enough: line up, cut or drill, and done... right? Turns out that after I took this picture, the fan's blades were making contact on the top middle rivet, so I had to pull the fan off and drill that rivet out so it wouldn't make a horrible racket when I applied power to it. Without the stock backet, you'll also have to find a new home for the temp sensor that was attached to it. I just stuck it next to the fan in roughly it's original position.

After all that though, it's basically done. Just re-paste the CPU, bolt on the pump, and you're good to go... after you finish reattaching all the plastic crap you pulled off the exterior of the chassis. I opted for a pull configuration on all the front intake fans, and I relocated the GPU radiator to the rear of the case as exhaust with it's fan set to push. I don't think this setup is ideal, since the GPU radiator is being fed with the hot ambient air inside the case, but it's my only option.

I think it's also good to time to address the most glaring issue with the Area 51's chassis in regard to the radiator placement, and the main reason why I think a 360mm radiator is important - not necessarily because it fits and looks the best. The front panel only has two 120mm grills, which complicates things for radiators bigger than that. If you used a 240mm radiator, a good chunk of the surface is going to be blocked by the divide between the two grills, while a 360mm radiator covers both grills and a little bit of the very bottom one. This is all compounded a bit by the addition of the plastic front plate, which likely impedes the already constrained airflow a bit more.

In a perfect world, I'd just take an angle grinder and cut a big rectangular hole in the chassis, but I don't want to modify this tower more than necessary. I'm theorizing that the pull configuration might help in this regard since the radiator is more exposed to outside ambient air, but without comparisons I have nothing to really base that idea on. 

The good news is that the actual thermal performance speaks for itself. Dell's factory BIOS and Command Center suck when it comes to overclocking and I was not able to get a 4.0 GHz clock to stick, forcing me to settle for the 'Level 2', 3.8 GHz preset until I figure out a workaround. With that preset, on a multi-core Cinebench test, I maxed the CPU out at 60 degrees Celsius and under actual gaming loads with Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p, 144Hz, Ultra w/ RTX), I was hitting 51 degrees tops. The GPU is a little less happy - low to mid 70s isn't horrible for an overclocked RTX 2080 Ti, but it's certainly pushing the 120mm radiator of my EVGA FTW3 Hybrid to it's limits.

Thankfully, the new Thermaltake fans are also dead quiet. I can't even hear the thing at idle and it's barely a whisper under load. These fans are a huge step up from the factory fans which sounded like jet turbines once they got up to speed. One of the slight annoyances of the new setup though, is that I no longer have a fan plugged in to the 'TOP FAN' header, and the BIOS screams at me every time I boot up the computer with no way of disabling the alarm, but it's not a huge issue.

That said, I'm basically at the limit of what I can do with this tower in it's current hardware configuration. As much as I love the AIO setup on both the CPU and GPU, I likely won't be able to have one or the other going forward with future upgrades. A 120mm radiator is now insufficient to cool the current crop of flagship GPUs and all of the AIO models now either come with 240mm or 360mm radiators, neither of which I can fit into the Area 51 R2 without some drastic changes. 

This likely means I'll have to go back to an air-cooled GPU in the future, and while some of the better built three-slot cards perform pretty damn well on the thermal end, I'm afraid I've been spoiled by the silent wonders of liquid cooling. As a result, I might strongly consider going the custom loop route, assuming I can effectively cool both a top-end CPU and GPU with just a 120mm and 360mm radiator. Or I can just buy a new, less weird case like anybody with half a brain should do instead. But I do still love the looks of this tower and it should hopefully continue going strong for a good while.