There have been many people asking if you can upgrade the motherboard on the Area-51 R2 to R5 cases. The answer is YES. I did upgrade everything on my Alienware Area-51 R2. The only original component in my case is the FIO board.
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I would not call the side panel cut an upgrade but a custom mod for cosmetic improvement. looks great and professionally done. regarding front 240 mm radiator installation it is not absolutely necessary to cut the case bezel. a 240 mm rad can be mounted on the top fan only leaving the bottom half hanging.
It was likely cut to improve airflow. After you put the bezel back on I suspect you probably can't see the cut. Or if you could, nothing a black air filter couldn't cover up.
Hi, why are you asking for my tag? My Area-51 is 6y old, so there is no warranty anymore since a long time... Also this is not the point of this post. The point is to show that you can swap the motherboard in the Area-51 case.
Hi, I used silicone to glue the acrylic window in place. But I also kept the top lock, and the bottom metal part otherwise you can't close the side panel anymore.
So ok, maybe I should add a few details. This entire project started with me wanting to upgrade the CPU after 6 years. As a result I replaced the mottherboard, then the CPU cooling as the original Alienware 120mm water cooling was not enough to cool an intel i9 11900K. So 1 thing led to the other, and I finally ended up replacing almost everything. Only the FIO board and the optical drive remain.
These are the components I changed:
CPU: Intel core i9 11900K
Cooling: Corsair H100i capellix 240mm
Mobo: MSI Z590 carbon wifi
RAM: 32GB Corsair Vengeance (4x8GB)
Case fans: 2 x Corsair LL120 controlled by a commander pro (1 fan is the intake in the front bottom of the case, the 2nd fan is an outtake fan mounted at the top back side of the case)
Case leds: 2 x Corsair RGB led strip controlled by the same commander pro
Power Supply: Corsair RM1000x
GPU: Gigabyte Aorus Extreme 3080 RTX
Hard drive 1 (OS + games): Samsung SSD980 Pro 2TB NVMe
Side Panel: I cut the side panel and added an acrylic window and some Alienware stickers.
About swapping the Motherboard... The biggest issue is that you need to connect 2 cables from your new Motherboard to the FIO board: One is an usb3 header cable, which you need if you still want to use the 2 front usb connections. The other cable is an usb2 header cable that you need to connect between the FIO board and the FIO connector on the motherboard. This is needed so you can power on the mobo using the alienhead power switch. For this I used a normal (long enough) usb2 header cable, and made a small hole in both sides of the cable so it will fit the pins on the mobo and FIO board. If you need more info on this, I made a 3 part youtube video on this. Just look for my YT channel Mobi666.
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Posted August 18th, 2021 20:00
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