Adding cooling to the R4 ALX.

I've only been able to find a few posts about adding additional fans to an Aurora R4 ALX.  Our options are limited as all of the motherboard connections seem to be full.  However, I ordered a set of Cooler Master PWM 120mm fans from TigerDirect and mounted them in a push-pull setup.  The holes line up fine and work off of the stock 4-pin connections in the top of the case.  I uninstalled and re-installed command center to make sure that it would recognize the fans.  I still can only monitor the rear system fan (no control over it of course), but the push fan ramps at startup and seems to scale with the pulling fan.  I ordered 2 fans so that they would hopefully run about the same speed.  I realize that the stock fan that Alienware uses is a beast, but the Cooler Masters do their job with a little less noise.

On the front of the system, I added a Vantec HDD cooler to use as an intake fan.  $22 is a little pricey for an intake fan but I like that it's pushing cool air directly towards the radiator and over the RAM.  There were no clearance issues.  It fits perfect in the tool-less bays.  The only thing that doesn't fit flush with the front is a little tab to open a box where the fan filter is but it doesn't interfere with closing the front panel.  This fan runs off of a 4-pin molex connector and takes up 2 drive bays, which I won't be using anyways.  The fan is 80mm.  I replaced the stock black fan with a new 80mm blue LED fan that I had as a spare and it matches up great with the Alienware blue LED's.  Of course the front panel of the chassis has to be open to see it.  You can still kind of see the lights through the dust filter.  If you look through the bottom air intake of the chasses while the drive cover is closed, you can see that a fan mounted here can still pull air.  With the bay cover closed, you never hear the fan.  With it open, you can barely hear it.

I'm running a core i-7 3820 with level 1 OC (stock 3.6Ghz to 4.1Ghz), 8Gb of 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM.  I monitored my tests using RealTemp for the processor temps and HyperPI to max the cores out.  Running stock at 100% load for 10 minutes, my highest processor temperature was 71 celcius.  After adding the aforementioned fans, the same test came out with the highest temperature of 62 celcius.  During both tests, I had the PCI and HDD fans both at 75% speed.  I tried the various positions of the ALX fins but there was no discernable difference, maybe 1 degree but I could not narrow that 1 degree down to the opening or closing of the fins.

C283-3084 is the parts number for the 120mm PWM Cooler Master fans on TigerDirect, and V13-3354 is the parts number for the front bay HDD cooler.

The picture is kinda bad, but it gives you an idea of how it looks and fits in the case.  With the lights low, that little LED fan shines bright when the chassis door is open.  The second picture is with the dust filter door open.  To replace the fan in the HDD cooler, you have to take the front bezel off to get to the screws that hold the fan in.  This is done with 2 little push tabs on the side of the unit.  You could run this unit without the dust cover so you could see the fan all of the time but without the bezel on the front, it won't have that flush fit.  The filter seems to restrict air only slightly.

So if anyone is looking for a way to cool their system down a little more, this setup worked for me, bringing processor temps down an average of 9-10 degrees and adds a different look to the front of the chassis.  Hope this helps anyone that was asking some of the same questions that I was asking.  My entire order of these 2 PWM fans and HDD cooler + shipping came out to $47.02.  So it's not a very expensive mod and requires only a screwdriver to mount the fans.