Have you tried removing the CPU OverClock?

Have you tried setting the PCIe fan the Manual-Curve to get more air in the front? This is with the fans on the cards themselves on Auto ... next step is Manual.

Be sure you have a nice clean install of drivers. Maybe not the latest, but something stable and official for 450.

Ya, an Area-51 would be better for dual-cards, but 450's are not real powerfull, so it doesn't seem like they should be running hot.

One thing to also note is that the upper card won't have much 'air' compared to the lower card due to the lower card literally hindering air flow.  As recommended above, you may want to consider altering the Active Thermal for the fans to manual curve to force more airflow for the PCI fan.

As they used to say, let your fingers do your walking, dial tech support.  If I was as worried as you seem I'd be on the phone since chances are anyhow you aren't going to get it checked out by email.  I have always found talking to a human always works the best. Since getting my Area 51 ALX I have called twice and never call Monday morning or in this case this week being a Holiday Tuesday have so far not waited more than 5 minutes on hold if that long. I make it a point if possible to do all checking out of what I feel they will ask me to do. This site and one person has really helped me and when talking to tech support told him all Ihad done and what was told me on this site and put on hold for a couple minutes and came back and said they would set me upwith new part and someone toinstall. Very painless.

I have spent 5 hours with tech support on the phone already. They have been totally useless so far as fixing the problem or offering any solutions.

They also couldn't work out why my card reader wasn't working until I asked if there was a size limit on the cards it could read. 10 minutes later the guy came back and said yes there was a problem, they were not sure whether UDMA cards would work.. They have not offered a solution so I spent $20 and got an Atech Pro Card Reader that recognizes up to date technology. (My R3 is 2 weeks old!)

Hi Keiichi25,

Thanks for your comments.

I have been running all the fans I can control at 100%. I added a 42" vertical HEPA fan  next to the R3 running flat out and the temp has dropped 5 degrees F

Actually tech support said the same. That was the driver I was using. We actually did a clean re-install and that still did not help.

How about the Dell drivers?  Someone here said theirs would only runcorrectly with the Dell drivers as the NVidia ones messed it up.

Thanks Tesla 1856,

Actually the CPU is not overclocked, Dell/Alienware overclock the turbo boost. Their specs are really misleading on this one. I've run an Intel diagnostic on processor and its performing well within limits. The drivers are a clean install. I tried the latest nVidia driver and that made matters worse, so I'm going back to an earlier (pre Dell) driver and see if that stops driver errors. Currently SLI options in nVidia control panel has disappeared again. SLI bridge ribbon cable defective? I have, under Tech Supports "guidance", basically stripped down the internal components and re-seated everything.

Your suggestion about manually controlling fans had occurred to me. I have been running all the fans I can control at 100% for the last hour and the temperature differential between the 2 cards has dropped 5 degrees F, as has the temp of the upper card.  Incidentally I also have a HEPA filtered 42" vertical fan blowing over the unit as well.

There are so many posts about the freezing/lockup issue, especially with the R3. Memory Manufacturer comes hign on the list. My R3 has Micron 4x4Gb.

I've only had 1 error message today, with one black screen.

FYI I'm a photographer and the applications I use are not really that demanding apart from DxO Optics Pro. The R3 rendering time for images is 3 times faster than my Dell XPS Studio 8100 (2.8 Gig Quad Core i7).

Actually, I had similar driver 'recovered' errors along with the Texture graphics issue that follows it later.  I am not using the same system as you are, mine is an area 51 with nVidia GTX 560 Ti card that came with the system.  After spending 3 weeks with trying to trouble shoot it with nVidia techs and with Alienware, I found putting my card on Performance for Power instead of Adaptive solved my problem with the driver issue.  I am planning on talking with nVidia to see if this is normal on their developer side.  I do know that Alienware will state their systems are not designed for 24+ hour running, as it is not server hardware, so I am believing that the OEM manufacture of the card might be the culprit.  I would try setting the power management for the cards to Performance and see if it stabilizes, assuming your card does Variable clockrates for the GPU/Memory/Shader.

Sorry I have been away from forum for a few days. Here is an update.

1. Replaced the unbranded card reader with an Atech unit. This has corrected Renasus USB driver problems. Now able to read UDMA cards over 8 Gb. Shane I had to pay for it.

2. Upgraded nVidia drivers to latest version (280.26 from nVidia) and still had occassional driver not responding/recovered mesages. SLI option has not, as yet, disappeared

3. Uninstalled Alienware Respawn software and I have now gone almost 3 days without error messages or black/blue screen problems, or, random reboots.

I still think ventilation flow to graphics cards is poor. I'll let you you know if there any recurrences.

Thanks for everyone input...really appreciated.