The Alien Has Landed

 

After a lot of searching, researching, eBay messaging, Fedex package tracking, AND hand-wringing...... the Alienware Aurora 7500 has arrived from Oakland, CA. Now comes the hard part. The actual building of this older machine from what it is into a (relatively) up-to-date gaming computer.

Let's start with the model of Alienware that we're working with in this project. The Aurora 7500 was one of the last of the "classic" Alienware desktops. The kind with the smooth outer case that really started their well-know lighting effects. In reality, these cases were simply mid-towers of varying sizes with external plastic cladding made for them by Chieftec. Unlike today's (post-Dell) machines, they are actually very normal underneath with pretty regular drive cages, PSU locations, MB attachments and even cooling system. This make them almost ideal for updating and adaptation.

As you can see, the insides are VERY, very normal. They pretty much all take an ATX motherboard which we'll discuss later. As equipped from the factory, they generally had fairly stock, though high-end motherboard of the CoreDuo/Core2Duo generation. Depending on how the machine was configured, they had either a "tower"-style HSF (Heatsink-fan) or (for the desktops of that time), the more radical "closed-loop" water-cooling setup. Pretty much everything inside these things were fairly normal, albeit, highly spec for the time.

Despite it's age, in our situation, we're certainly not looking to just rip it's guts out and put in a bunch of new stuff.....not if we can help it anyway. This machine comes equipped with an E8400 "Wolfdale" Core2Duo CPU, which is well-known as having excellent gaming characteristics as well as over-clocking potential if we want to go in that direction. What this does is, buy us time. In all probability, we'll look to do a major upgrade on the machine in the fall by replacing all the "guts". In the meantime, what's in this box will allow my student to play games at decent frame rate set at low or medium levels.

Which leads us to the heart of the issue. The reason that the seller was getting rid of this machine was that it was giving him graphic artifacts on his monitor. From looking at the pictures he posted in his ad, it was obvious that it was a graphics card issue. There was of course the possibility that I'm wrong and it's the Southbridge chip on the MB, in which case, that's scrap and we go directly to ripping that out of the case and starting over. But as it turned out, I was right. After a quick graphics card swap on the bench, the machine came right up with a "clean" screen! We are going to approach this from a couple of different directions. First, we're going to try the "bake the graphic card in the oven" recipe and see if we can at least temporarily solve the issue by "reflowing" the solder of the BGA on the GPU.If that doesn't work, we can use one of the many random cards I have stashed away for a situations such as this. In the meantime, a new graphics card (one really for the rebuild) will become the first purchase.

Otherwise, for the duration of the summer, this machine will remain "stock". Then around fall, when enough money has been saved to purchase updated insides, we'll rebuild it into the new Super (yet frugal) Alien.