Alienware Area 51: Triad, Tri-SLI GTX 980, Haswell-E

Thankfully, Alienware sets-up it's systems completely clean of bloatware. Only Alienware's Alien Command Center and AlienFX software, which offer useful, base functionality and features, are bundled in. However, you do get a copy of PowerDVD if you opt for a DVDRW or Blu-ray drive.

Alienware's Alien Command Center Software has five primary sections -- Thermal Controls, AlienFX, AlienFusion, AlienAdrenaline, and OC Controls.  You're looking at the AlienFX control panel, which lets you dial-in system lighting colors on the jog wheel controller for any one of 9 zones or all zones at once. Alienware's light piped system has a wide range of the color spectrum, so you can dial it up to arrest me red or dial it back to cool blue and kicked-back.

AlienFusion let's you setup power plans for various sleep states. AlienAdrenaline let's you configure a system setup based on invoking a specific game title from performance monitoring to power plans, external apps and AlienFX lighting setups.

And AlienOC, well, you get the idea. Here you can dial-up voltages (literally), clock multipliers and clock speeds for the CPU and DDR3 DRAM. This utility let's you save profiles and presets that you can invoke with a single click. In practice, it worked quite well, as you'll see in our overclocking section on the pages that follow.