OK, perhaps awful was too strong a word. Mediocre is better. There's nothing special about the cases inside - airflow is restricted to one draw fan in the front and one exhaust fan at the rear. There is a fan over the hard drives but it doesn't draw from the outside, so it's just circulating case air, and there is a fan on the side panel, but it's behind so much plastic styling and lighting it barely draws any air through, plus I don't think there's a dust filter so that's gonna be blowing crap all over your GPUs.
You can't run cables behind motherboard trays so you have to start using sticky pads with ties wraps just to get the cables out of the way otherwise you're impeding the already limit airflow (and as there's no window on Alienware cases I've never seen an Alienware build even bother with cable management - you're not gonna see it so why bother right?).
These cases were fine when you had cooler chips like the Core 2 Duo and Athlon X2 but with todays quad-core, highly-overclockable beasts, these cases just don't cut it any more.
All the work, especially with the P2, has all gone on the styling and the AlienFX lighting. They look great don't get me wrong, but for a basic E-ATX chassis with a funky molded plastic shell it's seriously overpriced and underperforms unless you're watercooling (which is how they clock their ALX X-58 to 3.8GHz without melting).
Personally I'm doing some lighting mods (and hopefully a DIY AlienFX lighting system IF I can revise electronics well enough to understand some tutorials I've found) to a Raven.
OK, perhaps awful was too strong a word. Mediocre is better. There's nothing special about the cases inside - airflow is restricted to one draw fan in the front and one exhaust fan at the rear. There is a fan over the hard drives but it doesn't draw from the outside, so it's just circulating case air, and there is a fan on the side panel, but it's behind so much plastic styling and lighting it barely draws any air through, plus I don't think there's a dust filter so that's gonna be blowing crap all over your GPUs.
You can't run cables behind motherboard trays so you have to start using sticky pads with ties wraps just to get the cables out of the way otherwise you're impeding the already limit airflow (and as there's no window on Alienware cases I've never seen an Alienware build even bother with cable management - you're not gonna see it so why bother right?).
These cases were fine when you had cooler chips like the Core 2 Duo and Athlon X2 but with todays quad-core, highly-overclockable beasts, these cases just don't cut it any more.
All the work, especially with the P2, has all gone on the styling and the AlienFX lighting. They look great don't get me wrong, but for a basic E-ATX chassis with a funky molded plastic shell it's seriously overpriced and underperforms unless you're watercooling (which is how they clock their ALX X-58 to 3.8GHz without melting).
Personally I'm doing some lighting mods (and hopefully a DIY AlienFX lighting system IF I can revise electronics well enough to understand some tutorials I've found) to a Raven.
+1. For that price you could get a TJ07 or a nice Lian-li instead of that piece of plastic junk.
Good point, I agree and looked online, they do look like some crappy cases, but on the outside, the cases looks awsome though, but truth be told, its the inside that really matters so you are right.