Cannibalise Alienware Aurora A11 for new gaming rig

[beats_86]

I'm looking to upgrade my gaming rig and want to use my alienware aurora a11 as the shell mainly due to the cooling system and current HDD/optical drives etc.

I was thinking of ripping out the old alienware stuff and throwing in a Z97 mobo and i7 4790 as well as a GTX970.

Is this a good idea or should I start from scratch with the new components and a new cooling system and just drag across the drives?

 

[i7Baby]

Sounds OK - as long as it fits. PSU?

 

[RazerZ]

What are your Alienware's current specs?

 

[das_stig]

If the old system used a standard format motherboard not a proprietary design and funky custom cables to connect the casing to the motherboard, shouldn't be too hard to rig something up.

 

[beats_86]

Its an Alienware Aurora with A11 bios. I can't tell much about the hardware specs apart from having i7 920 CPU and twin AMD 5770s with 16GB ram in 2GB modules. I upgraded the 5770s to a single 7870 and haven't had any dramas with it.

I can't see any details on the PSU but internally I can see a sticker on one of the power cables that says P16 and P17 connectors aren't in use with 525W PSUs so I guess I can assume it's a 525W but that seems a little underpowered for twin 5770s????

The Mobo looks like it might be a micro ATX as it only has 3 PCI slots and one PCIe so I'll have to get the micro ATX version of the z97 mobo I was looking at I guess, which isn't that great if I want add a second graphics card in the future as I'll have to upgrade the case and stuff then.

Besides that everything looks fairly normal with nothing really out of control specific-to-alienware stuff in there.

I've taken some photos and I'll try to post them once I work out how to do that.

 

[das_stig]

After a quick bit of Googling, users on Dell community site say they have swapped out for ASUS Rampage III Gene, so you may be in luck.

 

[beats_86]

So it seems I'm not alone in this endeavor and it is possible but will be a lot of work if I want to get all the case lights and cooling working as the original.

Chances are I'll be able to make it work if I use a non-alienware program to run the cpu cooler. Does anyone know of a good one that would work? I'm not too fussed about getting all the lights working.

 

[i7Baby]

Use the uefi software that comes with the new mobo.