Before anyone gets too excited, this isn’t some micro-PC miracle squeezed into a handful of Lego bricks. The Alienware Area-51 Brick Kit is exactly what it sounds like: 318 bits of plastic that, when assembled with the help of an instruction booklet, form a dinky 2.2 x 5.3 x 5 inch (55 x 132 x 130mm) tower resembling the current Area-51 desktop. That makes it roughly NUC-sized in volume but without any computing power. It can't run Crysis and it is about the only thing in the world that you can't mod to play Doom on.
The tower can be built with or without a faux side panel window. Either way, it ends up looking more like a nerdy ornament than anything with the jaw-dropping DNA of Alienware’s older designs. Those with fond memories of the Giger-esque monstrosities from the early 2000s or the aggressively angular triple-bay hexagons from the mid-2010s will be disappointed by this latest iteration, which looks more like a bored office PC than an alien artefact.
Tom’s Hardware said that while it was pleasing to see another PC tech-related Lego set the whole thing was a “a little underwhelming.” A splash of RGB or some kind of lighting would have gone a long way in making it pop. As it stands, it is basically a tribute to an uninspired chassis, minus any flashing lights or functionality.
Getting one isn’t easy either. You’ll need to scrabble together those 9,999 ARP points via Alienware’s Arena app. Points trickle in from daily logins, community activities or linking accounts like Steam, Twitch and Discord. It’s unclear how long that grind might take, but unless you’ve been religiously logging in for months, chances are you’ll be staring at a screen rather than snapping bricks together.
Still, it’s the most coveted item in Alienware’s ARP Marketplace, which otherwise offers cutting-edge swag like branded socks and stickers.
This isn’t the first time tech and Lego have collided. ASML produced a wildly detailed Lego TWINSCAN EXE:5000 lithography machine last year, although it was an employee exclusive and cost $228. SK hynix also dabbled, putting out a kit with Oxford Toys to build a Package and Test facility, although that one surfaced mainly on Korean social media.
