Despite the terrifying price this PC doesn’t come with a display or a set of speakers, but it does come with a stack of ‘free’ extras that consist of a keychain, a pen, a polo shirt, an aluminium briefcase and, perhaps most usefully, an Alienware support manager on call day or night.
Power Draw Results
Power draw in Watt (W)
The Area 51 ALX CFX is a moderately noisy PC, but it's near-silent compared to the Tri-SLI packing Mesh Q8 - reviewed here. Once Windows Vista Ultimate is running, the hard drive array ticks away like crazy. Vista hammers your hard drive at the best of times, so two of the things only add to the pain.
PCMark 05 Results
Longer bars are better
Performance in 3DMark06 and PCMark05 is impressive in every department, but that's partly thanks to the extra 1GHz of CPU speed. In graphics tests, the Alienware starts to look somewhat limp compared to the Mesh Q8 when anti-aliasing is enabled - then in Crysis things went utterly pear-shaped.
COMMENTS
I purchased an Area-51 from Alienware
And I am going back to building my own systems.
I thought, geez, I'm tired of all the research, compatibility testing, tuning, and troubleshooting... Why not pay someone to do that for me? Alienware had a great reputation the last time I checked (that shows how long ago I checked, I guess). So I shelled out thousands of dollars for a fancied-up glowing box with oodles of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Quad processor, with a nice RAID-1 setup. [aside: I don't ever want to live through another hard drive crash. I still back up offsite, even my games, but I'm RAID-1 from here until death.].
After spending over 20 hours of on-phone time, and countless more hours of other time downloading testing software and running long tests, my machine is still unusable. I have used Vista on other machines, and for all its problems Vista is not enough to explain this level of instability. To anyone who has built systems it is obvious that the frequent random bluescreens are a sign of a hardware issue. Even after running Alienrespawn to wipe the drive and reset to factory configuration, it bluescreens. However, Alienware insists that it is a software issue, and will not do anything except tell me to run more tests.
If a company won't stand by their product enough to fix or replace obviously broken systems, I have no use for them. I am contemplating sucking it up and paying the 15% restocking fee (which is enough to buy a nice new laptop by itself!), just to see the back of this nightmare. I hope everyone at Alienware gets warts on their eyelids.
Is there any decent company that makes premium systems, or am I stuck building my own forever? It was fun for a while, but now it is just work.
holy cr*p!
and people say Apple make overpriced computers!
No sound card??
'There’s room to install a sound card, but as things stand you’ll probably be relying on the integrated SoundMAX audio.'
That comment there is enough for me to never look at an Alienware rig again, a decent sound card is part of a good gaming machine now days, onboard sound just doesn't cut it.
@£3624 I'd expect a top of the range x-fi card.
At that price, it's about 2 grand more than it's worth...
Wha?!
Can we have a NSFM tag on articles like this one? - Not safe for monitors. There's a lot of coffee gonna be spat out at the sight of that price tag.
Mac Pro? Seriously?
Since when has an 8 core Xeon workstation cowered in fear of a Core 2 based gaming rig? That doesn't make even the slightest bit of sense - the Mac Pro and this abomination of good taste are intended for an entirely different market.
And Price wise - the Mac Pro starts at $2,299 US - with a 2.8 GHz 4-core Xeon. The Area 51 starts at $2,099 US with a2.66 GHz Core-2 Duo.
That's just asinine.
