Storage is another area where Alienware have not
skimped on the quality and connected to the Nforce
4 SATA controller are 2 160gb Hitachi 7200rpm drives.
Having used a couple of Hitachi drives over the
past year or so I’m not disappointed to see
them here though 2 Western Digital Raptors would
have been more impressive. Where Alienware also
met our needs was the choice of DVD writer. This
workstation comes with the NEC 3520A, one of the
more recent NEC drives. Whilst they don’t
get the same recognition in the press that drives
from Liteon etc receive NEC DVD writers have always
served me well. The two I’ve used in my home
PC never let me down so Alienware’s choice
of drive is wise.
Moving to the top of the case we see that Alienware
have provided a gold coloured PSU which is Enermax
branded and rated at 550w, more than enough to power
a machine of this type and again a recognised brand
which is known for its high performance and stability.
The final component of note in the system is the
graphics card. Our review unit features ATI’s
FireGL 5100. The 5100 comes with dual DVI and 128mb
of video memory. For those of you used to running
ATI’s Radeon series this cards equivalent
is the Radeon X800 family. The card has a 256mb
memory interface and 12pixel pipelines with 6 geometry
engines. Theoretical performance of the card is
22.4gb/sec of bandwidth with 675m vertices/sec and
5.4G pixels/sec.
