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DriverHeaven Review |
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The last time we looked at an Alienware system was February of last year and my colleague Stuart came away with a warm fuzzy feeling as that particular system performed exceptionally well considering the limitations of the mobile sector. Today we have the opportunity to test one of the new Alienware area 51m gaming systems. As some of you might know when you order a machine from Alienware you custom build it on their website. So with a budget of £3000 we decided to go "balls out" and put as much top end hardware into the rig as possible. Ive been reviewing and testing so much ATI hardware lately I went the Nvidia route for the graphics, its a 256 GDDR3 megabyte, 12 pipe design running at 330 core and 1000mhz on the ram. The CPU is the hot running Intel based Prescott, id first looked at a Prescott based laptop in a Dell Inspirion machine mid 2004, as you would expect these need serious cooling, ill be dwelling on that later in the article.
Driverheaven uses custom javascripts for displaying high resolution images, these may be blocked by some popupblockers. This is the system we choose to test - and for more information on the alienware systems please head to this link: Intel Prescott 3.6ghz - 1meg level2 cache.
Opening the packaging first impressions are as expected for a desktop replacement, this machine is large and heavy and im glad to see a full numpad on this keyboard. As you can see in the image (above right), the screen has a gorgeous glass coating (seen often on Sony xblack machines) which adds contrast and overall impact to images you view. The chassis is very deep and the extreme opposite of the wafer thin superportables - I cant quite see this being lugged around for everyday use. Pictures can be deceiving so ill show you an image next to the large Logitech MX1000 laser mouse so you can judge for yourself.
Working from the rear we have the usual array of ports
along with a DVI out from the 6800 go, this allows you
to connect a larger or secondary screen to your machine.
You can see in the image above a 20inch Dell 2001fp connected via the DVI out, the image quality is superb as you would expect from a 6800 card and you can of course use Nview for cloning and dual monitor for even more deskspace.
Next to the rear ports are the quite substantial vents for the Prescott processor, ill deal with the chassis cooling shortly but it is necessary to give this machine plenty of room to cool or you will run into issues.
We have fitted an NEC 6500 dual layer 8x DVD rewriter and in operation this drive performs flawlessly. This chassis has space for two drives in a vertical placement.
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