▪ Alienware Area-51 ALX

Fans of high-end boutique PCs were shocked when the biggest of the corporate conglomerate PC vendors, Dell, purchased Alienware. The company had become quite successful by catering to high-end PC gamers and enthusiasts, and seemed to promote a corporate culture that was, for lack of a better expression, the anti-Dell. Besides, didn't Dell already have its XPS line of high-end gaming PCs?

The worry was that Alienware would just become another Dell brand, cranking out systems that didn't truly push the technological envelope, and didn't have the kind of funky customization options boutique PC manufacturers are known for. Well, if the company's entry for Games for Windows Magazine's Ultimate Game Machine competition is any indication, those fears are unfounded. Alienware, for better or worse, is making the same kind of PCs they have made for years.

Physically, the case uses Alienware's current P2 chassis design. It looks like an alien head from the front, or sort of like a retro '50s car grill on the sides. Think of it as William Joyce meets H.R. Giger, and you wouldn't be far off. It's also supposed to have a bunch of custom lighting zones through a feature called AlienFX: Windows software is supposed to let you pick custom colors for six different areas. All the lights were out on our system, and the Windows software simply gave us an error and suggested we try rebooting (which didn't help). Busted AlienFX system aside, the case is kind of love-it-or-don't affair, but it certainly is distinctive.

The outside of Alienware's P2 chassis is nothing if not original. The large chrome side grills have a sort of retro vibe that reminds you of cars with big fins, and of course they let plenty of air flow into the system.

There's not really much to say about the back of the system: It looks like the back of a high-performance gaming PC. You can't tell from back here, but that's a PC Power & Cooling kilowatt power supply. The small chrome hatches used to remove the panels are almost indistinguishable from the rest of the case. This whole area gets quite hot when the system is running.

The CPU quadrant is tight and compact: Those tubes for the liquid cooling system don't stretch very far at all. It's going to be a royal pain to swap out your CPU, but that's usually a trade-off you have to make with liquid cooling. It's a little surprising that there's no active cooling on the RAM, but the tubes for the CPU cooler actually extend over the RAM a little bit, making that pretty much impossible. It also makes it a little tricky to get RAM in or out of the motherboard slots.

The higher clock rate of Alienware's overclocked dual-core system helps it pull out a really nice CPU score in PCMark05, though quad-core systems like the Gateway will have an advantage there. Its memory score, and overall PCMark05 score, are a shade lower than CyberPower's.