Alienware systems are unique. There’s nothing on the market that looks as eye-catching (except the new crop of HTPCs), nothing that performs as well out-of-the-box, and nothing that costs quite as much. Pitched at extreme gamers, the Aurora 7500 SLI now comes with AMD’s brand-new dual-core Athlon 64 FX-60 processor.

And of course, it wouldn’t be seen dead without two nVidia 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards. It’s big, brash and noisy, but there’s nothing that shifts quite like it (it scored a bar-raising 8185 on 3DMark06 Pro!). The bad news? It’ll set you back £4200 - without a monitor and with Windows XP Home Edition pre-installed.

The most impressive feature of any Alienware system is its design. The Aurora 7500 SLI is no different. The company has meticulously crafted a high-performance HR Giger-inspired system that offers unique build quality and carefully scrutinised component integration. Full optimisation also comes as standard, a feature missing from most big-brand companies who ship systems with drivers at least two months old.

The moment you boot the system you’ll notice it’s an Alienware - Windows has been customised with a cool silver livery and Alien logos dotted everywhere. The high-gloss black finish (also available in white, blue, green, purple and silver) and silver fans are also outrageous, making every other tower system on the market look like a bygone product from earlier days of computing. Having said that, Alienware has used this enclosure for a while now so it’s about time it had a refresh.

Under the hood the system is dressed to impress. It comes as standard with an AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 processor, ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard with passive northbridge cooling, two 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards, 2GB of system memory (expandable up to 4GB), two 250GB SATA hard disk drives (7200rpm, 8MB cache) and a 500GB drive (configured in RAID 0 for 1TB total capacity).

You also get a dual-layer DVD±RW drive and separate CD-RW drive, Creative Labs’ X-Fi sound card, Alienware-branded surround sound headphones, Microsoft Explorer USB mouse, and Logitech PS/2 keyboard. Of course, an Alienware system wouldn’t be complete with a mass of additional cables, accessories, T-shirt, and mousepad.

The Athlon 64 FX-60 is a dual-core CPU running at 2.6GHz - 200MHz faster than the Athlon 64 X2 4800+. Interestingly, the FX-60 has a core clock 200MHz lower than the FX-57, but there are two of them - kind of like two Athlon FX-55s. AMD believes that multithreaded applications are gradually becoming more common. The company points to recent developments in graphics drivers from both nVidia and ATI, which take advantage of dual-core CPUs.

Further, recent game updates for Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4 add multithreaded support. Similar to the Athlon 62 X2 4800+, the Athlon 64 FX-60 has 1MB of L2 cache for each core, of which the L2 cache is not shared. And like all FX-series processors, the Athlon 64 FX-60 is clock-unlocked, allowing you to overclock the CPU easily for extra performance.

In short, the Athlon 64 FX-60 processor takes its place as the highest performing dual-core consumer processor from AMD, and shows an average 34 per cent improvement on overall digital media performance and an eye-popping 80 per cent faster performance on certain benchmarks over similar single-core processors.

And then there’s nVidia’s SLI (Scalable Link Interface) technology, a revolutionary approach to scalability and increased system performance. SLI takes advantage of the increased bandwidth of the PCI Express bus architecture, and leverages hardware and software features inherent to nVidia GPUs (graphics processing units) and nForce4 MCPs (media and communications processors).

The Alienware Aurora 7500 integrates these technologies to deliver stunning PC performance. And depending on the application (as well as driver support), SLI can deliver as much as two times the speed of a single GPU configuration. Games are just now starting to support SLI. nVidia’s GeForce 7800 GTX also includes new image quality features such as transparency supersampling and multisample antialiasing, which enhances visual quality by removing jagged edges from 3D images, minimising aliasing, and high dynamic range (HDR) lighting support for improved lighting and shadowing effects.

The case is large enough to accommodate another two external 5.25-inch drives, four 3.5-inch bays for hard disk drives, in addition to a 3.5-inch floppy drive (included here) and/or 8-in-1 digital media reader/writer (optional extra). Connectivity options are also plentiful. Thanks to the inclusion of two nVidia-based graphics cards, there’s four DVI ports (VGA monitors require and adapter) and two S-Video outputs with dual-display support. There’s even an external SATA port for high-speed external storage, the first of which we’ve seen on a desktop PC.

The front of the system accommodates four USB 2.0 ports, while the back plays host to one 25-pin parallel port, another four USB 2.0 ports (eight in total), digital audio out port (S/PDIF), two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and two PS/2 ports (the bundled keyboard uses a PS/2 connection). Amazingly, there’s no built-in FireWire, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and the headphone and microphone jacks are located at the rear of the system. Internal expansion options comprise two PCI Express 16x slots for graphics (both occupied) and three PCI slots for add-in cards, such as a TV tuner. If you’re worried about powering all these devices, don’t be - there’s a 600-Watt Enermax power supply unit (PSU).

Alienware is one of the more visible players in the gaming PC arena, and its Aurora 7500 SLI is nothing if not visible. It is a gaming PC through and through, and will boisterously announce your presence if you have the courage to drag it to a gaming tournament or LAN party. But although it’s at the pinnacle of the company’s gaming PC lineup, there are better choices out there if value means anything. [8]

[Best Desktop PC Pricing UK]
[Best Desktop PC Pricing US]

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BIOS, Feb 02, 06 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Desktop PC