[PC] ALIENWARE AURORA 7500 - The Gamerz Dream

Bull3t

Alienware originally made a name for itself in the days when most mass-produced PCs hid cheap components inside dull beige boxes. Fine if you wanted to play Hearts, less so if Half-Life was on the agenda. So everyone that mattered modded their PCs - and those who could afford to let someone else do the modding bought an Alienware.
Nowadays everyone makes fancy black and silver PCs, and even low end machines have half-decent 3D graphics. So is it still possible to love the Alien?
While the company's most recognisable brand - Area 51 - has Intel inside, the less-well known Aurora series we're reviewing here is its nod to AMD's 64-bit world.

The base model Aurora 5500 is lukewarm, with an Athlon 64 3200+, 512Mb of PC3200 RAM and an Ati Radeon X700 as standard - all high-spec components (an Alienware speciality) for just over a grand. But if you want some serious grunt, the Aurora 7500 is where the heat is really turned on. An SLI system with two graphics cards on the same motherboard, for those who want a closer shave.

They start off at nearly 1900 with an Athlon 64 XL and two nVidia 6600GTs on board.

Lucky us, there were two upgraded 6800GT cards in the machine we tested - the only downside of this spec being the increased price tag: Twenty three brand new Xboxes, on my last count (work it out yourself). Still, it's got a mouse and a keyboard and it'll play Half-Life 2 at 1600x1200 with an average frame rate of nearly 80 fps.

And anyway it's nearly as big as twenty three Xboxes... and that's saying something.

When the cardboard boxes arrive you'd be forgiven for thinking some sort of prefabricated building had been delivered instead of a PC: this Aurora 7500 is as enormous as it is heavy. There are good reasons, though - not least two chunky graphics cards, a couple of hard drives (and room for more), up to 2Gb of RAM, an Athlon 64 XL and enough room and air-shifting paraphernalia to keep the whole shooting match cool over extended gaming sessions.

The case is also built to last, an important factor when a proportion of Alienware's clients are expected to take their Aurora to LAN parties. Investing in some sort of fold-up trolley would be a good idea if you fall into this group, even if it does make you look like a granny on a shopping trip. The case also comes with a lockable door for the drive bay - a useful security measure if you leave your PC in a public place while you seek out Red Bull and pizza.

Looks-wise Alienware PCs are a matter of personal taste. I love their laptops, but their desktops, in Cyborg Green at least, look a lot like the front end of a John Deere tractor - minus the wheels. There will be plenty who disagree with me on this though, and there are five colour options available to tone it up or down, including black and Apple Computer-like white - but not beige. Ours came in silver.

There's absolutely no shortage of USB connections, for those who must... well, connect eight USB devices to a PC. You know they're out there somewhere. Usefully, four of these ports are on the front. There's a fire wire port too, along with the usual array of I/O ports including a gigabit LAN socket.

The standard sound card is a Creative Audigy SoundBlaster 2 XS, more than enough for most gamers, though 115 buys purists an upgrade to an Audigy 4 Pro.

With the base-line processor in our test machine (an Athlon 64 X2 4200+), twin 6800GTs and the standard RAM package for the Aurora - 1Gb Dual Channel DDR PC3200 - we achieved an extremely respectable average frame rate of 97 fps in 1600x1200 gameplay with Battlefield 2. By comparison a single graphics card, office-built system with an Athlon 64 3200+, a 6800 Ultra (a higher spec card, note) and the same RAM could only muster 72 fps in the same shrapnel-ridden place on the same level.

Those hoping for close to double the figure with two graphics cards will be disappointed of course, but those who want a significant increase in speed (and we're talking a lot smoother, with two less-powerful graphics cards working in tandem) won't. Remember we're not really comparing like with like; it's a very good spec non-SLI, hand-built system - the sort of thing most normal gamers achieve with upgrades - versus what's actually a fairly low spec Aurora 7500, as they go.

If you have the will, and the cash to spend, the sky's the limit on the Aurora - the latest HTT Athlon 64 FX57, a couple of hot-off-the-press nVidia 7800 Ultras, 2 gigs of Corsair XMS memory and a 10,000 rpm Western Digital Raptor hard drive will set you back a mere 1500 more than our test machine. Granted this is taking you into small car territory, but cutting edge performance comes at a price, and it doesn't get more cutting edge than that.

Okay, so now you're thinking between two and four grand is a lot of money: surely you could build the system yourself for less and to hell with Alienware. And you you'd be right - but only to a certain extent.

If you price the components in our system separately (including a decent case, cooling solution, processor, motherboard, RAM, drives and scarily expensive graphics cards) it does indeed work out less - a total of maybe around 1500-1700 depending on brand, versus nearly 2300 for the Aurora