Alienware Area-51 Gaming PC Comments

about the EIDE optical drive, there have been some problems reported with nvidia boards and SATA optical drives and HDD set up in RAID and using an optical drive on PATA can combat this. so Alienware are doing customers a favor.

"Extreme performance yet buggy, noisy, expensive and with a poor balance of components."

Sounds ideal, if you like needlessly wasting heaps of cash paying over the odds for a second rate build and a processor that costs more than most pay on a complete system (including monitor). What is the point in choosing a 790i (Nvidia) board with support for SLI and then supplying the ATI card? No wonder it's buggy too. It'd be hot, consume tons of leccy and be mismatched right from the off.

2 gigs of (pointless DDR3 1066MHz) ram, a measly 500 gig SATA hard drive and great choice of operating system (32bit). Great for future upgrade malarkey. Even the case looks like an unhappy amalgamation of a cylon and robocop (or is that dusty bin?). Not a good combination. Oh dear. And just 2 and a half grand is the asking price. Meh.

good review. nice to see a reviewer taking everything other than performance into account in an alienware review. thoroughly deserved its score.

by the way - is the case really that long or is it the gills making it look like a limosine?

"The system comes well packaged in a manner similar to Dell's XPS 360,"

Really? Nobody else here caught this typo!?

@Ardjuna: yeah they should have gone for a different motherboard, i'm currently thinking of building my own pc but stuck on which motherboard to use, i would have used this one if i was using Nvidia GPU but i have decided to use ATI, because of this problem, so want one that is crossfirex compatible and intel CPU.
Hope you dont mind but if there is a good one that comes to mind would you mind posting please? thanks

@Ardjuna: i was looking to get the best possible board for around £150ish (can be a bit more or a bit less) as i am looking to get a mid to top range GPU and then buy another later and crossfire them. as with RAM DDR2 is fine.
the idea is for the board to be 'future proof' as much as that is possible, and just keep upgrading.

also (pressed send by accident) thank you for the recommendation that is the type of board i am looking for just wondering if there are any real gains by spending more and getting a small increase on MHz ect, if you know what i mean

Re: the preamble. BMW is still very much where it's at for performance saloons. Don't you Merc and Audi fanbois forget it, neither.