Now owned by Dell, Alienware is back with a new chassis form factor, a couple of 8800s and a machine that plays Blu-ray discs. Can the system builder correct some of the niggles we've seen in previous machines? There's some yes, and some no.

"So, what's the downside? It's not that we object to the £3k+ price point - that's fine, for the target market. But we object to an X-Fi card that lacks X-RAM - the advantage over motherboard audio is otherwise slim. We also feel let down by memory that is so slow, for the price. The previous system we saw from Alienware was also let down by poor RAM, and we can only suggest that Alienware has a meeting with Corsair, or OCZ, or Crucial or even its current supplier, Patriot, to sorts this out. We saw in the benchmarks that overall system performance was let down by the poor memory timings, and we can't help but feel that the £50 difference between the Xtreme Gamer and the Fatal1ty Edition of the X-Fi should be sucked up by Alienware here, given that there has already been so much spent on the 8800 GTX's."



Link: Bit Tech