The Battle of the Gaming PC Titans

Alienware ALX

Alienware is a well-established name in the gaming system market. When you buy an Alienware machine, you can expect to get a PC that will perform well and come with a ton of extra goodies - and the price tag that goes along with such quality. The water-cooling potential for this case is phenomenal - the huge radiator was overkill for our system and would have no problem in almost any warm room or LAN party conditions. However, aside from all of the greatness you get, we found some problems.

Our system had traces of coolant in the case, as well as on the cables and connectors. This would indicate that it was hastily put together. Yet we must compliment Alienware in their extremely good cabling, which appears to be the product of time well spent on making things fit the right way - and out of the way.

It seemed that Alienware did not do a full "burn in" of our system with the overclocking settings of 8%. Our system simply could not run some of our tests without crashing. This is unacceptable when spending a small fortune on a computer. It should just work right out of the box.

Considering all of the value added to this system we simply expected more from the final product. The system should have blown us away - sorry to say, but our prediction failed us. However, we are confident that Alienware would not push the customer's system like they did with our review system.

Pros

  • Features
  • Accessories
  • Performance when working
  • Options
  • Overclocked
  • Water Cooled
  • Shipping Materials
  • Cabling
  • Hand-holding during the ordering Process

Cons

  • The Case
  • Reference Cards
  • System Instability at that overclocked level
  • Not what we expected from Alienware