Fall Extreme Gamer System Shootout Part 3: Alienware's ALX

Test Summary

This is where all of the shenanigans begin. >From the time we received the ALX boxes at our door, to opening them up, and peering into the systems’ guts, it has been fishy. When we turned the system on we found more of the same. The system came to us with an 8% overclock set in the Asus A.I. BIOS feature.

Now it is not uncommon for high end system builders to send out units that are overclocked. You saw what Falcon Northwest did in our last SLI roundup, and what All American Computers did in the first review of this series. However, we could not get every benchmark to run, which we tried to correct by going back into the BIOS. Even when we dropped the system clock to 211 MHz there was still one benchmark that would not run (This will be addressed in more detail in the 3DMark 2003 section). When the system remains unstable and a benchmark does not run even when we get the system to a point where all the other benchmarks run flawlessly, there is something askew as to why they shipped it like this.

Our Test System