Alienware Aurora Extreme

12/8/03 - Alienware is one of the more well known names in the performance PC gaming systems and the Aurora Extreme is their current top of the line system. It is based around the latest AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 processor. This is a very expensive 64-bit performance CPU from AMD that currently has the best performance for 32-bit operating systems. It also has the added bonus of being able to support future 64-bit operating systems.

Storage for the system is based on the Seagate 120GB Barracuda 7200.7 serial ATA hard drive. There is an option for a second one to create a RAID0 strip for additional performance. Optical storage is handled by a 16x DVD-ROM and 52x CD-RW optical drives. Audio processing is covered by the recently released Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. This is a bit of overkill for most users. Suprisingly, the system does not ship with any speakers to use with this high-end audio card.

Rounding out the graphics is the NVIDIA GeForceFX 5950 Ultra graphics processor with 256MB of video memory. This is a very powerful DirectX 9 graphics card that will perform well in all of the current PC games. The one drawback to the card is the two slot design, but its not that big of a problem with full size desktop systems.

Finally, Alienware allows the users to customize the cases from a variety of color combinations at no additional charge. Only one "Chameleon" design has an additional charge. This makes for a very stylish desktop PC with a large amount of performance.