Alienware Area-51 750i Mainstream Gaming Desktop Personal Computer

Feb 4 2009 - Alienware's Area-51 750i desktop certainly brings stylish PC gaming to an affordable level. Performance for gaming is quite good even with the base $999 system specifications, but it could use a bit of a bump in the memory and hard drive sizes. Of course, the system is very customizable to add additional features. Customizaing the system will quickly drive up the cost of the system. It is pretty much less expensive for users to do the upgrades themselves.

Feb 4 2009 - Alienware's Area-51 750i desktop offers a more affordable option compared to their X58 system. It is based around the older Intel Core 2 processors rather than the faster but more expensive Core i7. With a starting price of $999, it certainly can be very attractive to the gamer with a small budget.

The base system comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 dual core desktop processor. This isn't really an issue with PC gaming as most games are not designed for multiple core processors. The higher clock speed can actually benefit gaming over slower clocked quad core processors that cost more. To keep the costs down, it is based around the DDR2 memory technology. The base system comes with 2GB that will let it run Vista OK, but it really could benefit from more especially with the low cost for DDR2 RAM.

Similar to the memory situation, Alienware packs a relatively small 250GB hard drive into the base Area-51 750i system. This is fine if the system is being used for just gaming but is quite small for storing digital media files. Larger hard drives are available but the cost is about the same as buying one online and installing it yourself.

Since it is built for gaming, the graphics are very important. The system comes with a single GeForce 9800 GT graphics card that is acceptable for all of today's PC games. It may struggle at extremely high resolutions or with lots of filtering enabled but should be fine for 1680x1050, the most common resolution for middle sized monitors.

With the excellent case design that is easy to work in, consumers are probably best off buying the base system and upgrading it on their own rather than purchasing the upgrades at time of order. Upgrading only drives the cost up quickly compared to competing systems.

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