The Alienware Area-51 X-58 is a strange gaming PC. Unlike most it’s a sleek package that oozes power and strength without seeming showy. Sure, it’s a hulking great monolith of a PC, but is also strangely beautiful too.
As well it should be, given the stonking price tag. But inside is enough power to rival the Death Star. We’re talking Intel Core 2 Duo, Quad and Extreme processors and the world’s most powerful graphics card – the 602MHz NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 GPU.
The Alienware Area-51 X-58 races along at a gallop, even running Windows Vista, with a hangar-like 4TB of storage, and options for RAID 1 and 0 drives, speeding up access even more.
Make no mistake. This is a seriously powerful PC. Even the network card is a souped up number: the Killer Xeno Pro, packing in ultra-quick connections to make sure enemies are dispatched with the minimum lag and maximum speed.
If there were a single word to describe the Alienware Area-51 X-58, it would be “accelerated.” Everything from the 64-bit version of Windows Vista that’s included, to the solid state drives and multiple SLI graphics cards and RAID drives are designed to blitz through games like a teenager through crisps.
Go for the ALX version and even the processor is beefed up, requiring a liquid cooling system to avoid meltdown inside that shiny black case.
But there’s no point in having raw power without responsibility. As bum-clenchingly quick as the Alienware Area-51 X-58 is, it’s still absurdly expensive. The high end versions come close to £4,000 by the time you’ve customised them with the essential accessories, and there’s still no HDMI output, so pointing all that graphical wizardry at a big screen is a no go.
Above all then, it’s a serious PC for serious gamers. The X-58 shuns the showy cases in favour of pure grunt and understated power. It might pain your wallet to do so, but if you can afford one you’ll never play games the same way again.
