Alienware Area-51 X58 review

Alienware pitched us this £4,200 Area-51 X58 desktop as one of the first PCs it has shipped that truly takes advantage of the buying muscle afforded by its parent company, Dell. Given that the features you get for the pound noticeably surpass the $8,000 (£5,400, but not available in the UK) Falcon Northwest Mach V, we have a hard time arguing. We still find the classic Alienware case clunky. We also wish Alienware offered overclocking in this model. Still, for the sheer density of features, Alienware offers amazing value here. If you're a gamer whose wallet can take such a large hit, you'll find everything you need in this PC.

We won't spend too much time on Alienware's classic case design. It's one of the best-known gaming chassis, and as such it's something of an icon. The stylised outer shell also lends more weight to the system and complicates removing and replacing the side panel. We don't love it, but perhaps you do.

To get a sense of just how much Alienware has crammed inside this desktop, consider how the Area-51 X58 measures up against the Falcon Northwest Mach V. Each has Intel's latest high-end processor, 12GB of DDR3 system memory, and a pair of dual-chip ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards. We expect those features in any £3,500-plus PC, but the Alienware also has twice the storage capacity in standard hard drives -- 2TB between two hard drives -- compared with the single 1TB drive in the Mach V.

Each vendor installed the operating system on fast, silent solid-state storage. Alienware trumps Falcon Northwest here by spanning the Windows boot partition across two 128GB Samsung solid-state drives. Falcon Northwest went with a single 80GB Intel X-25M drive. We can't speak to the Samsung versus the Intel drives in side-by-side competition, but as our system-level performance charts show, the Area-51 X58 competes very well against the Mach V, especially given that the Alienware isn't overclocked, and Falcon Northwest system costs over £1,000 more.