Alienware

If you've been eyeing a high-end, hand-built gaming PC, today might be the day to pull the trigger. Here's a selection of the Cyber Monday deals available from the dedicated PC vendors.

Alienware Alienware's high-end desktops aren't as competitive as they used to be, but its laptops and budget-price desktops still have some appeal.

You'll find Alienware's best deals on its highest-end hardware. The M14x and M18x laptops, and the Aurora gaming desktop all offer discounts of above $400. The best deal of that bunch is the M14x, with a starting price of $2,… Read more

Congrats to Michael M. of Nottingham, Md., for winning a $500 gift certificate from KlearGear.com in last week's giveaway. Are you a frequent traveler? On the heels of the E3 games expo, this week's giveaway sponsor, Dell, is offering up a nice, sturdy TSA-friendly backpack that's great for gamers and others.

The Dell Alienware Orion M17x Tactical Backpack keeps your gear secure and protected on the go with its heavily padded back panels. The subdivided main compartment easily holds a laptop up to 17.3 inches, while a secondary compartment has 10 additional pockets for holding anything from pens to plane tickets to MP3 players to any random tchotchkes you like to carry around during your daily wanderings. Also, the camo design sets it apart from its basic-black-leather cousins.

Normally, the Dell Alienware Orion M17x Tactical Backpack would cost you $119.99, but you have a chance to get it gratis. How? There are a few rules, so please read carefully; there will be a test. … Read more

The third generation of Core i-series CPUs has been benchmarked, written about, and discussed for months now, but PC makers could only sell them starting April 29.

Even then, only the very high-end models, the quad-core Core i7 chips, are currently available. The more mainstream dual-core Core i3 and Core i5 processors found in most laptops won't get updated until sometime in May or June (and then probably won't be physically available for some time after that).

A handful of hearty manufacturers have already put the high-end new Core i7 chips up on their sites, allowing you to … Read more

The 11-inch gaming laptop is the textbook definition of a niche product. In fact, up until now, there's really only been one serious entry in that category, Dell's Alienware M11x. Origin (coincidentally co-founded by some former Alienware employees) is now getting into the game, with the EON11-S, which the company calls a "compact high-performance laptop."

Interestingly, this new model won't actually double the number of 11-inch gaming laptops available, as the Alienware model is being quietly discontinued. That's a shame, as we liked the M11x, even if it wasn't the most practical for … Read more

A truism of Intel chip announcements: Intel releases a new CPU, and with it a new graphics chip or, since Sandy Bridge, a new graphics core embedded in the CPU silicon. Intel then claims said chip/core will provide at least a baseline PC gaming experience. This claim is never true.

Only now it is.

With its new Ivy Bridge CPUs, Intel has introduced two new graphics cores, the Intel HD 4000 and a lower-end HD 2500 core. You will still have a better gaming experience with a budget graphics card, but for at least the HD 4000, Intel finally has an onboard graphics processor with some 3D processing muscle.… Read more

Dell is rolling out a series of updates to the Alienware M14x, m17x, m18x laptops, including the latest GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. This timing is odd, to say the least, as Intel's third-generation Core i-series CPUs (also known as Ivy Bridge) aren't included.

Instead, these new Alienware models have the current second-gen chips (aka Sandy Bridge). As the high-end quad-core versions of Ivy Bridge are expected to be available from PC makers starting around April 29, the message is clear -- anyone who orders one of these new Alienware laptops before that is a sucker. … Read more

Gaming desktops have become impressively diverse over the past few months. The best part is that even the lower-end systems are remarkably capable. It's now possible to spend less than $1,000 on a ready-made gaming desktop from a specialized vendor that will play pretty much any current title you can throw at it.

Whether that accessibility has come from better-designed hardware components, or game graphics stagnating because of the longer life cycle for consoles, it's a great time to be in the market for a new gaming desktop. Below you'll find four of the best systems in the category.… Read more

I expect Alienware will sell a lot of these.

There's very little about the new Alienware X51 gaming slim tower a mainstream buyer won't appreciate. You can buy a reasonably fast configuration, like our review unit, for less than $1,000. It's on an aesthetic par with an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3. You can even put it on its side and slide it into your media rack.

It's still a PC, of course, with all the content benefits and interface and software hang-ups implied therein. And in spite of Alienware's clever work cramming in a full-size 3D card, the X51 will make a finicky upgrade platform. You get no other expansion card slots, there's room for only one hard drive, and the 330-watt power supply (an upgrade over the 230-watt default) limits you to mainstream graphics cards.

Still, the bumped-up GeForce GTX 555 card in our review config can run Battlefield 3, Skyrim, or pretty much any other game at 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution with smooth frame rates and respectable quality settings. That's all many gamers will ask for, particularly those shopping for a PC like this one.

Read the full review of the Alienware X51.… Read more

To its credit, Alienware's new x51 has introduced some real innovation to slim tower desktop design.

I was wary of the x51. Slapping an alien-themed case around a Core i-series motherboard doesn't really bring anything new to the table. This system does more than the slim towers we've seen from Acer, Lenovo, HP, Gateway, and others. Its competitors all have standard motherboard layouts, and because of their size, they require half-height, lower-power graphics cards. The x51 has a full-size card inside of it. In the case of our review unit, it has a respectable double-wide GeForce GTX … Read more