Alienware X51 review

Dell’s Alienware brand produces enthusiast PCs that generally don’t try to compete on price with smaller bespoke builders. Its latest system, however, represents a change to that tactic. The X51 is a small-form-factor PC that takes Alienware’s gaming expertise and attempts to sell it to the living room masses.

It’s immediately clear that the X51 is designed to challenge consoles. It’s all glossy black plastic and sleek curves, and familiar Alienware touches can be spotted throughout. The stylised UFO on the front of the machine lights up and can be rotated to suit the PC’s orientation, just like the PS3 logo, and the side of the case is adorned with illuminated panels and otherworldly characters.

The X51 is small, too: it stretches 344mm lengthways, and it’s only 94mm wide, which means it will fit into spaces traditional PCs won’t. It also means Alienware’s designers have done a superb job in managing to cram in a fully functional gaming PC.

The bespoke motherboard, for instance, hosts the processor, DIMM sockets and most other key components, but there are two daughterboards – one for many of the internal connections and headers, the other handling links to the front panel and various lights. A separate board rises from the PCI Express x16 slot to rotate the graphics cards through 90 degrees, and the card is held in a sturdy metal caddy. The sizeable gap beneath it is partly left for air to reach the GPU, and partly to give Alienware somewhere to fit the 3.5in hard disk.

It’s a superb piece of compact design, with cables routed discreetly throughout, and care taken over component placement. Upgrade space is understandably at a premium: the DIMMs, processor and wireless card are easily accessible, but you only get the single graphics card slot and it takes some effort to extract the card itself or the hard disk from the metal frame. This PC isn’t meant for tinkering.

The living room case also means concessions on the core components. You get a 3GHz Intel Core i5-2320 and 8GB of RAM, which carried the X51 to a score of 0.87 in our application benchmarks. That’s nothing particularly special for a PC at this price – even the £599 Chillblast Fusion Elixir overclocked a Core i5-2500K to score 1.1.

Gaming performance is similarly mid-range. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 555 is an OEM card that’s essentially a cut-down version of the GTX 560. The goal is obviously the 1080p resolution of today’s TV sets, but you won’t always be able to bump the settings right up: an average of 47fps in our High quality Crysis benchmark fell to 27fps at Very High settings. Again, the cheaper Chillblast managed 36fps at Very High, which shows the trade-off for a small chassis.

What can you do to alleviate this gaming problem? Dell offers several models and configurations, but they don’t address the core issue. Upping the processor to a Core i7-2600 raises the price to £899, and you can also pick two models that include monitors, which seems to miss the point – for £949 the X51 comes with a 23in Dell ST2320L screen, and £1,279 gets you an Alienware OptX AW2310 3D-ready panel. There’s also one cheaper specification available, with a lesser Core i3 processor, half the memory and an Nvidia GeForce GT 545 graphics card for £649. But no faster graphics (unless you risk adding your own), due to the limits placed on both power and thermals in such a small case.

So this is the best it gets right now, and the good news is that at least these components run fine in the chassis. It helps that nothing is overclocked, but the processor’s peak temperature of 71°C is low, and the graphics card’s peak was only 3°C higher.

There are few surprises in the rest of the Alienware’s specification, with 802.11n wireless, a 1TB mechanical hard disk and a slot-loading DVD writer. The port selection is standard, with the usual pair of USB 3 sockets alongside six USB 2 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and both optical and electrical S/PDIF.

The final piece of the puzzle is the bespoke software, but it’s little we haven’t seen before. AlienAutopsy merely has links to driver downloads and adverts for antivirus packages alongside basic options from the Windows Control Panel. The Command Centre offers standard power options, alongside tools to change the colour of the X51’s lights and a basic script tool to load up software – such as VoIP or IM clients – when particular games or applications are launched. It also has a BIOS rather than a UEFI, and one so basic it won’t please overclockers.

Alienware’s PCs are some of the most striking around, and the X51 is no different – it’s a fine example of small-form-factor engineering and would look great under a TV. But value is rarely Alienware’s strong suit, and that isn’t going to change in such an ambitious system as this. The X51 costs more than faster PCs, yet doesn’t totally succeed at the one task that would make it a must-have: 1080p gaming at console-killing top settings. Right now it’s decent enough, but the next generation of more efficient graphics cards should allow version two to fulfill its obvious potential.

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