Alienware Aurora ALX review

Alienware machines are some of the most unashamedly aspirational systems on the market today – powerhouses that place just as much emphasis on first impressions as they do framerates. The firm’s latest, the Aurora ALX, is no different.

The exterior features the dramatic lines and matte black finish that we’ve come to expect, and every crack and crevice is filled with a light – which, of course, can be changed to a colour of your choice, or even made to pulse and flash. The lid is adorned with a row of motorised fins, which are designed to rise up and let more air into the case should the temperature inside reach a certain threshold.

Inside, the major components are sequestered into their own areas to improve airflow and heat dissipation, while the processor is chilled by a Cool-It water-cooling unit. There’s even a battery-powered light that illuminates the inside of the chassis when the side is removed, in line with Alienware’s claim that the Aurora ALX is one of its most easily upgradeable machines ever.

While some of these additions sound impressive, they’re less useful in the real world. The roof fins, for instance, made no difference to CPU and GPU temperatures: when the system was stress-tested with and without the fins activated, the processor peaked at around 68. The graphics card, meanwhile, always ran around 5˚C hotter. With just a single intake fan at the front and another on the rear water module, those top vents just don’t get the air pushed towards them to be of any real use.

We also found the case awkward. The GPU cage and housing makes graphics card removal far trickier than it would be in the average chassis, and while there’s a decent amount of room to upgrade – three free DIMM slots, a pair of hard disk bays and a single PCI Express x16 slot – the numerous stray cables that litter the interior make the upgrade process a bit clumsy.

The water-cooling unit also generated plenty of noise, especially when the Aurora ran through our demanding graphical tests. It’s possible to reduce the fan’s RPM via Alienware’s thermal control software, but this still left an audible hum that became significantly louder during arduous sections. The use of water-cooling should really be about pushing a processor to its limits, but the chosen CPU – an Intel Core i7-920 – is inexplicably left running at its stock speed of 2.66GHz. A quiet heatsink and fan would have done the job perfectly well.

The Aurora scored 2.04 in our 2D application benchmarks. It’s not a bad result but, in the face of strong competition, its stock-speed specification lags some distance behind: the overclocked Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire and Chillblast Fusion Mustang scored 2.45 and 2.53 respectively in the same tests.

ATI’s Radeon HD 5870 breezed through our Crysis benchmarks, even managing a more than playable 37fps in our 1,920 x 1,200 Very High test. Unlike the choice of CPU, we can’t argue with the HD 5870’s inclusion – the only better option is the dual-GPU HD 5890, but that’s exorbitantly priced. Our only gripe is that we might have expected two cards.

The rest of the specification offers little to excite. There’s no Blu-ray drive, which is poor form in a system this expensive, and the 6GB of DDR3 RAM isn’t even installed in a triple-channel configuration. At least there’s plenty of storage, with two 1TB hard disks arranged in a striped RAID0 array.

The peripherals are a bit better. The monitor boasts the Alienware brand, but it’s all Dell: bright, accurate colours and sharp detail abounds across the 1,920 x 1,080 panel, and there’s no sign of backlight bleed. It’s just a shame that the screen is only a 22in model – we’d expect at least two more inches. The included keyboard and mouse are good too: both have positive, responsive actions; the mouse boasts a handful of sensitivity settings and the keyboard offers a range of media controls.

Alienware’s aspirational systems normally come with suitably high prices attached – and the Aurora ALX duly obliges. This particular package – which has had its GPU and hard disk capacity boosted beyond the standard options – costs an eye-watering £1,964 before VAT. Had it achieved a record-breaking score we’d still have called it absurd, especially given the Wired2Fire is faster in every one of our benchmarks and includes a superb 24in monitor nearly £800 less. With a bit of overclocking things might have been a little more palatable, but Alienware will only tweak the top-end Core i7-975 model – and that CPU will set you back a further £870 inc VAT.

Even without that, the ludicrous price is the final nail in the coffin for a machine that’s slower and louder than its rivals, and is crammed with gimmicks that scream style at top volume while offering negligible real-world use. We like to see manufacturers pushing boundaries to take technology further, but even the staunchest of Alienware fans will struggle to justify this sort of excess.

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