Despite the terrifying price this PC doesn’t come with a display or a set of speakers, but it does come with a stack of ‘free’ extras that consist of a keychain, a pen, a polo shirt, an aluminium briefcase and, perhaps most usefully, an Alienware support manager on call day or night.

Power Draw Results

Power draw in Watt (W)

The Area 51 ALX CFX is a moderately noisy PC, but it's near-silent compared to the Tri-SLI packing Mesh Q8 - reviewed here. Once Windows Vista Ultimate is running, the hard drive array ticks away like crazy. Vista hammers your hard drive at the best of times, so two of the things only add to the pain.

PCMark 05 Results

Longer bars are better

Performance in 3DMark06 and PCMark05 is impressive in every department, but that's partly thanks to the extra 1GHz of CPU speed. In graphics tests, the Alienware starts to look somewhat limp compared to the Mesh Q8 when anti-aliasing is enabled - then in Crysis things went utterly pear-shaped.

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