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If Haswell innards weren't enough to incite a purchase of Alienware's X51 gaming PC, perhaps an extra choice of GPU could push you over the edge: Dell's little gaming-machine-that-can is now available with AMD's Radeon R9 270X. The card adds $100 to the base price of the Core i7 model, bringing the total to $1,200. In return, this configuration brings the chipset maker's Eyefinity tech into the fold for multi-monitor support or output to a 4K monitor, although you probably wouldn't want to attempt gaming on it beyond 1080p. While we're scraping together enough pennies for a true 12K gaming rig, we suppose this may just have to do.
Update: Apologies for the earlier error regarding this being a flagship card. The post has been corrected.
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, AMD, Dell
Via: Direct2Dell
Source: Dell
For the most part, Dell's using this week at Computex to talk up its various XPS products, though its Alienware division is also getting a little love. The company just announced that the pint-size X51 desktop has been refreshed with Haswell processors (up to a quad-core Core i7-4770) and an optional 2GB NVIDIA GTX 670 GPU. The design hasn't changed at all, as you can see, but the price has: it now starts at $900 with Haswell. If you're on a budget, though, and willing to settle for last year's chips, the Ivy Bridge models will still be available for $699 and up. Now all we need are some fresh gaming laptops. How 'bout it, Dell?
While the Alienware X51 has been slated by Valve as a currently available Steambox, consumers still have to get rid of that pesky Windows to install the Linux-driven platform. As we've seen with the Razer Edge, a Windows 8-powered gaming system just doesn't work well for living rooms because it still needs an interface that's not a game controller. Fortunately, that barrier is slowly evaporating as the Dell-owned commodity is now providing Ubuntu as an OS option for the X51, paving the way for easier Steambox modification in the future.
It'll come with Linux-friendly drivers from NVIDIA right out of the box, and you can of course install Steam for Linux on it from the get-go. As a reminder, the X51 is available in Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 models, and can be upgraded to 8GB of RAM with 1TB of storage, with either a NVIDIA GeForce GT545 or a GTX 555 card. Features include HDMI 1.4, eight USB ports (six are 2.0 while two are 3.0), digital 7.1 surround sound, on-board WiFi and gigabit Ethernet. Pricing for the base Ubuntu model is $599, which is about $100 less than its Windows counterpart.
Source: Alienware, Dell Community Blog
