Surprisingly, considering the price of the Aurora ALX, no sound card is supplied, with Alienware instead relying on the motherboard’s integrated Realtek audio codec. We did intend to benchmark the system as shipped to demonstrate the performance difference, but it proved unstable, and would only benchmark with the DIMM repositioned in the correct triple-channel configuration.Īn unbranded ATI Radeon HD 5870 is flavour of the month at the moment, and is the graphics card chosen here – a good selection, although bizarrely Alienware's website will, at the time of writing, by default fit the system with two Nvidia GTS 240's in SLI - a truly dreadful solution especially considering the huge performance upgrade to the HD 5870 costs you just £20 more.Ĭlick to enlarge - The hardware lurks beneath a plastic shroud, with quick release hard drive bays below An unsuspecting buyer may not notice this, so it’s disappointing to see such poor attention to detail by Alienware. However, the system was supplied to us with one of the DIMMs in the wrong slot, which meant it defaulted to dual-channel mode, limiting performance. As the chipset offers triple-channel memory support, three of the six DIMM slots on the board were filled with three 2GB Corsair Dominator DIMMs, rated at 1,600MHz with 9-9-9-24 timings.

Alien AutopsyOur sample Aurora ALX arrived with an Intel Core i7-920 CPU, configured rather disappointingly at the stock speed of 2.66GHz, sitting inside a proprietary X58 chipset-based micro-ATX motherboard.

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