Alienware Alpha Gaming Consoles

Currently (4/17) the 4GB is same price new after coupon: http://slickdeals.net/f/7765817-alienware-alpha-compact-desktop-i3-4130t-gtx-860-400-free-shipping

Anybody else here? Anyways, if you’ve been away from PC gaming for a while, humblebundle.com is a great way to catch up. They’re currently running a PC “Origin” deal - $1 for 5 games, or “Beat the Average” (currently ~$5) for 9 games and counting.

Have been considering building a new PC roughly based on the ‘Very Good’ tier of Logical Increments. Any idea how the GPU in this measures up?

I got the i3 4GB model last week.

The HDD has to go - as soon as you can! once you have a SSD the performance of these are much better.

not for a hardcore PC gamer, but for a part timer like me it is OK.

I’m getting good frame rates @ 1080p in most games on high/ultra.

best deal is the 4GB model and pickup some 2x 4GB CAS9 memory and a 249/250 GB SSD

Any idea how high of wattage CPUs these can handle? There’s a few quad cores for less than $200 on newegg, but they’re 84w. I know there’s 250GB Samsung SSDs out there for about $120 also.

I don’t think they can use anything beyond 35w TDP. The VRM’s on the motherboard probably can’t handle much more and you’d definitely need to upgrade the external PSU.

Your best bet is the i5-4590T and it is hella expensive and only 15% faster than the i3 because the i3 runs at 2.9GHz all the time and the i5 only boosts to 3GHz, which it only hits on 2 cores anyway, so you might at well just have the i3 with its 2 physical + 2 virtual cores always running at 2.9GHz. Few games will care about the difference here, this thing is limited by the 860M GPU, not the CPU.

I agree, ditch the HDD and put a nice SSD in there ASAP. That’s really the only upgrade it needs.

Seems like these are suddenly being clearanced out everywhere. Sale on Woot, Dell, and a fantastic B&M deal at Microcenter. So either the price will keep dropping or a new version is coming (or both).

They have a newer version that will be running SteamOS set to launch later this year.

I’m sorry but seeing this just makes me giggle, for all the years of pc vs console gaming wars, this just looks like a white flag to me. Yes, yes, I know all the spec and frame rate and res arguments and all that, but it’s just kinda funny that it’s Alienware of all people :stuck_out_tongue:

I think it’s less a white flag and more a business decision/acknowledgement from Alienware that the market on pre-built “gaming” laptops/desktops has been dropping but there’s a niche they might be able to fill as an alternative.

Neat idea but beware, the custom GPU is not user replaceable and the firmware cannot be updated. Plus, if you’re at all into newer games, they’re generally going the way of the quad core, meaning this will be obsolete sooner rather than later.

I run an Acer V3 with a 1gb nvidia GPU and a dual core i5 and while it is slightly slower than this, it was also sub $500 three years ago.

250G Samsung for $90 at MC: