Alienware X51: The little PC that could

PC World - Among built-to-order gaming PCs, Alienware is about as close as one gets to a household name, and the brand is largely synonymous with huge black boxes covered in garish blinking lights. The new Alienware X51 ($999 as configured, as of February 3, 2012) is a marked departure from that routine, cutting both costs and girth to deliver a machine that's palatable to the masses but doesn't lose any of that gamer cred.

The Alienware X51's specs aren't especially impressive on paper. The model I reviewed is equipped with a 3GHz Intel Core i5-2320, 8GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 555 discrete graphics card, and a 1TB hard drive. Of note: Despite the system's (relatively) small size, those are all desktop-class components, and they perform well. On PCWorld's WorldBench 6 test suite, the X51 earned an impressive score of 147, landing at the top of the budget desktops category and giving some of the lower-end performance desktops a run for their money.

The X51's gaming performance isn't exactly mind-blowing, but it is strong. On our Crysis 2 benchmark, it posted a frame rate of 46.2 frames per second at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and fairly high settings. You can certainly eke out more frames if you turn the visual details down a bit, but that's excellent performance for a PC at this price. On Dirt 3 at the same resolution and settings, the X51 produced a rate of 84.3 fps.

But the real story here is the case. It's small -- just over a foot tall and long, and 3 in. wide. It looks quite a bit like an Xbox 360, and it can operate lying on its side or standing upright; you can turn the alien-head badge on its front to match the case's orientation, if you mind those sorts of details.

The real feather in the X51's cap is its upgradability. A single screw keeps the side of the chassis locked down, and two more guard access to the innards. From there, you're free to swap components in and out, with the expected reservations. The Mini-ITX motherboard offers only a pair of DIMM slots, and things are so tight inside that you'd be hard-pressed to fit some of the taller RAM sticks available without jostling the SATA cables sticking out of the optical drive. The power supply is also meager, and limited to 150W graphics cards. That said, with existing Intel Sandy Bridge motherboards promising drop-in support for upcoming Ivy Bridge processors, Alienware has positioned the X51 as a gaming-PC offering that's also a smart investment for tinkering types.