Gadgetory

have we finally bridge the gap between gaming PC and console I'm Dan Ackerman and this is the Alienware alpha now we've been hearing about this particular system for more than a year now it was originally proposed as part of the steam machine series so Alienware decided to take the box they've been working on and just release it as a Windows 8 desktop but with a custom UI that gets you into the steam big picture mode now you can use a master keyboard but it's really designed to work with a gamepad you can use a wired or wireless Microsoft / Xbox gamepad and here's the custom UI you can launch into steam that tation into big picture mode which is the television version of steam you can go into settings and you can set your display resolution and connect to your network and do a few other things so in the steam big picture mode any games you bought through the steam service and there are thousands of games and a lot of them are actually very inexpensive some of them are the same games you can get on console some of them are ones you could only play on a PC will all be listed here you can download them install them and you can run them and hopefully if they have this little game controller icon that means the work well with the controller I found a bunch of games that actually don't have that controller icon I have a keyboard icon still work fine with the controller now the catch is this box starts at five hundred and fifty dollars when it was first proposed the new gaming consoles cost you know five hundred dollars like an Xbox one those prices have come down since then so this is now at five fifty still to get into it is more expensive than the current generation consoles the components insider are a little perplexing it's almost better if you play around with this without knowing what the parts are because it only has an intel core i3 processor which you may think of it's underpowered for gaming system and the graphics card it's a modified version of nvidia x' 860m which is a fine mainstream card you know not fantastic but the way they've optimized the processor and the graphics card actually works really well and I was able to play brand-new games like Far Cry 4 on kind of medium as sheddings that really look great on a television as opposed to being like on a big super high-res monitor right up close to your face and I found it to be you know as good or or perhaps better than the console versions in a lot of cases so if you're willing to take a chance and work through some setup hiccups we occasionally had to dig out a mouse to fix a few things and we had a couple of problems early on it's a little bit of a first generation experience with the custom UI once we work through all that I actually found this a lot of fun and a great way to access my huge library of Steam games and get them all up on my TV we're frankly it feels more powerful than connecting to a current gen console