Gadgetory

hi I'm Richard Branson senior editor for CNET today we're gonna take a look at the Alienware x51 so this is alien wares new slim tower gaming PC it starts at $6.99 a review unit goes to $9.99 though it has the three gig Intel Core i5 CPU an nvidia geforce gtx 550 v graphics card terabyte hard drive and eight gigs of memory so we know Alienware is generally a higher-end boutique gaming vendor but with this system they're trying to bring it's sort of unique styling down to the mainstream prices so this is one of the first slim tower desktops from Alienware it's also one of the first to start at under a thousand bucks it can stand upright or you can lay it down on set you can make the logo look right and overall this actually looks like it could fit into a home entertainment system it's got a slot loading DVD drive that's a pretty nice feature although we wish should have blu-ray there are some slim towers in the same price range from other vendors they actually do have blu-ray perhaps the most unique feature about this system though it's here in the back there's a full height dual slot graphics card most other slim towers land half-height cards and i have to be very low power because of the constraints of heat and power management that come with these small cases Alienware those done some pretty good work in making the system fast but also pretty compact so over here on the back we'll take a look at the ports real quick you can see there's a couple USB three Jack's USB 2.0 7.1 audio digital audio output of two different kinds HDMI integrated into the motherboard although it's disabled because it has a graphics card installed you also have an Ethernet port inside the system those where it gets really interesting so there's one screw here we have to undo those little connector here for the lights that light up to and where eyes on the side so there's actually a video of the whole process of disassembling the system already we encourage you to take a look at the review where you can see us do that this daughter card here goes from the graphics card down to the motherboard so that bridge is the PCI expansion slot and that's how only where it can do this graphics card full height going along the side of the PC otherwise it's pretty straightforward there's a mechanical hard drive underneath the graphics card we've got memory down here and here's the optical drive the CPU of course is underneath the fan right here so in our testing we found this is a pretty decent gaming PC at least for its price it'll play battlefield 3 at 19 with high detail and pretty good speed there's no real slowdowns that we noticed overall it's a pretty solid gaming system that said it's CPU performance wasn't that great if you want to spend a little bit more you can upgrade to a core i7 chip so that's a nice option now this x51 does have a 330 watt power supply in here which lets it use the faster graphics card but it probably can't use a much faster card than that which you can certainly get in a standard mid tower all that said I actually do like this PC and recommend it to anybody who really does want to compact gaming system so I'm rich Brown this is the Alienware x51