Gadgetory

no this is Sean Hollister with the verge and we're here with the Alienware x51 desktop gaming computer that isn't much bigger than a standard game console you take a look at the back here you can see we've got the dual DVI and mini HDMI ports of a GTX 5 5 v graphics card take a look at the back panel it's a full array of ports on the h61 mini ITX motherboard including full audio pair of USB 3.0 ports 4 USB 2.0 ports Gigabit Ethernet HDMI and even a pair of digital audio jacks here optical and coaxial both to connect it to your home Media Center you'll also notice a tiny port down at the bottom that's for power in order to save on space Alienware included a giant power brick instead because the Alienware x51 is designed to take a place in your home Media Center the crew wood Alienware made it look like a video game console too you can see we've got the matte finish on the sides similar to the Xbox 360 a nice big diagonal strike through the center like the Xbox 360 slim and this shiny coat in the front like the PlayStation 3 along with this slot-loading optical drive right here just like the PlayStation 3 in place you should do before you can turn the logo right here you've got it horizontally Alienware x51 is actually one of the most upgradable miniature pcs we've seen in a while one screw in the back push off the frame hair to the side detach the wire here get at the cards this particular one connects to the lights on the side panel and you can see all the insides and as you can see here both the DVD drive and the GPU rack are modular you can pull them right out and upgrade them now to the inexperienced PC builder this may look like an impenetrable Fortress of metal but aliens where's actually designed these internals to be completely modular you can remove any one of them at a time for the entry-level price of $6.99 the Alienware x51 comes with a core i3 processor 4 gigabytes of memory and nvidia Sgt 545 graphics card and a DVD Drive what you're looking at here is the 1200 $49 version which upgrades the optical to blu-ray as a gtx 555 graphics card and a core i7 2630 point 4 gigahertz so this is the alien FX app that comes with the Alienware x51 and it's got pretty much one purpose it lets you change the mood lighting of the computer on the front and on the sides to one of these colors in the circle if you go into the Advanced Mode you can actually set those lights to different system events or applications for instance if you get an email we can set the alien head to light up red at that point to give you a notification so now we're going to take a look at the performance of the Alienware x51 and first mission of Battlefield 3 it's not too bad can't really do this on ultra and high is a bit of a crapshoot but I'm medium settings battlefield 3 definitely playable similar to battlefield 3 The Witcher 2 isn't comfortable on Ultra settings or even high settings on the x51 and it's 1,200 $49 configuration but it does pretty good job at median last but not least we've got just cause to set on the island nation of now and we're running here with maxed out everything except we're only running 8x anti-aliasing instead of the 16x possible it runs well over 30 frames per second and looks pretty great as long as you're not using the most demanding latest PC games and got a slightly older title like Just Cause 2 you shouldn't have any problems with the top spec x51 unless of course you don't know how to drive you