Alienware takes aim at consoles with mini PC Alienware joined the mini PC biz this week, revealing a powerful games machine roughly the same size as an Xbox. The Alienware X51 desktop squeezes high-performance components into a compact chassis, the Dell subsidiary said, in a bid to be the brains of a your home entertainment hub. Alienware X51 As such, the X51 veers …
Would get me a 360, a wheel, a couple of extra pads and at least 6 games... and it'd be the same spec as all the other 360s...
Hardly targetting console gamers... more going for PC gamers who whilst they may have a decent spec PC are looking for something better and also think that it might well be useful to cream an extra 20cm space for storing that really important thing that never really found a home on the desk but could definitely probably fit in the gap that'd be made by getting this box.
It's a big market.
While you may have the urge to create sculpture suitable for gracing the 70s-vintage offices of a pharmaceutical company in Basingstoke, it's unlikely that we will place your new product on a pedestal in the centre of the living room. Recognise that we have more than one piece of kit under the TV. Be nice and make it so we can stack your new item on top or alongside the rest. That way, you might even sell some, instead of just having to send the trucks straight from the factory door to the landfill site.
...I do like considerate design. Like another poster stated, these appliances aren't normally placed on their own, standalone pedestal, instead they have to play nice and share the space with other toys. At least this machine appears to have a patch of flat to its top for potential(ly dodgy) stacking and I do like the side vents, I can't abide top venting appliances; anti-stacking, pro-dust.
Pedantic, boring rant over.
I was thinking of making a good LAN box on an ITX form factor, this seems more akin to a stripped-down laptop/desktop mashup.
Beefier versions of this have nVidia 555 GTX graphics and Core i5/i7 support from what I was able to gather in my snoop around the buy pages.
I'd still prefer to make my own setup however. That way I get a x16 PCI-E slot to play with.
External supply I could take or leave, plenty of handy 12V based ATX power options from places like mini-itx.com (not to mention a good few ARM-based devkits).
Still a good idea though for those who want small PC with some grunt off-the-shelf.
They use fairly high spec components to make (to me ugly - but clearly some peeps like it) very expensive kit. Surely anyone who cares enough about gaming to spend this sort of cash on kit is going to look at what goes into it and realise that they can make their own, better, machine for half the money and have cash left over for a decent ssd too. I always assume anyone actually buying their kit has (parents with) more money than sense. The PC I built myself 3 years ago (at a hundred quid more than this admittedly) shows this one the door without even trying. That's a relative dinosaur in gaming terms.
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