Most gaming desktop computers are pretty big machines that can easily be upgraded to the latest graphics card every year. Which isn’t a bad thing in most cases but some people might want something that’s a little more portable than a large gaming desktop. Well you could get a gaming notebook but if you do that you’d lose the ability to swap out graphics cards. The good news is that Dell has a solution for us called the Alienware X51 which they announced today.
The Dell Alienware X51 is basically a small form factor gaming desktop computer. Think of this X51 machine as a gaming console but with PC parts inside that’s because the X51 has a console sized form factor. It is only 13.5-inches high, 12.5-inches deep, and 3.7-inches wide making it just a little bit bigger than the original Xbox 360 console and much smaller than pretty much all gaming towers.
Inside the new Alienware X51 you still get pretty good components. Dell says you’ll be able to run games like Battlefield 3 on high at 1080p and get more than 30 frames per second. The X51 starts at $700 for a 3.3GHz Core i3-2100 processor, but for $900 you can get a Core i5-2320 processor at 3.0GHz, or for $1150 you can get the Core i7-2600K. And as far as the graphics go the X51 starts out with the NVIDIA GeForce GT 545, 4GB of DDR3 memory, and a 1TB hard drive along with a DVD burner, and WiFi. The only real problem I see with this new X51 machine is that the power supply options only go up to 330W so you will be limited to that power supply when you want to upgrade the graphics card later. But overall this is a pretty decent small form factor gaming PC.
What are your thoughts on this?
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