Verdict: Not as expensive as a spy plane, but nearly as fast

All of Alienware's products are named after famous US government conspiracy theories, from Area-51 desktops to MJ-12 laptops. So it seems appropriate that Alienware's most expensive and high-end system is named after the Aurora, an unconfirmed spy plane that can apparently fly at Mach 6 (six times the speed of sound) through the stratosphere. The Aurora ALX is Alienware's first liquid-cooled PC, and is based around the Koolance Exos-2. If you wanted to sum up the Aurora ALX using only one sentence it would be 'a slightly modified Koolance Exos-2 installed in the top of a standard Aurora chassis'. And this is probably the main weakness of the Aurora ALX - it doesn't look different enough from a standard Alienware system.

Internally, the Aurora ALX is an impressive system, comprising an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU wedded to an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard. Unfortunately, the fan cooling the chipset on the motherboard makes quite an unpleasant racket, easily audible over the radiator and PSU fans. The CPU is pre-overclocked from 2.4GHz to 2.64GHz by raising the FSB from 200MHz to 220MHz, and is accompanied by 1GB of Corsair XMS4400C25 RAM, leaving two DIMM sockets on the motherboard free for a future memory upgrade. The graphics cards are a pair of GeForce 6800 Ultras, but neither the GPU nor RAM are pre-overclocked, which is disappointing, considering that both cards are water cooled.

The water-cooling system has two 120mm fans, which can be run in automatic speed mode or set to one of three manual speed settings. Initially, the Aurora ALX ran quite happily at the very quiet first speed setting but, after a few days, it automatically revved up to the second speed setting. However, even at this setting, the Aurora ALX is still reasonably quiet, and certainly quieter than the boisterous Real Machines RX Alpha.

Storage-wise, the Aurora ALX has one of the best combinations of drives, with two fast 74GB Western Digital WD740GDs in a 146GB RAID 0 array, and a single 250GB Western Digital WD2500JD. If this isn't enough for you then there's a free S-ATA II port and four free S-ATA ports on the motherboard, and six empty drive bays. Only one optical drive is supplied, but it's a super-fast NEC dual-layer DVD burner. All of this is powered by a PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 510 XE PSU, which, despite only being rated at 510W, has a very meaty 34A 12V rail.

High-quality audio is generated by a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS sound card, and output to a 7.1 set of Creative Gigaworks S750 speakers. The S750 offers two more speakers than the 5.1 Logitech Z-5500 Digital speaker set favoured by some of the other Dream PCs, but it can't produce the same floor-shaking sound. The mouse is a Microsoft Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2, while the keyboard is a Wireless Desktop Elite.

The monitor is a 20in NEC MultiSync LCD2080UX+ TFT, but it's a fairly old model so image quality isn't the best. However, its 16ms response time means that games and movies speed along without any ghosting.

The Aurora ALX isn't just about the hardware, though, as it's a complete package. For example, Alienware provides a free telephone technical support service and, as an Aurora ALX owner, you're provided with a password to access Alienware's game servers. Additionally, when you place your order, you can send in or purchase up to three games from Alienware and the company will install, update and configure them on your PC before sending out your order. It's little touches such as these, as well as the great documentation, that makes the Aurora ALX stand out from the horde of generic high-end PCs slung together by PC manufacturers on a daily basis.

PERFORMANCE

Last year's Alienware Dream PC, the Aurora Extreme was conclusively the fastest, but it's a different story this year. The Aurora ALX is certainly very speedy, but its 3D performance is below par due to the non-overclocked graphics cards.

The Aurora ALX is very fast at 2D tasks, especially in multithreaded applications or when multitasking, but it isn't as fast in games as we'd like it to be. For example, it achieved an extremely fast score of 2.63 in our video encoding test, which is second only to the marginally faster Armari. However, it averaged only 64.9fps in Far Cry at 1,600 x 1,200 with 4x AA and 8x AF, a good 7.4fps slower than the fastest Dream PC, the Holly.

CONCLUSION

While it's clear that Alienware has spent a lot of time and money developing the Aurora ALX, it's still lacking in a few key areas. For example, an easy upgrade would be water cooling for the motherboard chipset, which would help to lower the overall noise of the system, while a rather more compact case wouldn't go amiss either. Similarly, while the Gigaworks S750 speakers sound great, a 7.1 speaker system is overkill for a gaming PC - you'd be better off with a higher-quality 5.1 set.

Unfortunately, at the moment you can't buy the Aurora ALX in the UK, so you have to phone Alienware US to place your order.

However, because of the current state of the US economy (congrats George) the US dollar is relatively very weak, so you can pick up an Aurora ALX for £4,879, including delivery and VAT. This makes the Aurora ALX pretty good value for money, much more so than the $100 million plus dollars allocated by the US government to the Aurora spy plane programme.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

• Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB - Hard disks / storage
• Asus EAH4870 TOP - Graphics cards
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro - Sound cards
• Multiwinia - Games
• Zotac GeForce GTX 260² - Graphics cards
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 - Graphics cards
• Scan 3XS X58 Core i7 - Desktop PCs