Alienware shrinks the gaming PC

With the announcement of the M51X, Alienware brings PC gaming to a console form factor.

By John Gillooly 

Alienware PCs are historically huge, bulky, powerful gaming beasts. Which makes the Dell subsidiary’s latest announcement all the more exciting. The M51X is a new small form factor PC design, aimed at providing quality PC gaming in a package not much larger than a console.

The Australian variant of the M51X will ship with a Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 455 and a 1TB 7,200rpm hard drive. This base level version packs a pricetag of $1299 and promises 34fps in Battlefield 3 with high detail settings at 1920 x 1080 resolution.

High-end PC gaming in a console-sized package.

As is the way with Alienware systems you can then spec it up in various ways, adding a faster CPU or GPU, more RAM or a Blu-Ray drive. It won’t be capable of fitting the highest end hardware, which is a tradeoff for the system size, but it will deliver a really powerful gaming solution in a tiny package.

Small form factor gaming is nothing new, but this is one of the most tightly integrated packages we have seen. Not only would it make for a tidy little gaming desktop, but it would also be a great machine to plug into a TV for some big screen PC gaming. It also comes with both wired and 802.11n wireless networking connections as standard, which increases its flexibility.

You can find more information about the design of the M51X on the Dell Blog, although keep in mind that the seemingly much lower US pricetag is for a version of the system that only comes with a low-end Core i3 CPU. The systems themselves will go on sale tomorrow here in Australia via the Alienware.com.au and Dell.com.au websites.

While the monitor is sold seperately, you can see just how tiny the M51X is

Source: PCauthority