GAMING PCs

Alienware Area 51 ALX

PCs for gamers are all about the power—and all about the cool factor, both of which the Alienware Area 51 ALX has in spades.

Performance first. You can get an Area 51 ALX in any one of a number of powerful configurations, but I'll outline a typical one here. My dream system is built around an Intel Pentium 4 840 Extreme Edition CPU, which is a dual-core processor on a single chip. Performance is enhanced ever further with Intel's Hyper-Threading technology, which supports up to four threads simultaneously.