Date:
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Author:
Gary Huff
Editor:
Jason Wall
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Alienware Aurora 7500-R4

The latest system to pass under the [H] microscope is a Vista machine equipped with an AMD processor. Is the combination of gaming hardware and Windows Vista an out-of-this-world experience or an extraterrestrial headache?

continued...

Part I – Product Overview: Company Overview and Purchasing

The Website from Another World

Since Dell is now the parent company of Alienware, it should come as no surprise that Alienware’s website is starting to look much like Dell’s, except with an Alienware skin. The logo is featured at the top-left of the page, while a flashy image entices the viewer with the performance of an “OVERCLOCKED! Intel quad-core processor.” It’s also only available for a limited time, which we found to be extremely strange. You generally don’t see “limited time offers” on technical advances – rather, they’re more common on discounts or free items.

From the main page you can shop for PCs based on how we plan to use them. The categories are Gaming, Home & Home Office, Business, Government & Education, and the Creative Professional. We clicked on Gaming and were immediately greeted with an image announcing that “Windows Vista Is Here!” Good to know, but we hoped that we could still get XP if we wanted it. We scrolled down to see the list of machines we could order in the gaming category and were given a selection of both desktops and laptops, including a Superman edition laptop that comes with a “super” price tag.

We clicked on Desktops and were taken to a page that listed all the different models that Alienware has to offer. At the time of purchase, the desktops were divided into Auroras and Area-51s, which feature AMD and Intel Core 2 Duo processors, respectively. Interested in how the AMD 5000 series of processors is doing, we clicked on the sleek image of the Aurora 7500 and were taken to the main product page. The image on this page showed yet another color variation of the PC we were looking at, and at the bottom-right of the image was a bright blue button for customizing our machine. We clicked it and entered the customization options.

Anyone familiar with ordering from Dell will be at home here. Unlike some vendor websites where the customer has to click on drop-down boxes to see all the options available, everything here is out in the open. Selections are made by clicking the radio buttons next to the options that you want. The first selection of note is with the processor. For the Aurora 7500s, no Intel CPUs are offered. The available AMD CPUs are from the X2 4600+ to the X2 6000+.

At the time of purchase, the only options for the OS were Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate. Since that time, Alienware has put XP back on the table for the consumer. Currently, the OS selections are Windows XP Professional and Media Center Edition, along with Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate. Any selection other than Vista Home Premium adds to the cost of the machine, thus encouraging the customer to stick to the default OS.

The various colors that the Alienware chassis can be “painted” (it’s a plastic shell) add nothing to the cost, but adding a lighting system to your rig will set you back $200. There are other advanced chassis options such as liquid cooling and “Acoustic Dampening.” We opted for neither of these upgrades.

A customer can further upgrade their selection with RAM sizes up to 4GB, hard drives that can hold a full Terabyte of data, a Blu-ray burner, and up to dual NVIDIA 8800 GTX cards. For an additional $30, Alienware offers to optimize your video card settings for the highest possible performance using its AlienAdrenaline package. In actuality, it doesn’t necessarily optimize your performance across the board. Rather, it allows you to optimize performance in different applications. In other words, Alienware isn't overclocking your card - it's simply providing a redundant NVIDIA profiles interface.

Also offered are Ageia PhysX cards and Dell displays. Several keyboards are also available, including the Logitech G15 and MX 5000 cordless mouse/keyboard combo.

The second page of the customization options contains warranty, support, and additional software options. An additional $290 can get you the most comprehensive warranty with 4-year toll-free phone support and onsite service. Alienware also gives you the choice of adding its system restore package, which is cleverly dubbed “Respawn.” It costs an extra $40, which makes it the most expensive image recovery option that we’ve seen in the integrator business. It looks even more costly when you consider that most integrators include an image-based restore solution for free. We opted for the disc set to see what the $40 buys us.

You can also add a few games to your order, including Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, and World of Warcraft. The games cost about as much as what you would expect to pay from a local retailer. More “boring” software such as Norton Anti-Virus, Microsoft Office, and Adobe Photoshop are also available for purchase. We stuck with the default options on this page, opting only to include the “Respawn” set in our order.

But Wait, There’s More!

After hardware and software, the third configuration page offers oodles of accessories that you can bundle with your order. External hard drives, high capacity flash drives, a Saitek gamepad, an Ozma headphone set, and even Microsoft Zunes are available as add-ons. We’re simple folk so we avoided adding any of these extras, but we did graciously accept the free t-shirt that is listed at the bottom. You have your choice of white or black, but there is no choice for the size of the shirt.

After completing all of our customization options, we finally got to the page detailing our order, price, and tax/shipping and handling. We then provided our credit card information and submitted the order. We promptly received an automated response email from Alienware detailing our purchase. A link at the bottom of the email took us to a section of the website that would provide real-time status information on our purchase.

Four days later we received another email informing us that our payment had been received and that our order had been added to the Production Queue. One day later we were sent another email informing us that our system was being built. Another twelve days passed before an email arrived informing us that our system had shipped. The email provided both our order number and a FedEx tracking number. Three days later, the machine was at our door. All told, twenty days passed between placing our initial order and receiving the PC. This was right in line with the amount of time that Alienware had promised to have the unit delivered.

Soon after receiving the note that our machine was on its way, we began receiving email newsletters from Alienware – the “Alienware Insider.” We were also asked for our feedback on our buying and ownership experience. In all, we received seven additional unsolicited emails over the course of a month. Granted, this isn’t a lot of emails, and at the top of each email is an option to unsubscribe to future messages. Also, part of us likes the fact that the company continues to keep in touch with its customers, even if the “newsletters” only contain advertisements for other Alienware products. If the company actually put some information of value in the newsletters, we might not have found them quite so useless and annoying.