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The best gifts for the PC gamer in your life
Of the more than two dozen sections in our massive holiday gift guide, the PC gaming is one of the largest. That's because there are so many directions you can go in here: You can splurge on a laptop (we recommend three here) or pick up any number of accessories like headphones, a mouse, keyboard, mic or webcam. Or, you know, you can pick up some actual games. Find all that in our guide at the link below, and while you're there, check out the 100-plus other items in there.
The Alienware 13 gets better with VR and impressive battery life
Gaming laptops used to be an outlier in the world of portable computing. When the rest of the market was focused on extending battery life, gaming laptops doubled down on raw power and thick frames designed for better airflow. Trying to find a small gaming machine that didn't sacrifice power for portability was a fool's errand. Today, things are different. Gaming laptops can be thin, have enough battery life to survive a plane flight and double as a productivity and entertainment machines with few compromises. The best recent example of this to cross my desk is the Alienware 13, a small, powerful gaming laptop that does almost everything right.
Alienware will give recent laptop buyers a free upgrade
It's tough to buy a laptop when new processors are imminent -- you can't help but feel that the system you just bought will be rendered obsolete weeks later. That might not be a problem if you snagged one of Alienware's latest laptops, though. The Dell-owned PC maker is promising free upgrades if you bought one of its updated portables (those introduced on August 27th) and new processors reach the relevant Alienware line within 30 days. In other words, you're not hosed if a Skylake-based system shows up while you're still getting used to your days-old machine. The company tells us it has "high confidence" that Skylake will show up by late September, so you'll be future-proofed as long as there isn't a delay.
Dell revives the Alienware 18, upgrades its smaller gaming laptops
It's a rare, satisfying feeling when a community rallies together to ask a company to bring back a discontinued product and it actually works. Today is one of those days: Dell announced at PAX that it's bringing back the Alienware 18 -- the most powerful portable gaming machine the company's ever made. The revived 18-inch rig is being touted as a 'special edition' and will pack in a 4th Generation Intel i7 processor, up to 32GB of RAM, a 1TB HDD (with an optional 512GB SSD) dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M or 980M graphics, depending on the configuration. Too big? Too much? No worries --- Alienware is refreshing its 13-, 15- and 17-inch laptops, too.
Alienware puts its new gaming desktop and 13-inch laptop up for sale
If you liked the looks of Alienware's new thin-and-light 13-inch laptop or its bigass, futuristic-looking Area-51 desktop, then listen up: Both are on sale beginning tomorrow, with shipments starting in November, and we finally know the full specs. Starting with the Alienware 13, it goes from $999 (£949 in the UK) with a dual-core Core i5-4210U processor, 8GB of RAM, a 2GB NVIDIA GeForce 860M GPU, 1TB 5,400RPM disk and a fairly low-res 1,366 x 768, non-touch matte display. If you like, you can step up to 16GB of RAM, either a hybrid hard drive or up to a 512GB SSD, and either a 1080p non-touch display or a 2,560 x 1,440 touchscreen. It would seem, though, that despite those various upgrade options, there's only one choice for the CPU and graphics card. Regardless of the configuration you get, the whole thing comes wrapped in a slimmed-down package that weighs about four and a half pounds and measures an inch thick.
The Alienware 13 is the smallest and lightest gaming laptop in Dell's lineup
Y'all remember the Alienware M11x, right? That compact, netbook-sized gaming laptop with the glowing keyboard that made it look like a spaceship? Anyway, Dell discontinued it back in 2012, only to release several big-screen machines the following year. Well, it looks like someone at the company saw the error of their ways: Dell just announced the Alienware 13, and while it's not the brand's smallest notebook ever, it's definitely the smallest the company has put out in quite some time.
