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  • Alienware Aurora 7500 gaming tower reviewed

    by 
    Evan Blass
    Evan Blass
    06.05.2006

    When reviewing a computer from Alienware (or any other "boutique" electronics manufacturer, for that matter) it's difficult to compare to other systems on the market, mainly because these machines will offer a lot more power than your typical white box PC but also cost a good deal more than a similarly-equipped rig that you've built yourself. Therefore, setups like the ~$3,000 Aurora 7500 tower will never lead the pack in value, but XYZ Computing gives this particular model a thumbs up when it comes to performance, build quality, and upgradability -- and those benefits don't come cheap. As you'd expect, the 7500's dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ processor and dual nVidia GeForce 7900GT cards in SLI configuration make short work of even the toughest benchmarks, delivering more-than-acceptable framerates for high-end games even at a resolution of 1,600 x 1,200. Besides the steep price (though again, if you want this kind of power on the cheap, you're gonna have to spend hours building your own box), there's not much to criticize about this model, although XYZ laments the lack of dedicated fans for the dual hard drives and the fact that the toasty GPUs don't receive the same kind of liquid-cooling love as the CPU. Still, if you've got some extra dough laying around, but not a lot of extra time, it sounds like you can rest assured that the Aurora 7500 will deliver the top-notch fragging capabilities you desire.