Alienware Aurora 7500

“The 7500 looks as if it came straight out of the Space Age. It has sleek aerodynamic contours and a cool blue LED glowing inside it, and comes loaded with some of the newest and baddest components out there.

Under the hood, the 7500 has all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a top-of-the-line PC. It's got an AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 for a central processor with two 2.6-gigahertz cores, making it great for heavy-duty multimedia use like games and video editing. It also has a dual 512 MB ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire, a top-of-the-line graphics card...and a surround sound-enabled audio card.

On the front of the computer there are four USB ports, a flash-memory reader for several different card formats, and a DVD drive. Also, Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition, which helps you manage video and music, plus gain access to your computer through a living room TV, comes installed. In short, the Aurora 7500 is equipped to serve as the center of your home theater system.

There's no shortage of options for the expert with big plans to trick out the PC -- say, coordinate multiple monitors or install a half-dozen surround-sound speakers. There are four different monitor jacks, and six different jacks and a Firewire port on the audio card.

To give the computer a workout, I loaded up the spooky first-person shooter game F.E.A.R. and cranked all the graphics settings to the max. In case you've ever wondered whether dropping big bucks on a snazzy graphics card and a power-hungry processor makes a difference, the 7500 will clear up the matter once and for all. Played on the standard Dell I use at work (which I rarely do -- promise), it looks like any other video game.

On the Alienware PC, it was as if I were in a movie. Game play was never choppy, and the graphics were stunning: Pools of water rippled and glistened in detail. Smears of blood on the wall were disturbingly grisly. It really makes for an in-depth experience that far exceeds what I'm used to. After one scene in which the villain chews off a victim's face, a colleague commented that I looked a few shades whiter. I'll concede I felt pretty spooked out.

Was I impressed with the 7500's performance? You better believe it.”