Posts with tag: Alienware

Late last week gaming PC company Alienware teased its customers on a major new announcement. Today the company revealed what they were hinting at with the announcement of their new M17 gaming PC notebook. The 17-inch display notebook has the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300 mobile processor and is the first Alienware notebook to support ATI's Crossfire graphics set-up with two ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 cards inside.

Alienware's press release states that their M17 notebook can be configured with a Core 2 Duo processor, Crossfire and 3GB of memory for under $2,000. Of course you can go all out and get one configured with up to 4 GB of memory and 1 TB of hard drive storage via two 500 GB drives in a RAID 0 set-up. Obviously this is a desktop replacement notebook rather than one that would be used to do extensive travelling with.

The gaming-enthusiast division of Dell, Alienware, has always been good at generating hype for its products. Now emails are going out with this above teaser image that seems to indicate a major new product announcement that will be officially announced on Monday.

Alienware has always been a major gaming PC maker, even before Dell purchased them in 2005. A few months ago, a Dell spokesperson stated, "We are going to invest like crazy in product development, design and engineering to propel Alienware as the premier gaming brand in the future." Is Monday the day we will get some concrete info on those efforts? Stay tuned.

Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment debuted its first trailer for the upcoming MMO Stargate Worlds several months ago on an episode of the TV series Stargate Atlantis. That first trailer, however, didn't actually show gameplay from the MMO. Tonight, the first actual publicly seen gameplay trailer from Stargate Worlds will be shown at 8 pm ET on G4TV's X-Play series.

In related news, the developer has teamed up with PC maker Alienware for a contest where the winner will get an Alienware Area-51 PC with a Dell 30 inch monitor and an advanced copy of Stargate Worlds.

Big, huge PC maker HP bought small gaming PC maker Voodoo PC back in 2006 and since then the merging of the company has produced the powerful (and expensive) 002 Blackbird PC which has gotten a ton of critical acclaim since its introduction in late 2007. Now it seems HP and Voodoo PC are preparing yet another major announcement.

According to a new article on the Fortune web site, HP and Voodoo PC are going to reveal new products that " . . . could begin to establish the company as a provider of beautiful technology gear." That's a pretty vague description but we are hoping that these new products won't just look good but have some horsepower as well. HP-Voodoo are competing for the gaming PC space with Dell and its sister company Alienware (while Dell purchased in 2006). Recently it was revealed that Dell would put more emphasis on their gaming PCs on the Alienware side.

[Via Engadget]

There are some gaming rigs that just take the cake when it comes to pure, refined muscle. Running Crysis on maximum settings at 60 FPS constant? Pieceacake! Handling Age of Conan on max settings with dozens, perhaps hundreds of players on the screen at a time? Not a problem. Alienware has just announced a new machine that makes these beastly rigs looks like wussies.

Featuring a 3.2 ghz processor overclocked to an insane 4.0 ghz, your choice of linked video cards (Geforce 9800 GX2 or Radeon HD 3870 X2), and 4 gb of memory, it's a crazy gaming rig for those who don't want to build their own and just want to get to the fragging. Just don't let all that power go to your head.

It's so freaky! Ok, it's not that freaky but when you write about a game called Freaky Creatures you kind of have to start with something like that. Today it was announced that the upcoming MMO game from Abandon Entertainment will have a promotion with gaming PC maker Alienware.

Specifically people who sign up to beta test Freaky Creatures this summer will be eligible to win a number of prizes including an Alienware Area-51 m15x notebook. The game, which allows players to construct their own creatures and then have them battle other creatures online, is scheduled to officially launch sometime this summer.

A few months ago, a number of PC gaming hardware and game publishers launched the non-profit PC Gaming Alliance, designed to both help promote PC gaming as well as solve some of the issues that are currently plaguing the industry (hardware compatibility and piracy being the top two concerns). One of the members of the Alliance is AMD and this morning the PC graphics chip and processor company announced a program called simply AMD Game that is being designed to help consumers purchase PCs for gaming purposes.

The press release states that a study by Jon Peddie Research indicated that two-thirds of all PCs sold in 2007 has just the basics in terms of hardware and were not able to really give a solid gaming PC experience. The AMD Game logo will be put on hardware and components that the company feels will give consumers a clue that these products will be suited for gaming. Hardware retailers like Newegg and TigerDirect and gaming PC makers like Alienware, Velocity Micro and others will sell PCs with the AMD Game logo. The company has even posted up info on several hardware configurations for PCs that could be used to make high-powered gaming PCs

Of course, all of these is designed to also help AMD sell more hardware to consumers; they make both processors under the AMD name and graphics chips under the ATI brand. Having a gaming PC with an AMD made motherboard, processor and graphics chip makes things simple for buyers and gets AMD more money. They need it to to compete with Intel on the processor side and NVIDIA on the graphics side. Will Intel and NVIDIA also launch their own similar program? That's a good question...

What is the next leap that is needed for gaming-oriented PCs? According to Dell's gaming PC subsidiary Alienware it's not a faster processor or graphics card but moving to a more powerful operating system. In a new News.com article Alienware's desktop product manager Marc Diana says the major PC hardware companies (Microsoft, Intel, NVIDIA, AMD) need to move collectively to fully support 64-bit based operating systems.

Ever since the release of Windows 95 13 years ago, most PC games have supported 32-bit based OSs with only a few that have fully supported 64-bit systems natively. In fact Diana admits Alienware doesn't even bother to offer 64-bit based PCs because the driver support for such a system isn't available, in their opinion. Yet going to a 64-bit OS would not only increase performance for PCs in theory it would also allow gaming PCs to have memory that can break the current 4GB limit that 32-bit OS have.

Diana said other factors could also help in making more powerful PCs in the future including moving to DDR3-based memory that use less power but are clocked higher than DDR2-based memory. At the moment DDR3-based memory is still much more expensive than the norm.

Remember yesterday when we reported that Dell was phasing out its XPS line of gaming PCs, according to a story from the Wall Street Journal? Well, Dell looks like it's doing a little damage control on that item. In a post on Dell's official blog site its Corporate Communications head Anne Camden states, "We don't plan an early phase-out of these systems as the WSJ incorrectly stated, and in fact will continue to refresh them to keep them on the front edge of gaming."

However it's also clear that Dell does plan to put more of its gaming PC emphasis on its sister company Alienware, the Miami based company that Dell bought over two years ago. Camden states, "We are going to invest like crazy in product development, design and engineering to propel Alienware as the premier gaming brand in the future." We always thought it was odd that Dell promoted its own XPS gaming line when it already had a gaming line in Alienware. For now it appears things will stay that way but we get the feeling the XPS line will be used for other product lines and less for gaming in the years ahead.

Dell may have just launched their new XPS 730 line-up of hardcore PCs game machines but according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal (the full article is for subscribers) that may be the last XPS gaming PC the company will make. The report states that Dell will begin to phase out the XPS line because it was eating into the sales of its sister company Alienware which Dell purchased back in March 2006.

Again, Dell just released its new XPS 730 and the XPS 730 H2C PC systems a couple of weeks ago so it's interesting that they might be considering such a move soon after this new model release. The Wall Street Journal also reports that Alienware plans to release new case models that are made of new materials and look much different than the current design.