alienware posts

Atari made some news a few weeks before E3 2009 when they announced that they were pulling out of exhibiting from the E3 exhibit hall and meeting room they had previously booked. In the end, however, Atari still had an indirect presence at the show. Their Ghostbusters game, due out later this month, was being shown in playable form at Alienware's booth. We got to play the beta build of the PC version on the newly revealed M17x gaming laptop and it looked pretty darn good. We can't wait to check out the final version in a few days.

Atari's other big game for 2009 is Champions Online and on the last day of the show its director at Cryptic Studios Bill Roper showed off a demo of the title to a number of journalists, Big Download included, in the Palms Restaurant just a block away from the LA Convention Center. We also got our own beta key to the game and will give our hands-on impressions of the highly anticipated super hero MMO in the near future.

Apparently, there's some big event of some sort happening in Los Angeles this week. Supposed to be a huge deal in the video game industry, something like that? Lots of news? Anyone know what all the fuss is about?

BI just keeps seeing poorly-lit phone-cam pictures of hotel rooms from Callaham's Twitter feed and snarky IM's from our head honcho about how long the line at Starbucks is.

Why, yes, BI wasn't able to make it to the E3 party (apologies to the fine folks at $Unspecified_Vendor, at whose party we were not able to cause chaos the likes of which would be spoken of in hushed tones for decades to come; maybe next year). Truthfully, we're not actually bitter about it. Given the flood of news that's been coming from this year's edition of the expo, hardware, especially for anyone not using a console and/or prone to waving things around, seems to be pretty much an afterthought.

Well, there was a particularly festive flight sim joystick. Thank you, Logitech.

A few days ago we reported that Dell's Alienware unit had launched a teaser site for a product announcement that would be made the first day of E3. Now it appears some more clues as to the nature of the announcement have been found in the forums of Notebook Review.

The message boards have posted up an shrouded image of a dark but very impressive (on the surface) laptop along with the alien writing. Someone did a translation of the writing and came up with this:

The sum of the first four primes
denotes a state of two parts
known as the gentleman's muscle car of 1967
when pure, it will carry a yield strength of 7-11 mpa
is always empty in zero sum games

Okay . . .that was helpful. In any case we have less than 5 days to find out for ourselves.

[Via Engadget]

E3 2009 seems to be bringing back at least a few PC hardware companies. Intel and Nvidia are listed as exhibiting on the show floor and Dell's Gaming unit (that means Alienware) is also listed as showing up at the show. But there's evidence that Dell-Alienware are prepping a major E3 announcement.

Alienware recently sent word about a new web site called www.allpowerful.com with a Flash-driven animation set up, alien letters and countdown clock that will run out on June 2. That just happens to be the first official day for E3 2009. You can sign up to get a email notice about whatever it is they are planning to reveal. Until then, we watch and wait.

Ardent fans of this column will doubtless have noticed that BI has been a little, shall we say, thin on the ground of late. There are two main reasons for this -- one, BI's biennial sojourn to the other side of the country for a week of testosterone poisoning, and, two, a multi-week stint with a rather demanding guest around the house.

The guest in question, however, wasn't an unemployed former college buddy, a surprise visit from the in-laws, or a couch-surfing second cousin. It was, rather, a sixty pound, gloss-black obelisk -- Alienware's top-of-the-line gaming system, the Area-51 X58, tricked out by them with damn near every bell, whistle, and go-fast toy in their arsenal. And BI had their blessing to, and we quote this with great relish, "Send it back as a smoking pile of slag. But, seriously, watch Iron Man on the Blu-Ray drive first."

We were skeptical. Surely, entrusting someone of BI's questionable restraint with a valuable piece of equipment would carry more stringent usage guidelines than, "Give it back when we ask for it." They were adamant -- this was the third such system released to the wild, and they wanted it to be abused.

Fortunately, the conference call ended before our mad laughter began.

PC makers have to deal with the slowdown in the economy like everyone else and Dell is no exception. The company has already announced plans to cut down a number of its workers. Now it appears that its gaming PC division Alienware (which Dell bought three years ago this month) is gearing up for similar layoffs.

ExtremeTech reports that in a memo sent to Alienware employees the company will shut down manufacturing plants in Miami (where Alienware was originally founded) and in Ireland. Alienware PCs will now be made in previously established Dell plants. A number of Alienware workers will also be laid off although exact numbers have not been revealed. Oddly enough, Alienware also plans to expand the reach of its PC brand in the near future to 35 countries, in part because of its merger with Dell.

A couple of years ago Bigfoot Networks launched their first gaming LAN network card, the Killer NIC. The card was designed to give PC gamers a smoother and better online gameplay experience even with fast broadband connections. While the device was much more expensive than the normal NIC product reviews of the Killer card were very favorable.

Today Bigfoot Networks announced their plans to release their second generation gaming PC network card family, the Killer Xeno. Using a PCIe interface the new card has more memory, an improved network chip and hardware acceleration for improved voice chat in games.

There will be two versions of the Killer Xeno card. The the Pro version will have 128MB of memory and sell for $129.99. It will go on sale in April via third party card maker EVGA. It will also be made available as an option on Alienware PCs. The Ultra version, with 256 MB of memory, will go on sale in May for $179.99.

Dell made some noise last year about perhaps transferring most of their gaming oriented PC business to their Alienware division but at CES this year Dell launched a new gaming PC that's all about having AMD inside. The Dell XPS 625 desktop PC supports the so called AMD Dragon platform.

That means the PC has the newly released AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition processor alongside two ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards in CrossFire mode. AMD's own OverDrive program also allows for overcloking the processor as well. Pricing for the new XPS 625 PC starts at $999 and it's available now on Dell's web site.

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.