Manufacturer: Alienware

Price: $1,349 (My configuration)

Colors: Black

Weight: 12 lbs

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It’s been 3 long years since my review of the Alienware M17x-R2 laptop. I love the thing, and it can still play the latest games, but it is starting to show its age. I wasn’t too fond of Alienware laptops because they used to be so expensive. Since their redoing of their entire lineup, they have become much cheaper over the years. With the new 14, 17, and 18 laptops and the Area-51 desktop being dropped for the X51, they have come a long way. They still offer the monster Aurora desktop, and maxing it out won’t cost you $6,000 anymore. The X51 is a console-sized, compact, small-form-factor desktop that is very affordable yet still offers a lot of power for gaming.

My specs for this setup are as follows:

Motherboard: Intel H87

CPU: 4th-Generation Intel i7 4770 @3.9Ghz

GPU: Nvidia 2GB GTX 670

RAM: 8GB DDR3-1600Mhz

HDD: 2TB @7200RPM

That’s a pretty powerful rig for something the size of an Xbox 360. The chassis itself looks amazing. It’s all about the custom design; what sets gaming rigs apart from others is the chassis; the more unique, the better. The AlienFX slits on each side give it a sleek look. The beveled top and front plate make it look sleek. The rotatable alien head on the front gives it that extra little bit of uniqueness to set it apart from other rigs. There are plenty of ports here as well. 2 DVI and 1 HDMI, 8 USB 3.0 ports, surround sound hookups, a headphone and mic jack in the front, another HDMI port on the onboard chip, and a projector port. That’s a lot of ports in one small tower. While looks are important, performance is even more important, so let’s see how it stacks up to the most graphically demanding games today.

 Metro: Last Light

Advanced PhysX: On

Quality: Very High

Resolution: 1920×1080

SSAA: 4x

Tessellation: Very High

Texture Filtering: 16x

The game hovered around 15-20 FPS on these settings. That’s pretty much unplayable. You’re probably wondering why the GTX 670 can’t handle these settings, and it was from one simple setting: SSAA. At 4x, the scene is aliased quite heavily, and you need two cards to be able to handle the load. Once you drop it down to 2x, the frame rate shoots up to 35. On FXAA, the frame rate is even higher, but it looks a bit blurry. That’s pretty impressive, as Last Light is one of the most graphically demanding games out there, right next to Crysis 3. The 670 was obviously designed to handle stressful loads in DirectX 11.

Tomb Raider

Anti-aliasing: 4x SSAA

Depth of Field: Ultra

Exclusive Fullscreen: On

Fullscreen: On

Hair Quality: TressFX

High Precision Lighting: On

Level of Detail: Ultra

Post-processing: On

Reflections: High

Resolution: 1920×1080

Shadow Resolution: High

Shadows: Ultra

SSAO: Ultra

Tessellation: On

Texture Filter: 16x

Texture Quality: Ultra

That’s everything at its absolute maximum. I was getting the same frame rate as Metro at 10–15 FPS. Once again, it was the 4x SSAA. That is really for 2 cards to handle, but once I dropped it to 2, it went to 40 FPS. The game looks amazing, and the frame rate stayed pretty steady and didn’t jump around too much. If you turn off tessellation, the frame rate goes up to around 50 because tessellation is pretty demanding. Surprisingly, the TressFX will give you a 5–10 frame hit just for Lara’s hair.

 Batman: Arkham City

Ambient Occlusion: Yes

Anti-aliasing: 32x CSAA

Detail Level: Extreme

DirectX 11 features: MVSS and HBAO

Distortion: Yes

DX11 Tessellation: High

Dynamic Shadows: Yes

Fullscreen: Yes

Hardware Accelerated PhysX: Yes

Lens Flares: Yes

Light Shafts: Yes

Reflections: Yes

Resolution: 1920×1080

Here’s another GPU-demanding game. Arkham City is one of the most tessellation-heavy games out there, and the 670 runs it like a charm. Here’s a game where you can run everything higher than GeForce Experience tells you. It says to put the anti-aliasing at FXAA, yet I can run it on 32X just fine with 60 FPS. This just goes to show the true power of the 670 and the 4770 working in tandem.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

Anti-aliasing: Enabled

Bloom: Enabled

Blur Effects: Enabled

Cinematic Depth of Field: Enabled

Dangling Objects Limit: Disabled

Decals: High Spec

Depth of Field – Cutscenes: Enabled

Depth of Field: Gameplay: Enabled

Fullscreen: Enabled

Light Shafts: Enabled

LOD Distance: Far

Motion Blur: Enabled

Number of Shadowed Lights: Ultra

Resolution: 1920×1080

Shadow Quality: Ultra

SSAO: Enabled

Texture Downscaling: None

Texture Memory Size (MB): Very Large

Ubersampling: Enabled

Vignette: Enabled

Wet Surfaces Rain Effect: Enabled

This is a game where, when it came out, you needed two GPUs to turn on Ubersampling. My 5870 on my laptop has a hard time running the game maxed out, even without Ubersampling. The game has a smooth 60 FPS with all the above settings; not a single hitch was seen even in huge open areas.

 Crysis 3

Anisotropic Filtering: 16x

Anti-aliasing: 4x TXAA High

Fullscreen: Yes

Game Effects: Very High

Object: Very High

Particles: Very High

Post-Processing: Very High

Resolution: 1920×1080

Shading: Very High

Shadows: Very High

Texture Resolution: Very High

Water: Very High

Another game where the anti-aliasing stressed the 670 a bit too much. Using Tessellation anti-aliasing drops the FPS by about 10; in fact, any high version of the AA drops the FPS by 10. Medium is by 5, and there’s almost no drop in low on any of the three AA options. You really need two cards, or a 680/690/Titan or 7xx series card, to get high FPS with those AA options. Everything panned out well, especially since the water tessellation kicks most cards’ butts, is very tessellation heavy, and the shadows can really bog down most cards. The 670 was able to run all this at around 40 FPS. That’s damn good for just one card.

During all this testing, the X51 stayed nice and quiet; I barely heard it. After 3 hours of steady gaming, I felt the back of the tower, and it was barely warm. That’s some damn good cooling in such a small space. This means you don’t have to worry about games crashing or shutting down from GPUs getting too hot or the CPU overloading with heat.

Alienware computers always come with their own awesome suite of software, the Alienware Command Center. Command Center 3.0 was launched in February and features AlienAdrenaline. Say you like drawing a lot, and you listen to music or your favorite YouTube playlist in the background. You can create a shortcut that will launch Photoshop, your playlist web link, your media player, and even change the AlienFX to match the mood with a single click. That’s really awesome. Adrenaline also has system monitoring in real-time and allows you to record it. Of course, AlienFX allows you to change the colors on your tower, but I was disappointed here. You can’t morph or allow pulsing like with the laptops, and the alien head marquee on the front isn’t a hard drive light. The light is on the back of the PC, and I like to know when my computer is active. You can change each side of the tower and the head marquee individually, but I would have liked more options available. On top of that, there’s AlienFusion, which allows you to change all your power settings, which is great.

In the end, the X51-R2 is the perfect balance between power and compactability, as well as price. The 670 is a very powerful card, and the 4770 is an awesome CPU. The 8 threads make a huge difference over the 4 thread quad-cores out there. If you want a pre-built desktop at an affordable price, the X51 is the way to go.