The high-end specification stretches to the storage as well. Obviously when you fire up a demanding game the fans spin up, but even then the Aurora 7500 isn’t that noisy. Alienware has also stuck sound insulation cladding to the inside of the case. Non of the fans spin particularly fast so they don’t make a huge amount of noise. There’s a 60mm fan in the side panel pulling in cool air, while a large 120mm rear fan pumps the hot air out again. Alienware has fitted a heatpipe Thermaltake CPU cooler to the FX-60, which is pretty quiet in operation. Talking of noise, it amazed me how quiet the Aurora 7500 is. The twin x16 PCI Express slots in the motherboard create the perfect home for the two 512MB 7800GTX cards, and the large heatpipe coolers on the cards keep noise down despite the performance they provide. The 512MB GeForce 7800GTX is a lightning fast graphics solution, but when you put two of them together you’ve got a truly awesome gaming platform. That said, considering the rest of the spec and the price of this machine I would have liked to have seen four 1GB modules in place, although you can always spec more memory at purchase if you think you’ll need it.Ĭomplementing the cutting edge CPU are a couple of white hot graphics cards courtesy of nVidia. We’re definitely getting to the stage where 2GB is necessary for a high-end gaming system – titles like Battlefield 2 need as much memory as possible, even if you have a high-end CPU and graphics card. That said, there will probably be a BIOS update soon to resolve this problem and it’s not like the Aurora 7500 is slow as it is.Īll four DIMM sockets on the motherboard are occupied – there are four 512MB modules for a total memory complement of 2GB. One of the big selling points of the FX series is that they’re unlocked, allowing the end user the option of overclocking. In most cases this wouldn’t be a problem, but considering there’s an FX chip in this machine, it’s a bit of a shame. If there’s one downside to the Asus A8N32-SLi Deluxe it’s that the BIOS won’t let you change the CPU multiplier. The list of games with native X-Fi support is growing, with A-list titles like Battlefield 2 and F.E.A.R. It’s definitely good to see an X-Fi card in a gaming system, allowing the user to take advantage of the latest environmental audio effects. There’s integrated 7.1-channel sound complete with optical digital output, but Alienware hasn’t made use of this, instead fitting a Creative X-Fi soundcard. The Asus motherboard is stacked to the gills with features, including an external SATA port for high-speed external storage. The chipset is cooled passively thanks to some good looking heatpipe equipped coolers – this helps keep overall system noise down to a minimum. This is a great motherboard and one that we liked when it was reviewed back in November. The chip is sitting in an Asus A8N32-SLi Deluxe motherboard, complete with twin x16 PCI Express slots. Our own review of the FX-60 shows it to be a welcome successor to the FX-57, which although clocked faster, was only a single core chip.Īlienware has made sure that the FX-60 has been surrounded by equally high-end components. So, what you have is two unlocked Athlon 64 cores running at 2.6GHz – a pretty formidable power source by anyone’s standards. The FX-60 is, to all intents and purposes, two FX-55 chips in one package. It comes as no surprise that I’m reviewing this machine today, because at about 5am this morning AMD launched the Athlon 64 FX-60 – the fastest chip in its lineup – and that’s exactly what’s sitting inside the Aurora 7500. Anyone who knows Alienware will be aware that it has built its reputation on creating fast, beautifully built and downright desirable computers, and the Aurora 7500 continues that tradition. I’ve seen some pretty fast PCs pass through the TrustedReviews lab, but this system from Alienware is, without a doubt, the fastest machine ever to grace the pages of this publication.
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