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Rick Rizner, John Goddard
The well-equipped Alienware Aurora 7500 comes packed to the gills with top-notch components--it has a 2.4-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual- core processor, 1GB of DDR400 SDRAM, an ATI Radeon X850 XT graphics card (with 256MB DDR SDRAM), and two 160GB hard drives in a striped RAID configuration. But at $4041, the Aurora 7500 is also quite expensive.
In our previous tests of the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ processor, PCs with this dual-core chip performed admirably, consistently beating systems that used Intel's dual-core Pentium EE 840 across the board. The Aurora 7500 likewise sailed briskly through many portions of our WorldBench 5 test suite and turned in an impressive overall score of 118. Although that's not the highest rating we've recorded--that honor still belongs to the Xi Computer MTower 64 AGE-SLI with a WorldBench 5 score of 125--the Aurora's mark puts it in third place (after the ABS Ultimate M6) among all the systems we've tested this year.
One of the biggest performance benefits of using a dual-core CPU- -as demonstrated by the Aurora 7500's test results--appears when you...