Alienware Strikes Back

Crazy for Star Wars and in the market for a new high-end gaming system? Alienware has a PC for you.

Whether you were secretly rooting for the Empire to win or have your own Jedi aspirations, you can choose a case to suit you with the Light Side and Dark Side editions of the Alienware Aurora PC (below), based on the AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 processor.

Lightside


Darkside


The cases come with really cool-looking (yes, I'm a fan) paintings of either Darth, the Emperor, the Death Star, and Boba Fett, or with Obi-wan, Yoda, Luke, Leia and Han, plus the Millennium Falcon and other familiar ships. To complement the outer covering, you'll also get side-of-the-Force specific wallpapers and skins on the operating system--and it's all been blessed by Lucas. Alienware has offered OS skins before (free to download from their Web site) but the new skins will be for the Aurora: Star Wars Edition PCs only.

For the more serious-minded, Alienware has also updated its workstations with a new chassis, which offers better cooling, a quieter experience, and some nice details, like easy access to FireWire, USB, and audio ports in the front--even when the front of the case is locked to protect the four hot-swap drive bays.

The new MJ-12 7550A system comes with a new platform inside which supports dual AMD Opteron 200 series chips, up to 16GB of RAM with the forthcoming Windows XP X64 OS (4GB with current Windows XP), SATA II for faster disk access, and two real 16-lane PCI Express slots so you can run two SLI-enabled NVidea graphics boards at full speed.

The platform is available now in Alienware's current workstations, but the new chassis will come in June. Like current workstations, the new ones will also have accoustic dampeners inside to keep the system quiet. Alienware's workstations target content creators, video editors, and other users who need a machine with serious muscle.

And since AMD's dual-core chips won't require a new motherboard for dual-core support, it's a pretty safe bet that these systems will be able to handle dual-core AMD Opterons when the chips are available.