Aurora 7500

Laughing in the face of your normal price/performance balance, Alienware's Aurora 7500 is all high-end speed, top-drawer internal components and attention to detail. This is a beast of a PC.

The 7500 is a brilliant performer, but while attempting to dazzle you with sheer grunt, Alienware has missed out some basic features that really should be included in a PC for this sort of money.

The baseline system starts off expensive and, if you pop along to the Alienware website, you can configure it by adding extra features. This setup comes in at $5,999. But we think you'll need to pay out more to make it worthwhile. For example, this price doesn't include speakers or a monitor, and it'll cost you to upgrade that one-year warranty to four years. We were also disappointed by the 512MB of memory.

You'll either love or hate the HR Giger-inspired steel case - we think it looks great - but there's no arguing with its superb ability to deal with heat and noise. This PC runs cool and quiet. There's plenty of upgrade room inside, too.

A gamer's dream, the Aurora has two 256MB nVidia 7800 GTX graphics cards in SLI (scalable link interface) mode, and Creative's excellent Audigy 2 ZS. We managed 115fps (frames per second) on our Doom 3 test and the system didn't dip below 100 when pushed to 1,280x1,024. AMD's dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4400+ helped it to a WorldBench 5 score of 108.