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This £1,729 version of the Aurora R7 is a nicely balanced system that promises plentiful general purpose and gaming performance out of the box, but could also be upgraded fairly easily with a larger hard drive, SSD and extra 2.5inch drives.
The combination of an Intel Core i7-8700 and Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics is the heart of the system, and it’ll blast through any sort of desktop/workstation task. Meanwhile, it should happily provide speedy gaming performance at anything up to and beyond 1440p resolutions.
On the graphics front you can jump up to a GTX 1080 Ti, dual GTX 1070s or dual GTX 1080 Tis. For such a small machine the latter is particularly impressive, though we suspect the system would run fairly hot and loud.
But back to this machine and joining the CPU and graphics is a 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD. Specifically it’s a Toshiba XG5 which is rated for a decent 2,100MB/s read and 1050MB/s write. We would be tempted to bump up the boot drive to a 512GB SSD but at £240 this isn’t a good value upgrade.
You also get a 1TB hard drive which is also made by Toshiba and, in a move that is surprising both because of the year we’re in and the size of this machine, there’s even an 8x DVD+/-RW drive. You can also upgrade the latter to a Blu-ray writer for £50.
Otherwise, everything else you get here is on the motherboard. There’s a Qualcomm DW1820 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card that can do 2×2 802.1ac and Bluetooth 4.1, while round the back you get a seriously impressive array of connectivity.
There are six USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, one USB-C port, a DisplayPort, Ethernet, optical and coaxial digital audio out, and six analogue audio inputs and outputs. The graphics card also has three DisplayPorts and one HDMI, plus, you get a further three USB 3.0 ports, a USB-C and headphone and microphone jacks on the front.
Comparing the overall spec to a local system integrator, we specced up a similar machine for £1,500, suggesting Alienware isn’t offering particularly exceptional value here. The snazzy small case and custom liquid cooler add a little value but don't entirely bridge the £200 gap.
