Tweet
When Valve decided to postpone its Steam Machines initiative, its hardware partners were left in a difficult position - hold back on their living room-friendly PCs and wait for the final SteamOS and controller, or repackage their offerings as more traditional Windows-orientated PCs? Alienware went for the latter with its innovative Alpha console/PC hybrid, going to the trouble of engineering its own console-style user interface in order to make the machine fully operable without mouse and keyboard. The bolt-on UI is a bit of a kludge to be honest - and that's a shame, as the hardware design story here is quite remarkable.Let's start with some basic facts: the Alienware Alpha is significantly smaller than the PlayStation 4 (in fact, it's absolutely tiny), it's significantly more energy efficient, it's quieter, and it has something the consoles don't - complete access to a mammoth back-catalogue of games. While there's plenty to discuss about the overall power level of the Alpha's hardware, it's clearly capable of competing with the Sony hardware on recent titles, and its performance is quantifiably a step ahead of Xbox One. Indeed, some might say that it's the physical embodiment of a key challenge the latest wave of consoles will have going forward - their designs were finalised two to three years ago, while PC hardware development continues to improve significantly year-on-year. This year's Alpha is in no way a knockout blow to the consoles, but two to three years down the road, it could be a different story.
We've already covered the raw specs of the Alienware Alpha subsequent to a PR briefing we attended at the latter end of 2014, but getting the kit into the office allows us a much more forensic examination of the hardware. We were sent the base level offering for review - a console armed with a low-voltage Intel Core i3-4130T: a dual-core, quad-thread CPU capable of hitting 2.9GHz. This works in combination with an apparently customised version of the laptop GTX 860M - effectively identical to the desktop GTX 750 Ti, losing just a little memory speed.
Read more…
More...