E3 2004: Alienware confirms first dual-power gaming PC

News - Mighty.

Clearly noting the increased competition from both Dell and HP who are currently in the process of entering the money-spinning gaming PC market, manufacturer Alienware's latest plans - revealed at E3 today - demonstrate a firm desire to 'up the ante'. The result will be the world's first gaming PC created with support for two CPU's and two graphics cards, debuting as part of Alienware's ALX - "Alienware Luxury Experience" line of top-end PCs.

The manufacturer has been developing such a system since 2001, but delayed a planned launch last year in favour of adding support for the new PCI Express graphics card interface, which will be replacing AGP as the port of choice later this year. A "50+% performance gain over traditional graphics solutions" is expected from the dual system, which splits the graphical processing of the screen in half shared between the two cards. A test system running two PCI Express Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra cards was shown at E3.

The custom built mainboard created for this power will also support dual next-generation Intel Xeon processors and up to 8GB memory. Crikey. What's more, because Alienware will not be licensing their technology the only way to acquire this kind of system will be to purchase one from the ALX range.

The system's will debut later this year, pricing is unconfirmed; we're guessing 'expensive', is a good guess though.