2016 marks 20 years since the guys from Alienware sold their first beige-box PC tower, and the company — run by massive PC giant Dell — is using this year’s E3 conference to celebrate. Not only does Alienware have a demo of some (comparatively) ancient gaming PCs versus its latest and greatest, it’s also a look back at a time when PC gaming was even less cool than it is now.
The video above is a genuinely fun walk down memory lane, and you should take the seven-or-so minutes to watch it. It takes about three minutes until you’ll recognise anything that looks remotely like the smooth, curved, and frankly giant Alienware towers that we all know. Alienware has also just launched its E3 booth, and it has some new hardware to commemorate the occasion. New hardware that’s a lot gutsier than it was 20 years ago.
This year’s E3 haul includes four new PC products — most notably the new mid-tower Aurora, which can be specced with anything from a basic Core i3 to a top-of-the-line i7, and basic discrete graphics all the way to Nvidia’s latest GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 GPUs. Starting at $US799 there’s eventually going to be a bunch of different variants possible, and there are specific SKUs that are both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive certified.
Alienware’s long-running Area 51 behemoth and much smaller X51 desktops are also getting a much-deserved refresh. In the massive Area 51 you’re now able to order a 10-core Intel Broadwell-E monster CPU if you so desire, as well as up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM and over 6 terabytes of storage if you so desire. Triple graphics cards, too, if you don’t like having any money in your wallet. And, to round up the lot, the very same Alienware Alpha that the guys from Zero Latency are using to such good effect. [Alienware]