Destined to Reign

Now that Intel's mighty Core i7 is all out in the open, it's no shock to see a wave of gaming rigs come along boasting said chip. Following in the footsteps of Dell and Gateway comes Alienware with the Area-51 X-58 -- a beast that's a leap above (in terms of power and price) the recently revealed Area-51 750i. Serious gamers can select from the Core i7 920 (2.66GHz), 940 (2.93GHz) or Core i7 Extreme (3.2GHz) along with dual gigabit Ethernet jacks, one or two 2GB ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2s, up to 2TB of HDD space, an optional dual-layer Blu-ray burner and the usual complement of ports. The sky's the limit once you really start speccing it out, but the ball gets rolling at "just" $1,649.