Alienware intros $1K Area-51 750i

Alienware on Thursday veered away from its normal high-end audience to unveil the Area-51 750i. The system is the company's least expensive gaming tower but comes with the same lightable casing, wiring and stronger power supplies as more expensive Area-51 models; only the individual components dictate its price, and the system can be scaled upwards to include some of the better features from Alienware's catalog, such as liquid cooling and noise damping.

The base model is a relatively inexpensive $1,049 and carries a 3GHz Core 2 Duo, a 750W power supply, a GeForce 9800 GT for video, 2GB of memory and a 250GB hard drive. Systems can scale up to a quad-core 3GHz Core 2 Extreme, a 1,200W power supply, two Radeon HD 4870 X2s, 3TB of hard drives, Blu-ray and 8GB of memory. Alienware is promising a relatively quick turnaround for its PC and should ship pre-orders in late November.