Alienware and Bigfoot intro online gaming PC

Alienware on Wednesday announced it has released the Aurora Online Gaming Edition desktop PC. The tower is meant to improve the online gaming experience thanks to the inclusion of a Killer NIC K1 network card from Bigfoot Networks that claims to reduce lag and deliver smoother, more responsive online gameplay. The PC includes AMD's Phenom X4 9950 CPU rated at 2.6GHz and also sports 4GB of RAM.

The PC is housed in Alienware's P2 chassis with AlienIce 3.0 Video Cooling to prevent overheating in gaming sessions. Graphics processing is handled by ATI's Radeon HD 4870 card. In its base configuration, buyers get a 250GB SATA hard disk drive with Windows Vista preloaded as well as a 20x dual-layer DVD burner.

Blackfoot's Killer NIC K1 gaming network card features a 333MHz Network Processing Unit (NPU) with 64MB of memory. It reportedly improves responsiveness by bypassing the Windows stack for network transfers and thereby reduces in-game ping. Frame rates are also allegedly increased by offloading certain networking tasks from the main processor.

The Aurora Online Gaming Edition PC is now available for purchase from Alienware's website, with prices starting at $1,899.

Alienware Aurora Online Gaming Edition PC