Alienware announces Quad CrossFire machine

Posted at: 5:27am 6th March 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

New ALX system offers two Radeon HD 3870X2 cards for quad-GPU power, but only if you can afford it

Space age PC maker Alienware has just announced a new line of ALX machines that feature four Radeon HD 3870 GPUs in CrossFire configuration. The ALX CrossFireX comes with two 1GB Radeon HD 3870 X2 cards, giving you a total of 2GB of graphics memory.

As the machine uses two X2 cards, rather than four single cards, Alienware has also bypassed the need to use AMD’s Phenom-based Spider platform. As such, the ALX CrossFireX uses a Core 2 Quad CPU. However, with 2GB of memory just for the graphics card, this is a configuration only for 64-bit operating systems, as a 32-bit OS can only address a total of 4GB of memory, and that includes the system and graphics memory.

AMD recently enabled Quad-CrossFire (or CrossFireX, as it’s officially known) in its latest Catalyst 8.3 drivers, and Alienware clearly reckons it has some potential. The company’s senior vice president, Brian Joyce, described the ALX CrossFireX as ‘our most sophisticated desktop system,’ and said that ‘adding the awesome power of a quad graphics solution like CrossFireX to the ALX desktop is just one more way Alienware strives to deliver the world’sbest PC gaming experience.’

It’s not cheap, though. Alienware says that the ALX CrossFireX will start at £3,557 inc VAT and delivery. Alienware plans to set up a site with the details here, although it wasn’t live at the time that we wrote this story.