You know when an Alienware desktop thuds through the door that several facts will be taken as read: namely (a) this is going to be a heavy machine, (b) it's going to be one of the coolest bits of kit you've ever seen and (c) some thought will have gone into cranking to the max your enjoyment of computer games.

Well, the Aurora 7500 SLI fulfils all these expectations in an over-the-top manner that is little short of outrageous. It weighs a ton (not literally), so get a friend to manhandle it up the stairs, but once the packaging is ripped away, be prepared to stand back in awe at the large, steely blue casing with the trademark back-lit alien head and three rows of pink neon, backlit air intakes at the front.

Four USB 2.0 ports also sit at the bottom of the front panel and then, behind the front cover, is an intriguing combination of NEC DVD-RW, TSST DVD-ROM and a 1.44 MB floppy disk drive (who still has those?). For a machine with probably the cutting-edge, gaming-assist technology crammed under the lid this was a strange curiosity; a bit like finding your grandfather's wind-up watch built into the flight panel of a Stealth bomber.

What will get hardcore gamers very excited, though, is the difference that SLI technology will make to your onscreen visuals and performance. And make no mistake, this is an unashamed gamer's computer. Basically, Scalable Link Interface is a method of linking two (or more) graphics cards together to produce a single output and Nvidia, who are leading the way in this area, are combining it with the PCI Express bus.

In the Aurora 7500 there are two Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX graphics cards linked by a small PCB connector, and the motherboard (the current favoured one is the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe) has to include an Nforce4 SLI chipset. It's worth noting that only graphics cards with the same make and model will create the SLI effect, and if you are usimg more than one monitor then you have to disable all but the one linked to the primary graphics card.

The Aurora 7500 uses an AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 dual core processor running at 2.61GHz alongside 2GB of RAM, and if you're looking for decent hard drive, how about a terabyte of storage, composed of two 250GB hard drives in RAID 0 and one 500GB backup/data drive? If you add to that a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 4 audio system (upgraded from an earlier Audigy 2 system), you are in possession of some truly awesome gaming firepower.

The proof, as ever, is in the playing, and when first-person shooter Painkiller (one of nearly 100 PC games that can be SLI enhanced) was loaded up, the 3D images were so sharp they leapt out the screen, response time was ultra-sensitive and the 7.1 channel surround sound made the hackles rise on our neck. With Quad SLI (linking 4 graphics cards) already arriving on the market, seventh heaven is clearly beckoning.

There is a fourth Alienware fact that comes with every package, and that's the price. For the front line of gaming excellence you must pay, and pay heavily. And that's without a monitor or speakers included and Windows XP Home as the favoured operating system. No pain, no gain, folks.

Quite simply the most powerful, expensive, cool, blow-your-socks-off gaming computer we've seen to date, incorporating the stunning SLI graphics system, great sound and acres of storage in a beautiful package. All of which comes at a high price.