The PS4 and Xbox One are the crème de la crème of the gaming world and very few can argue with that.
Enter the new Alienware Alpha, a product of Dell that is a mash up of both a PC and a console. It looks like a console but ships with Windows and an Xbox 360 controller. PCs are cumbersome to use for gaming as you simply cannot connect it to your TV and fire it up to play, like you would a console. The Alpha helps bridge this gap. But how does it compare to the PS4 and Xbox One?
First look
Compared to the Xbox One and PS 4, the Alpha is much smaller. It is almost the size of the Nintendo Wii, but is a bit more squared off and stouter. It looks quite stylish with its plain boxy body that has a lopped off corner. It also has a sleek alien head power button lying smack at the front that glows in the color of your choice when the device is turned on. This gives it a very refined futuristic look. It looks more like a console than a PC.
Specs
The Alpha is pretty awesome. It can play virtually any game you throw at it and they look way better than they do on the Xbox One and PS4. The Alpha has great hardware for the money. The base version comes equipped with a core i3 processor with 4G of RAM and 500GB HDD. You can bump this up a bit to a core i5 with 8 GB RAM for improved performance. Though the Alpha is upgradable, you cannot change the NVIDIA 860m graphics chip which is quite a bummer.
The Xbox One features a 1.75 Ghz AMD 8-Core processor and an AMD Radeon GPU with 1.31 teraflops. The PS4 has a similar processor clocked at 1.6GHz and an AMD Radeon GPU with 1.84 teraflops. The Alpha clearly has an edge on the consoles.
Add on Features
The PS4 and the Xbox One both come with Blue-ray drives. The Alpha has no optical drive and plays no movies in console mode unlike the PS and Xbox.
While PS4 and Xbox One come with plenty of media apps, the Alpha blows them out of the water on this as it can play anything you throw at it, as long as it is installed. After all, it does run on Windows.
You can live stream your game with Xbox One and PS4. This is not the case with the Alpha. You can only take screencaps with Steam Big Picture. If you like chatting with your friends, Alpha lets you do just that with the daisy Wheel keyboard on Steam or even better, Steam voice chat.
Which Should I Buy?
If you want a console game, you would do better with the PS4 or Xbox One. The Alpha still has too many glitches that need fixing. It will take time before game developers, Dell, and Microsoft get their act together to achieve a seamless gaming experience for the Alpha.
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