Alienware Aurora gaming PC is a six-core monster

A refreshed Alienware Aurora gaming PC is beaming down to Earth, blowing our tiny meat-shaped minds with a stack of hardware so advanced it belongs in Cyberdyne's research facility.

The fearsome rig comes packing Intel's Core i7-3000 six-core processors, the fastest of which is the Core i7-3960X, which has 15MB of cache memory and is overclocked up to 4.2GHz.

Monstrous. Alienware is part of Dell, and as with most Dell kit the Aurora can be customised to the nth degree. The starting price for this tower of terror is one quid under £2,000, but expect the price to skyrocket as you select more souped-up components.

Dual 1GB AMD Radeon HD 6870 CrossFireX cards is the standard graphics option, with 8GB of RAM as standard. You can bump that up to 16GB if you don't mind adding £260 to the final cost.

The chassis looks suitably horrifying -- glowing exhausts adorn the sides of the Aurora, while mechanical vents along the top give the impression that a truly malevolent beast is inside, breathing through some kind of awful artificial lung.

Liquid cooling stops the whole thing from melting into a glowing puddle, and if you're a fan of disco lighting, you can mess around with the colours that emanate from the Aurora's flanks, decking your PC out in your favourite hues.

While the Alienware M11x gaming netbook has proved successful, it's pleasant to see monster desktops haven't been left out in the cold.

Would you buy this? Or do you have a different rig of choice? Let us know in the comments, or on our Facebook wall.