ALIENWARE

The Aurora Extreme looks like a PC that's been exposed to a massive dose of gamma rays. The result is a sort of digital Hulk -- a desktop computer gone wild.

It's got a gigabyte of memory chips, a 64-bit main processor, and a graphics card that alone costs as much as many consumer PCs.

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The Aurora Extreme is the kind of heavy-duty machine that a scientist might buy -- if the scientist spent his off hours blasting aliens or slaying orcs. It's not an engineering work station -- it's a game machine, a computer designed by Alienware Inc. of Miami for the primary mission of kicking digital butt.

But for the most fervent players, adequate isn't even close to adequate. They challenge each other for supremacy in Internet death matches. Or they meet face-to-face at ''LAN parties,'' where gamers connect their machines in local area networks and spend entire weekends annihilating each other.

These guys come to conquer -- if not in the game, then at least in the pre- and post-game woofing about who's got the biggest, baddest box. Bringing a generic beige PC to a LAN party would be like street racer Vin Diesel driving a lawn tractor in ''The Fast and the Furious.''

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This do-it-yourself approach put Alienware founders Alex Aguila and Nelson Gonzalez on the road to success. Both were avid gamers who simply weren't satisfied with the performance of generic PCs. So in 1997, they tried building their own. Their success put a bee in Gonzalez's bonnet, according to Aguila.

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Today, Alienware makes a broad array of game-oriented computers, including a children's PC and one of the few laptop computers designed to offer a decent gaming experience.

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