Consider the Alienware Alpha's GPU to be around the same as the GTX 660 (non Ti).

Looking at the developer's recommended specs, they suggest a minimum of a GTX 660, so yes, the Alpha can run it, providing you upgrade the base model's 4GB of RAM to 8GB (which should be considered minimum nowadays).

No.

The Alpha only takes Haswell processors. I3, I5, and I7 4xxx processors only.

Ubuntu should run fine. The biggest hassle will be getting the latest version of nVIDIA's drivers, as the ones that Ubuntu ship with tend to be fairly old.

SteamOS runs beautifully on the thing.

Originally posted by i eat baby legs:

i have heard stories on here about how windows 10 dont work on the alpha

The upgrading process can be painful, but Windows 10 itself works fine on the Alpha, as does the latest version of Hivemind UI.

You'll need a keyboard and mouse to do it. As long as Hivemind and all the other stuff is up to date, you shouldn't run into any issues.

Yes, the 4GB i3 model can play games at 1080p, and generally on medium. Windows is painfully slow to boot and generally use, but it can be done, and the Hivemind UI helps a little in that regard. It's not particularly fun when you're used to having a 16GB desktop, but it can be done.

Upgrading to 8GB is the first thing you'll want to do for this game, with getting an SSD or 7200RPM HDD being the second thing.

Upgrading the processor shouldn't be necessary.

Oh the fun of trying to explain to Dell support that the wireless Xbox 360 receiver that comes with the Alienware Alpha has died, doesn't work on any other computer, and needs replacement!

"Have you run our diagnostics?"
"Do you have the drivers loaded?"
"Are you sure this came with the machine?"
"Have you plugged in any other devices to the receiver?"

After gaining remote access, I had to use Google Images to show him what it was, what it looked like, and what the dongle itself wasn't doing. Then we went through the song and dance of no, the USB ports are fine, no, the controller is probably still fine, it's just the sodding receiver, which is no longer detected when plugging in, doesn't light up anymore, and doesn't work on any other PC in the house, regardless of which USB port, the position of the planets, and the alignment of the north and south pole on a given Thursday afternoon.

This took 40 minutes to sort out, after waiting 30 minutes for the call to actually go through.

I've had to RMA motherboards, get EFI capable BIOS's for video cards not under warranty (big props to Gainward for that), sent back countless dead hard drives for warranty replacement, and when working in enterprise IT, had to deal with the likes of HP and IBM on server and desktop support, and never in my life have I had such a hard time getting a company's technical support to reach the conclusion I already reached long before making the call.

Dell has the most painful technical support experience I've ever had, and while the bloke I spoke to was nice, he genuinely didn't have a clue about what came with this silly little machine, and how I reached the conclusion it wasn't working. If Dell want to sell gamers Alienware hardware, they damn well better have a support centre that knows something about what they bloody well sell.

Originally posted by Cheeseman Battitude:

Or go to the Nvidia website and download drivers for an 860M.

What he said. The latest official nVIDIA notebook drivers now support the Alpha's GPU. Just download the 860M ones.

If you already have a high end gaming PC, and both the PC and Alpha are on a relatively quick network, you can always stream your high end PC's games to the Alpha. This works even better under SteamOS on the low end 4GB i3 model, because I find SteamOS to be far snappier than the original Windows install.

As long as you continue to upgrade your PC's GPU over the years, it'll still continue to look awesome on the Alpha when streamed.

No, because it's not out yet, and the DK2 runs at a much lower res than the final product will.

According to this blog post, about the final version of the Rift:
https://developer.oculus.com/blog/powering-the-rift/

"By raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering"

The Alpha can do pretty well at 1080p with low to medium settings in most modern games. If low or console style framerates don't bother you, you can push games up to higher quality. However, this doesn't work well with the Rift, as low or wildly changing framerates will make you sick and generally be a terrible experience.

Hence, the Alpha is a terrible machine for the Oculus Rift. The Rift won't be coming out for consumers until the first quarter of next year, so I suggest to start saving or buying parts for a Rift capable machine now. The biggest expense will be your video card, followed by the CPU and then the motherboard, and it should get cheaper from that point onwards.

My main desktop/Rift capable machine is as follows (keep in mind, those are $AUD prices):
http://au.pcpartpicker.com/p/ypD2CJ

...what game? It'd help if you actually told us what game you're trying to play on it.

It should be capable of running most games on medium to high settings at 720P without too much drama. But again, it depends purely on what game you're talking about.

One of the biggest bottlenecks of the i3 model is the terribly slow hard drive and 4GB of RAM. The i5 isn't that big of an improvement over it.