Alienware

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Unless you need the absolute maximum speed that can be squeezed out of the computer, no, it isn't worth it. It's an enthusiasts PC.

An enthusiast's PC is one that they put together themselves.

Alienware is a wannabe enthusiast's PC.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by nostromo


I don't understand why its so damn expensive. For 5K, there's 512 meg of ram, a 80 gig hard drive, there's no monitor, no cd burner, no audio card, no speakers...

For a bit under 2k I have 2 gigs RAM, 180 gig HD...

[Jon Miller]

Is the Hardrive fast? After looking at Apple's site, I see that the Apple I was looking at is not the cheap one (ibook) but the expensive one, so I will probably be looking at 1.5k + even if I go with Apple. Hmm, will look a bit longer (any other great laptops out there? smallness, reliability, and battery lifetime are most important).

Jon Miller

[Nostromo]

I own a Toshiba. No complaints so far. Toshiba's are cheap and reliable.

[Tassadar500]

Does anyone own an Alienware?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Nuclear Master
Also, if I basically wanted to be able to play all the games out there, and a very powerful machine, what exactly would I need? An ATI X800, and a 3.6 GHz?

You don't need a 3.6 GHz CPU to play any of the games out there. That's just way overkill.

Get more memory and a top graphics cards.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
Is the Hardrive fast?

If you want a fast disk subsystem, go for Ultra320.

That's probably overkill for you, though.

[Atahualpa]

For less money and also great performance you can put 2 SATA or ATA drives ($200) into a raid-0 (most motherboards already include RAID controllers).

SCSI is dying. Some time ago I read an article on why google uses IDE instead of SCSI. They said that it was cheaper, even if you have to replace drives more often. And meanwhile with HDDs such as Western Digitals Raptor, there is SCSI perfomance and reliability available for IDE as well.

Beware of SATA though, Windows didn't want to install on my PC because I only have a SATA drive and it doesn't have the correct drivers. And because Windows is sooo advanced it only would accept these drivers on a floppy

[Urban Ranger]

Uh, you don't get SCSI performance with IDE. For starters, there's a huge CPU overhead with IDE but almost none with SCSI. Ultra320 has a throughput of 320 MB/s. SATA theoretically has 150MB/s, but after removing the overhead and the initial problems, you will be lucky to get 100. Of course, you don't get 100MB/s with regular EIDE devices, either.

[pg]

Originally posted by Nuclear Master
And if something went wrong would I just lose the money? And, is it very complex?

like asher said everything has warranties. seriously, if you have 4k go buy one from alienware. it's stupid and a total ripoff but i'm sure you'll be happy. with 4k you could build 2+ kickass systems easily so even if you broke all the parts on your first try you could buy them all again. if you build it yourself you will end up with higher quality parts by being able to choose what you want and need. this will take some research and reading on your part though so if you are lazy or can't stand all the techno-mumbo-jumbo just buy one.

you can make a really good for pc for ~1k easily if you don't have to have all the fastest stuff(which is vastly overpriced in terms of how much quickier it really is). if you went for most preformance per dollar you'd probably end up with a 600-800 dollar system which would still be able to run all the games as the 4k alienware.

few links -
http://anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2185&p=13 - anandtech's high end system summary which is ridiculous btw.

http://anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2177&p=9 - anandtech's mid level system summary which is somewhat reasonable especially compared to high end.

http://anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2177&p=9 - anandtech's low range system summary which is near the best value in terms of preformance for money spent. you'd need to upgrade video card, ram and cpu a bit on this system to make it a good gaming machine.

www.newegg.com - regarded as the best place to get parts if you go the build it yourself route

[The Mad Monk]

newegg

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by pg
with 4k you could build 2+ kickass systems easily so even if you broke all the parts on your first try you could buy them all again

Agreed. 4k really is staggeringly excessive for a personal computer system, even with the best components you can find. Hell, you can get yourself a server or two.

[Asher]

He's used to buying Apple.

[Tassadar500]

Originally posted by Asher
He's used to buying Apple.

[Tassadar500]

But seriously, I think I need to buy a PC first, and learn more about them, before I start trying to build one.