Alienware PC

[ant_mb]

It arrives tomorrow, and I can't wait!

I went with Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme (12MB Cache, 1600MHz FSB, 6GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 1333MHz, 1GB NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2, 7200 RPM 32MB cache and 1TB HD. I didn't pick up a new monitor yet, I picked up a 22 inch flat panel last year and will see how it works out. The Alienware monitor I wanted was well over 1,000. The only thing I'm a little leary about is Vista. I haven't used it yet so I can't judge it, but it gets plenty of bad press. Worst case I can upgrade to XP.

 

[GodSpeedLuc]

vista is absolutely fine. dont always believe what you hear. you have to judge it for yourself really. frankly i love the new vista version above all others.

 

[ant_mb]

vista is absolutely fine. dont always believe what you hear. you have to judge it for yourself really. frankly i love the new vista version above all others.

You're right! That's why I said I can't judge yet, but I'm a little leary. I have a copy of XP so i'm not really worried about it either way.

 

[poorwboy]

Hey ant, I just picked up a toshiba laptop and it has vista. Vista is fine, you have to navigate a little to find your way around. Also people say vista is slow on startup, but vista is faster than xp in my opinion. I have no complaints of vista yet, but it's only been a week and a half.

Nice pc by the way. Games are in the future.

 

[JohnP]

For my photo editing, I have a Dell Workstation with two Xeon Dual Core 3.0 GHz CPUs, 16GB of 1333Mhz dual-channel memory and a $1500 graphics card with a 15K RPM SCSI boot drive. I still don't score a perfect score on the Vista benchmark thingy. I have both Windows XP64 and Vista64 Ultimate installed. About the only time I boot Vista is when I want to play Mahjong Tiles or Chess. I ran extensive Photoshop benchmarks on Vista and XP on the system. They ran across the board 10% slower on Vista than on Windows XP. I still have a hard time finding things in Vista. I just don't see anything at all useful in Vista and it runs slower on a blistering powerfull machine. Having to tell it "Yes I really wanted to do that" all the time sucks too.

By the way, I scored this system for 50% of retail in the Dell Outlet last year. It was previously ordered but never delivered, so it was in effect brand new. I paid around $4200. The list price was over $8000. I have since purchased a couple more Optiflex systems from the Dell Outlet. You can get some real bargains there.

Congrats on the new PC. Should be a great game machine! Since you have XP, you can setup a dual-boot system and use the one that works best for you.

-John

 

[wrightme43]

I dont know diddly about computers. It sounds cool though. LOL Congrats man.
Vista works fine for me but I dont even begin to get anywhere near even close to thinking about maybe even getting sorta close to what my computer can do.

 

[mpb218]

Also, I hear that your cd key for Vista is compatible with XP, so if you Reeeally dont like it you can use that one.

 

[Raid The Revenge]

Here's couple of things you should know:

1) 7200 RPM hard drives? Yeah. They're fast. They spin really fast. I've noticed they can sometimes get hot, so make sure it's well ventilated and add extra fans.

2) 6 GB of RAM? Yeah. That's actually pretty good. Are you getting Vista 32-bit or Vista 64-bit? If you don't know...don't worry about it. Vista is fine. If you end up playing a game of "whack-a-mole" with the problems Vista has, give me a PM. I can fix them...

3) Nice video card!! 9800 Nvidia? You can display some SERIOUS graphics with that.

4)My last question is the network card. Uhh...can you get a letter for it? I'm looking for B/G/N....

5) This stuff is probably too complicated to understand. If it's too mind-boggling...just ignore it.

 

[christod1]

Congrats on the new PC. Sounds like a very fast pc but since most of the stuff is top of the line why didn't you get a raptor hard disk or better still an SSD HD (solid state disk) since it sounds like you didn't really mind about the price?

 

[SovietRobot]

I have two things to say
1. It's always better to build your own. I built a top of the line PC for about 2k(3 if you count 22in lcd, z-5500 speakers, and accessories), when the same components would've cost 3-4k from most companies, plus you get to choose your own brands and parts.
2. Vista is fine. Anyone who doesn't like it probably hasn't used it.

Oh also, enjoy Do you play PC games a lot?

 

[SovietRobot]

[COLOR=\"DarkGreen\"]Here's couple of things you should know:

1) 7200 RPM hard drives? Yeah. They're fast. They spin really fast. I've noticed they can sometimes get hot, so make sure it's well ventilated and add extra fans.

2) 6 GB of RAM? Yeah. That's actually pretty good. Are you getting Vista 32-bit or Vista 64-bit? If you don't know...don't worry about it. Vista is fine. If you end up playing a game of \"whack-a-mole\" with the problems Vista has, give me a PM. I can fix them...

3) Nice video card!! 9800 Nvidia? You can display some SERIOUS graphics with that.

4)My last question is the network card. Uhh...can you get a letter for it? I'm looking for B/G/N....

5) This stuff is probably too complicated to understand. If it's too mind-boggling...just ignore it. [/COLOR]

7200rpm has been the standard for desktops for over a decade, and a lot of laptops are using them now. I have a 10,000RPM Raptor for a game drive, now that is a fast drive.

Based on the specs I'm guessing he bought a desktop, which didn't come with a wireless card unless he opted for one, so B/G/N doesn't matter. Most likely he's got an integrated gigabit ethernet.

Also to the guy who posted about Raptors, I bought one(150GB sata model) and while games load a few seconds faster, it's not that big of a deal. I'm now using a 500GB SATA300 drive as my main drive and it's not much slower.

 

[christod1]

Also to the guy who posted about Raptors, I bought one(150GB sata model) and while games load a few seconds faster, it's not that big of a deal. I'm now using a 500GB SATA300 drive as my main drive and it's not much slower.

That must be me. What I meant was that since everything on the system is very fast why not a faster hard disk? Oh, and a couple of seconds slower on a PC does mean a lot. One of the main components of a PC that slows it down is the hard disk. Especially on a system like this. When someone is trying to squeeze every last fps playing a game a couple of seconds is huge. You sound like you know a little or a lot about PC's... I don't know, but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about...

 

[Sawblade]

RAID0 all the way. I've got 2 320GB SE16s right now, and I'm thinking about getting another 2 for even more speed + a 1TB drive for storage. It's fun to shock people with crazy fast load times. (being the first on the server after map changes)



As for Vista, I beta tested the release candidate and saw it as another Windows ME, so I'm sitting on XP x64 until windows 7 comes out.

 

[christod1]

RAID0 all the way. I've got 2 320GB SE16s right now, and I'm thinking about getting another 2 for even more speed + a 1TB drive for storage. It's fun to shock people with crazy fast load times. (being the first on the server after map changes)



As for Vista, I beta tested the release candidate and saw it as another Windows ME, so I'm sitting on XP x64 until windows 7 comes out.

RAID 0 -stripping. Again a lot more faster. I forgot all about that. Thanks. As for Vista, after reading and hearing about so many problems especially driver related and the fact that so many companies are preferring Windows XP for their new systems, I too saw it as Windows Millennium and I'm waiting for windows 7. Funny thing is that Intel are calling their new CPU',s which I read will be available in about a month, Core i7. Whats up with all the 7's?....

 

[Raid The Revenge]

Well...I'll try to explain things in a certain way so it makes sense to the non-epic.

Windows VISTA is an upgrade from Windows XP. VISTA has better graphics, more security, more updates.....

The problem is the RAM. Computers have a certain amount of RAM, which represents it's volatile memory (it forgets everything if the electricity is shut-off). Since Vista has better graphics and stuff...it drains MORE RAM.

The good news is RAM is cheap and abundant. 1 GB of RAM is enough to sustain VISTA. The problem is Vista-32 bit can only utilize up to 4 GB of RAM. Any excess RAM will simply be dormant.

Vista-64 bit can utilize up to 8 GB of RAM. The problem is Vista-64 has a bad reputation; it can't run certain programs like the previous Vista -32 could. Vista-32 had secular "compatibility issues" when it was first released.

I got my hands on Vista-32 when it FIRST came out. I had to make slight changes to my old programs to get them to work. NOW, most issues have been updated and I've haven't had any compatibility issues.

When people complain about Vista, they're not being specific enough. Are they complaining about Vista-32 when it first emerged? Or are they upset about the low compatibility with Vista-64? None of it matters now, anyway. All the updates changed everything.

I haven't got my hands on Vista-64. It came out a while ago.

 

[Chris]

[COLOR=\\"DarkGreen\\"]Well...I'll try to explain things in a certain way so it makes sense to the non-epic.

Windows VISTA is an upgrade from Windows XP. VISTA has better graphics, more security, more updates.....

The problem is the RAM. Computers have a certain amount of RAM, which represents it's volatile memory (it forgets everything if the electricity is shut-off). Since Vista has better graphics and stuff...it drains MORE RAM.

The good news is RAM is cheap and abundant. 1 GB of RAM is enough to sustain VISTA. The problem is Vista-32 bit can only utilize up to 4 GB of RAM. Any excess RAM will simply be dormant.

Vista-64 bit can utilize up to 8 GB of RAM. The problem is Vista-64 has a bad reputation; it can't run certain programs like the previous Vista -32 could. Vista-32 had secular \\"compatibility issues\\" when it was first released.

I got my hands on Vista-32 when it FIRST came out. I had to make slight changes to my old programs to get them to work. NOW, most issues have been updated and I've haven't had any compatibility issues.

When people complain about Vista, they're not being specific enough. Are they complaining about Vista-32 when it first emerged? Or are they upset about the low compatibility with Vista-64? None of it matters now, anyway. All the updates changed everything.

I haven't got my hands on Vista-64. It came out a while ago. [/COLOR]

Actually Vista-32 can't utilize more than 3 GB of RAM. At least that's the case with my laptop.

 

[Raid The Revenge]

I have a 10,000RPM Raptor for a game drive, now that is a fast drive.

You can get 10,000 RPM's now? Wow. How fast we evolved...

The problem with SOLID STATE drives is it's WAY HARDER to reach the same capacity of a Terabyte hard-drive (7200 RPM).

7200 RPM's hard drives can be found in LAPTOPS, but I found those ones tend to get very HOT. Heck...I know one that shutdown from overheating with just 5400 RPM.

Let me guess...your 10,000 RPM hard drive is LIQUID COOLED???

 

[Sawblade]

64 bit operating systems can support 16.8 million terabytes of RAM.

 

[Fred]

Actually Vista-32 can't utilize more than 3 GB of RAM. At least that's the case with my laptop.

Most likely that is because your laptop's video card has a gig of video memory.

Video memory gets lumped in with system memory, so if you have four gigs of system memory and one gig of video memory, you wind up with 3 gigs usable system memory.

Technically it's still using four gigs.

 

[grommit]

The memory issue is a bit complicated but basically if your machine has 4GB and you have a graphics card with a dedicated 512MB then you loose the 512MB from the system due to the way the OS maps the memory. You need PAE to get round this, mainly used on servers, or a 64Bit OS.



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