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Alienware Reveals 4GHz desktop
keeleysam writes "c|net news.com is reporting that Alienware is going to ship a 4GHz desktop. The new Area-51 ALX, introduced on Friday, uses overclocking, or the practice of pushing a processor past its factory speed setting, to elevate a standard Intel Pentium 4 chip to 4GHz. Because overclocking a processor can cause it to overheat, the desktop also includes a special liquid-cooling system devised by Alienware. Purchasing the 4GHz Area-51 ALX desktop is an expensive proposition for most consumers, as the machine starts at about $4,200, according to pricing on Alienware's ALX Web site."
http://www.alienware.com/alxpagesarea51alx.aspxsit eid3oid2100-1042-5347518ontid1040lopnlex/
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
which is why it's on a desktop, not a laptop
alienware also offers a Opteron box too, for a cool $4,964.00 - The Aurora. Firefox doesn't seem to load that up here unfortunately, had to use IE :(
Skype Me! username: john_allen_mohammed
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This is a gaming rig. How many games can take advantage of SMP?
Right, zero.
Depends on the application. There are many programs that don't take advantage of a second processor. Also, there are some tasks that can only be done linearly. A second processor only helps when instructions can be done in paralel. In those cases, the only option is "Speed Speed Speed" to get better performance.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
- The news page which mentions the 4.0 GHz CPUs Now Available in Alienware Area-51 ALX Systems.
- The ALX configuration page - As the name suggests you can use it to configure your desired ALX
Btw, the moment you choose to configure, the price shoots up to $5,458.00 (which includes ALL rebates)!http://efil.blogspot.com/
Quake 3 has SMP support.
Granted, that's about *it* that I'm aware of.
Alienware's dirty little secret is they are all marketing. My wife bought me one of their laptops last year based on their awesome marketing. After getting the run around on out of stock parts and waiting for damn near 2 months, the laptop came without SP1 installed, a virus in the windows system restore files and a faulty backlight switch.
It took over a month to get the laptop back when I sent it in to get the backlight switch fixed.
Their customer service is severly lacking. I would highly suggest you build it yourself instead of paying for Alienware's marketing department.
You can read my whole sordid tale on this topic at my website along with several other peoples comments.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
Yes. And you can buy extended warrantees, tech support, etc., just as with any other computer.
Actually, a lot of them do. Its this thing called hyperthreading that intel introduced that caused a lot of game developers to go ahead and make their games multithread friendly so that there'd be a speed increase on northwood-Cs. I have a friend (a very rich friend) that bought a dual Xeon 3.06 ghz box for his gaming system. Looking at task manager with UT2004 up shows that at least that game has multithreading support and will use all 4 virtual processors. So will Doom3... and I imagine any game using either of those game's engines will too.
CPUs are speed binned by the manufacturer based on rigourous tests done in worst-case conditions (highest allowed temperature, lowest voltage).
There are 3 things that let you overclock in normal situations:
1. If the CPU works at 2.99GHz, but not 3.0GHz, it has to be sold as one speed grade down. This CPU would be perfectly stable up to 2.99GHz.
2. If the environment you run in is not in the worst-case corner (you keep it cool, with good power supplied to the CPU), you'll be able to get a few extra percent.
3. When the manufacturer tests the CPU, they know all the worst-case instruction sequences and critical paths. When an overclocker does a stability test, it's extremely likely that they're missing various speed paths, and eventually something WILL use one of those paths, and you get data corruption. Using games as tests and seeing if they crash is absolutely not thorough - if every floating point operation was coming out slightly incorrect, you probably wouldn't notice, but the CPU is in fact not operating properly. Why is it that overclockers with "perfectly stable" overclocks always seem to end up having more apps crashing / more problems with "Windows sucking"?
If an OEM wants to sell a reliable machine, they'd have to do all the testing the CPU manufacturer does - the only thing they could do is guarantee a better max temperature/minimum voltage, but why bother? They're likely to gain at best 5% performance for significantly more effort.
My server
The CPUspeed daemon on Linux automatically scales my CPUs voltage and frequency depending on the system load, but I use a Pentium 4 based laptop. The Transmeta Crusoe has similar capabilities.
Anyway, its completely automatic, so I don't have to do anything. However, for those that want to tweak, you can hack kernel options, or use a separate program called "Laptop Mode". Note you don't need to use laptop mode with an actual laptop. Laptop mode has great features for tweaking harddrive power save features. Just google it, its great stuff.
There's a difference in using all virtual processors and using all the virtual processors.
Right now every single process runnin in WinXp on my machine is using both "processors" on my 2.6ghz P4.
When I play games... the same thing. BUT... that does NOT mean that the games are actually taking advantage of the hyperthreading support - it just means that Windows is sending operations to both "processors".
The game would need to be developed specifically for use with dual cores/processors to take full advantage. Even benchmarks have shown that using hyperthreading with some programs make them perform poorly compared to normal usage, even though they are runnin on all virtual processors.
Most games see very little performance improvement from a second CPU. Since the game is the CPU heavy process, and since the other processes running behind the scene are extremely light on the CPU... even though the second CPU runs these ultra-light processes, it makes very little difference. The bottle kneck is still one of the CPUs in your system.
So when it comes to games that run on both systems, the highest end Pentium or AMD based systems will by far out perform the highest end Mac.
Finally, considering that this entire article resides within games.slashdot.com... and that Alienware targets gamers... it should be assumed that performance is with regards to games. In fact, considering that performance varies for every system depending on the tasks it is used for... performance is ALWAYS relative to the task. Some systems are better at server stuff, some better at games, some better at office apps, some better at graphics apps, etc.
Computer performance is hardly a one-dimensional attribute.
I used the exact specs of last years Area 51 and built my buddy's PC for $1200 less the AW was charging. That is including the liquid cooling system. The case I bought is almost identical except for the dumb alien design. I dont know why anyone would ever buy a pre fab PC. You can just pay some geeklikemeto put it together for you.
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
Me and some of my friends each bought Alienware computers a couple of years ago. Without fail, each of us had a horrible experience with them.
The way they assemble things is very shoddy, and they must have some sort of ESD issues at their assembly facility - we all had extremely short lifetimes on motherboards and cpus - usually measured in months.
These weren't overclocked machines that we purchased, but they were at the time AWs highest end computers.
To make things worse (much worse!) their support is horrible. It takes 3 transfers to be able to talk to anybody who knows anything about your situation when you are in the middle of a component replacement. Their "on-site" replacement means that they hire out whomever is cheapest in your area to replace the myriad of things which break on their boxes. As a bonus, they continually change who they outsource their support services too, so the quality varies a lot, but it certainly is consistent at the low end.
One more thing - if you ever even mention, that you might have, at one time, considered getting a linux installation disk anywhere near your AW box, they will instantly refuse to help in anyway, no matter how obvious the hardware problem.
When it comes to responsibility, they just want to deny, deny, deny.
Just so you know - I don't now, and never have worked for AW or any of their competitors. I'm just a very unhappy consumer of one of their crappy products. I hate them, and I don't want to see anybody else burned.
thx.