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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."
Or, alternatively, one that actually works!_ alx.aspx
http://www.alienware.com/ALX_pages/area51
*shakes head at mods*
Liebermann has been selling 4.2GHz rigs with watercooling for a while now too.
They have P4 boxes overclocked to 4.2GHz and watercooled Athlon64 "4200+" boxes as well, for the AMD equivalent
This is a gaming rig. How many games can take advantage of SMP?
Right, zero.
- 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/
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
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
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.