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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."
considering how backlogged AW is i'm guessing the guy it's being shipped too purchased it last spring.
Ultra-Fast "Hello World" here I come...
Or, alternatively, one that actually works!_ alx.aspx
http://www.alienware.com/ALX_pages/area51
*shakes head at mods*
glad we got a definition of overclocking. i always thought overclocking was moving my clock ahead fifteen minutes so i could get places on time. but when i figured out i had an extra fifteen minutes, i just hit snooze. then i was late again. shit. so much for overclocking.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Most people know Alienware is quite overpriced, but $4,200! I know you're paying for the aesthetics more than anything but still, if you want that power then buy two 2GHZ boxes and save yourself $2000, I can't imagine Alienware would have many people 'in the know' purchasing their hardware.
/. and now about 100 other news sites) than anything else.
I think this is more of a gimmick for advertising (seen by the fact it's on
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
I'm guessing that the 2mb l2 cache is faster, so why are we still following the fascination with clockspeed (other proof, like AMD, aside)?
you know alienware has struck it rich when they include their own "ALX High Performance Network Cable".
By taking the CPU over Intel's rated speed, there's no warrantee from Intel. Does Alienware promise to replace 'em if they fail during a (nominal) warrantee period?
--
GMail invites for iPod referrals
I'm sure the group of people who buy overpriced Alienware products are the same group who'd pay for penis extensions.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I used to overclock, but squeezing out the highest performence-per-watt is more fun these days. I read about it on silentpcreview.com and gave it a try. It turns out that Athlon 64 CPUs can usually run full speed at 1.3V (vs. 1.5V), which cuts power consumption almost in half. 1.8GHz (3000+) at 1.2V (35W max), 1.4GHz at 1V, and 1GHz at 0.85V (maybe a dozen watts) work well too. Someone with a newer CPU than I have managed 1.2GHz @ 0.875V. Use ClockGen to tweak the clock multiplier and core voltage under Windows. (Does anyone know of a Linux equivalent? 64-bit compatible?)
I watched a bit over 3 hours of DVD video on my HP zv5000z with the CPU set to 1GHz @ 0.85V before the 12-cell battery ran out. Normal screen brightness and everything.
Of course, this won't work all that well on Intel CPUs. Maybe Alienware will include a free naquada generator with their "4GHz" P4's.
I hear it gets over 30FPS on Doom 3 too!
Who doesn't like free music?
Well, the surprising thing to me is that a similarly configured (but with more features) loaded 2.5 Ghz Dual G5 from Apple (with liquid cooling as well) runs about $2300 cheaper than the Alienware box.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
- 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/
Don't equate intelligence or technical adeptness with common sense. They're not the same thing. I've seen a guy who made a 1600 on his SATs pour hot coffee in his lap when asked the time.
Besides, if the person were so smart--why would he buy a ridiculously overpriced computer to begin with?
-Grym
So would you buy one if you weren't forced to get it with Windows installed?
Assuming you use Linux and nothing else, do you game a lot, since that is (usually) the primary purpose of buying an Alienware machine?
Somehow I get the feeling you're posting just so you can get in a jab at Microsoft - if you genuinely support the views you claim to, you shouldn't need to post just to basically say "Lookit me! I'm fighting The Man!"
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
How much time before you can buy something similar for half the money? 3 months? 4? I can understand you're willing to pay more for the fastest available, but eehh.. to do what? Gaming? Get a quality motherboard, fast memory and one of the latest videocards. Much cheaper. Scientific calculations? Get a small blade server or mini-cluster, that'll better suit the job. Just to impress your friends? Get a nice looking case, do some modding, add some cool looking lights. Much more fun.
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.
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.