Alienware Reveals 4GHz desktop 363
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."
link (Score:1, Informative)
Re:link (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.alienware.com/ALX_pages/area51
*shakes head at mods*
Re:How can it get any hotter (Score:2, Informative)
for the AMD enthusiast, (Score:2, Informative)
Re:link (Score:5, Informative)
They have P4 boxes overclocked to 4.2GHz and watercooled Athlon64 "4200+" boxes as well, for the AMD equivalent
Working Link (Score:2, Informative)
Re:erm ... (Score:4, Informative)
Right, zero.
Re:erm ... (Score:3, Informative)
The Links (Score:5, Informative)
- The news [alienware.com] 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 [alienware.com]
Btw, the moment you choose to configure, the price shoots up to $5,458.00 (which includes ALL rebates)!Re:erm ... (Score:3, Informative)
Granted, that's about *it* that I'm aware of.
Alienware has the best marketing department (Score:5, Informative)
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 [str8dog.com] along with several other peoples comments.
Re:Does AlienWare cover warrantee, since Intel won (Score:3, Informative)
Re:erm ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Alienware has the best marketing department (Score:4, Informative)
Most of Alienware's notebooks are re-branded Sagers (which are made by Clevo). A couple of years ago I got a Sager from PowerNotebooks [powernotebooks.com] and a few weeks later Alienware came out with a near identical notebook (their original Area 51-M) for about $1k more. Check out this [powernotebooks.com] for more details.
As always--It pays to shop around!
Re:Alienware has the best marketing department (Score:3, Informative)
I just got a new alienware, and while there were some hastles ACTUALLY BUYING IT, it works excellently. Its running amazingly, but this could just be afterglow from a new computer after living with a 1ghz 384mb RAM geforce1 64mb ddr for 5 years.
Ok, onto the story.
So I talk to the guy on the phone after creating a system on the website. Never order a computer just off a website, always speak to someone.
He gave me a quote, and a promised ship date of August 6th.
Then calls back a couple days later, explaining that the ship date will have to be later because they're having trouble getting the nvidia card they had in stock. I chose that card because it had a MUCH shorter ship date than the ATI card which was limited availability, but a little more expensive. So he says he'll switch me for the ATI card, which he apparently has in stock and now according to the webpage, has the ship date that the Nvidia chip had, and the Nvidia chip is now limited availability.
Now, aside from not understanding HOW THE HELL THIS COULD POSSIBLY HAPPEN, he did knock about a hundred off the card.
Then, few days later we find out it will ship later than the 6th, because they have to "test" the computer. I'm furious. The reason I need this computer BY THE 18TH of August was because I needed to transfer files to it before I came up to school with it.
They refuse to airship it because of potential damage, and I get the guys supervisor on the line. Now, the thing with these guys is, they're all based in Florida, and the guys on the phone are all mexican. Now, I don't like stereotyping, but apparently Alienware does. All of the Mexican guys use a fake American Sounding (TM) name instead of their real Mexican Sounding (TM) name. I can only guess that the Marketing Department at Alienware thought it would make the parents feel more comfortable buying a system from them.
I dunno. Anyways, it ships, finally, after me telling the guy that if it doesn't ship by this date, he'd better drive it up from Florida (to IL) himself to get it to me on time. So then we find out that the $150 rebate he promised, couldn't be done. So he gave us a $75 rebate and a $75 coupon from Amazon, because my father uses that heavily and it wouldn't be a problem.
Anyways, then when the thing ships, it looks like the speakers will arrive before the computer, and the computer won't arrive on time apparently. So then I go through some HUGE hastles with UPS who are completely incompetent and don't even know where their packages are.
Finally, the computer arrives, but its missing the $75 rebate, (the $75 amazon coupon shipped Express in its own UPS envelope and arrived a day earlier) and its also missing the keys to lock the tower (not that that would ACTUALLY stop someone who REALLY wanted to gain access to the front, as I could just snap the door off).
Finally, they mail everything to me. But its over, and I enjoy my new box.
Re:Why hasn't this been seen elsewhere? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Undervolting is the new overclocking (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:erm ... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:G5 (Score:3, Informative)
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.
DontbuyformAlien Ware! (Score:1, Informative)
Alienware - Don't buy from them (Score:4, Informative)
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.