The ALX, released this morning by Alienware, uses water cooling (finally!) and adds a nifty little case temperature monitor to the top of the box. It also is only available with the fastest parts, such as 10,000RPM hard drives, PC-4400 RAM, and a top of the line Radeon X800 or GeForce XT 6800. Not to mention it looks pretty sleek.
Check it out
here.
What do you think? I think it looks pretty cool, but I'll be waiting for the dual graphics cards - that and the cash.
Looks sweet. I'd want a bigger HD. At least double the 74. And if you are spending that kind of money may as well pop in an extra gig of mem. But it looks nice and the water cooling alone is worth the test drive.
Edit addition:
Tech TV just gave this bad boy a glowing review.
Question. Does this ALX have the dual graphics cards, or is that not available yet? If it doesn't, what's the point in getting this right now?
Devin will know. He knows everything.
Unfortunately it doesn't have the dual graphics cards. Supposedly we have to wait until the end of the year for that. There really is no point in going for the ALX right now - unless you like the idea of liquid cooling - when there are similarly specced machines for almost half the price.
So the short answer is no, the ALX doesn't have dual graphics cards yet.
Thanks for the info. This is enormously helpful to me. Devin, if you set out to get yourself the ultimate game computer around three thousand bucks or so, where would you go? Buy one from a company like Alienware or build one yourself?
I thought I fixed it so that guests couldn't post without registering.
Anyway, that's Bubba above.
Devin, if you set out to get yourself the ultimate game computer around three thousand bucks or so, where would you go? Buy one from a company like Alienware or build one yourself?
For around $3250 you can get an Alienware Area-51 with a 3.2GHz Pentium IV, 2GB RAM, an Nvidia Geforce 6800 Ultra, a 74GB 10,000RPM Hard Drive, a 160GB 7,400RPM Hard Drive, a 12X DVD+/-RW Drive, and a 7.1 EAX Surround Sound Card.
Based on price and convenience I'd go with the Alienware or a comparable system from Voodoo or Falcon Northwest. Building a computer is a time consuming process, especially the ordering part - and when you're building a gaming rig you're using really expensive/rare stuff that you don't want to screw up. Plus, there's no one to blame when it stops working. If I needed an every-day email/web/word/IM computer I'd build something for under a grand with Linux or Windows 9x on it. But when you want it to be done to perfection for gaming then it's worth getting something from one of the big three gaming OEMs (B3GOs).
I'd tend to avoid Dell, HP/Compaq, and Gateway's gaming or high performance offerings because they cut corners on things like the motherboard and the optical drives etc. The B3GO's products always have name brand motherboards - commonly from Asus and optical drives from Plextor etc. That and you'll find it difficult to get your hands on a GeForce 6800 or a Radeon X800 (I'd go with the GeForce) from the mainstream manufacturers.
Anyways, hope I've helped a bit. Let me know if you have any further questions!
Thanks for the superb info, Devin. I had an Alienware that kept having hard drive failures. Ultimately (long story short) I had to send it back to Alienware for them to figure out what was wrong. I'm now waiting for it to be returned to me.
Because the machine crashed so often, I'm a little leery of it and was considering just getting another, but I may just wait till this one gets returned and see how it does.
It has a Geforce fx 5900 card in it. I was considering upgrading that to the newest ATI card (because the ATI doesn't require an additional power supply). Is that a fairly easy thing to do? And would you recommend it? The machine is a P4, 3.0, with two gigs of RAM.
Thanks!
Personally I wouldn't bother upgrading. But, I'm biased - I'm a bit of an nVidia fan. Keep in mind that the fx5900 is still a $300 graphics card. I would only upgade if you've been noticing frame lag and stuff, and we have an fx5900/P4-3.2/1GB-RAM on our Alienware and Far Cry looks damn good at 1280*1024.
However, if you are going to do the upgrade it would probably be fairly easy, just swap the card in the AGP slot and make sure you have the latest driver ready to go. You'll want to see if you need to install the driver before or after putting in the card; but you will most likely install it afterwards. I don't think you'll notice a huge difference in the quality of the graphics if you're going from an fx5900 to a Radeon 9800. I would at least wait until the Radeon X800 has been around a few months so they can get the bugs out of the drivers - which is always a problem with just-released graphics cards. Also, the X800's performance might not be applicable to AGP, there may be some aspects of the card that only see their full potential with PCI-Express.
Long story short; you can probably upgrade from the fx5900 to an X800, but I'd wait at least until the X800 has been around for about 3 months. The fx5900 should serve you well until that time.
Oh, and I believe Alienware has a thing for Western Digital drives, which I'm not a big fan of. Try to see if they'll let you get a Seagate instead - I made sure we ordered our Alienware with a Seagate drive because I've had much better experience with Seagates than WDs. Maxtor's are great too, but Seagate's are my favourite.