I would like to state that my $800 Dell outperformed my friend's $2500 Alienware in both speed of opening identical programs and multitasking. This was done in a side-by-side comparison at a LAN party.
1. Hexa-cores (6 cores) are a ripoff, most games and programs can only utilize 2. Some of the newest games that are yet unreleased have been confirmed to support 3 or 4. Unless you are planning on folding DNA sequences or plotting Astronomy data collected from a satellite, you don't need any more than 4.
2. Windows 7 64-bit can ONLY use 4GB RAM. No more. The full 6GB RAM will never be used even if you somehow fill the 4GB.
3. Why would you put an electric car battery in a desktop computer? In case the power goes out? This part is confusing, I don't see why it's even in there.
If you want to be ripped off, go ahead and buy it.
Heat here and performance per watt there, if you want a laptop just buy one. If money is no issue at all, it actually isnt for some ppl, just go ahead. Wife and I each have an Asus ROG and we're never getting a desktop again. I dont play the latest games claiming awesome graphics... we're mmorpg nerds after all. We do play FFXIV with fairly high settings, with no problems at all. Sure this will kill it faster, but like already said money is no issue for us at all. Being able to take the computer with us anywhere however IS, since we run a small business that involves travelling.
You wont be playing with it unplugged much like already said. I cant say if Alienware is pricey where you live, but before buying my Asus I did some research and both MSI and Asus did seem to make good stuff with resonable price, for gaming. Sony was always alot more expensive with lesser graphics. No idea where Alienware stands.
I would like to state that my $800 Dell outperformed my friend's $2500 Alienware in both speed of opening identical programs and multitasking. This was done in a side-by-side comparison at a LAN party.
1. Hexa-cores (6 cores) are a ripoff, most games and programs can only utilize 2. Some of the newest games that are yet unreleased have been confirmed to support 3 or 4. Unless you are planning on folding DNA sequences or plotting Astronomy data collected from a satellite, you don't need any more than 4.
2. Windows 7 64-bit can ONLY use 4GB RAM. No more. The full 6GB RAM will never be used even if you somehow fill the 4GB.
3. Why would you put an electric car battery in a desktop computer? In case the power goes out? This part is confusing, I don't see why it's even in there.
If you want to be ripped off, go ahead and buy it.
Originally posted by =FTS=Fish Originally posted by Xero_Chance I would like to state that my $800 Dell outperformed my friend's $2500 Alienware in both speed of opening identical programs and multitasking. This was done in a side-by-side comparison at a LAN party. 1. Hexa-cores (6 cores) are a ripoff, most games and programs can only utilize 2. Some of the newest games that are yet unreleased have been confirmed to support 3 or 4. Unless you are planning on folding DNA sequences or plotting Astronomy data collected from a satellite, you don't need any more than 4. 2. Windows 7 64-bit can ONLY use 4GB RAM. No more. The full 6GB RAM will never be used even if you somehow fill the 4GB. 3. Why would you put an electric car battery in a desktop computer? In case the power goes out? This part is confusing, I don't see why it's even in there. If you want to be ripped off, go ahead and buy it.
Yea, but you didn't get a hat now did ya?? WIN Maybe I did.
Personally I say find the lap top with the stats you want and buy it, don't go for the band name, go for what it can do. AlienWare isn't the company it once was because it is now owned by dell, so it is pretty much a dell with a few different parts and a different casing, and while they are more difficult to mod than a desktop, lap tops now can be upgraded.
I would like to state that my $800 Dell outperformed my friend's $2500 Alienware in both speed of opening identical programs and multitasking. This was done in a side-by-side comparison at a LAN party.
1. Hexa-cores (6 cores) are a ripoff, most games and programs can only utilize 2. Some of the newest games that are yet unreleased have been confirmed to support 3 or 4. Unless you are planning on folding DNA sequences or plotting Astronomy data collected from a satellite, you don't need any more than 4.
2. Windows 7 64-bit can ONLY use 4GB RAM. No more. The full 6GB RAM will never be used even if you somehow fill the 4GB.
3. Why would you put an electric car battery in a desktop computer? In case the power goes out? This part is confusing, I don't see why it's even in there.
If you want to be ripped off, go ahead and buy it.
Yea, but you didn't get a hat now did ya?? WIN
Maybe I did.
Well, I will say this, I was running Brink last night while also running 72 applications and not a hitch. That aside, I honestly do love ny rig! Never a problem, but mine is a desktop. Laptop gaming is like acustic metal. It's just stupid. EDIT: Nice hat!! Love the little heart.:P
I vowed never to get an Alienware; however last year my PC died a rather horrible and annoying death and I have very VERY little time to act on it because I work from home and we were very much in our "prime time" of the season. So, my boss paid for half of the Alienware and I paid the other half. I have never for an instant regretted it. I love my machine.
It's easier to get a good deal if someone else is paying for half of it.
If you're using it for work and reliability is of the utmost importance, then going with Alienware probably isn't the best idea, as you have to hope that the corners they cut don't come back to get you. At minimum, you want a site that will tell you exactly what parts they use.
What you can do is to get overengineered parts all around that could handle a substantial overclock, and then don't overclock it. If you're not pushing any parts anywhere remotely near their limits, then the reduced strain means you're less likely to run into problems. Get a high end power supply, an uninterruptible power supply, and RAID 1 storage or at least periodic image backups together with daily incremental backups. While it's not possible to make absolutely certain that your computer won't die, that will allow quite a few things to go wrong without taking your system down.
-----
"Well the retailer in Canada was willing to do some modifications for me at www.fortnax.com but mine game with the 485M card and i cant complain, its running very cool, and for the games i play I am getting great performance out of my SB and 485M."
The Radeon HD 6970M appeared around the same time that Sandy Bridge processors came back after the chipset recall. If you bought your laptop before the 6970M was out, you might have one of the defective chipsets.
The problem with the GeForce GTX 485M isn't the performance. Rather, it's that a Radeon HD 6970M will get you about the same performance, while costing $200-$300 less, and using maybe 10-20 W less power. Most of the 6970Ms out there seem to be 2 GB versions, which is unfortunate, as laptops generally can't handle the sort of settings where 2 GB will work better than 1 GB, and it would be nice to not have the extra 10 W or so of power consumption from the extra video memory.
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"I myself have had a couple Dells, one being an XPS. I've also had HPs, and I can tell you from experience that Dells support is not that bad comparably. "
Good tech support is nice. Not needing tech support because the machine just works right the first time is nicer.
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"I would like to state that my $800 Dell outperformed my friend's $2500 Alienware in both speed of opening identical programs and multitasking."
Speed of opening programs is often storage-bound. The processor has some impact as well, but the video card usually doesn't. If you had a faster hard drive on an otherwise inferior system, you'll probably see programs open faster. Or if you have an SSD, then you win at program load times.
-----
"Hexa-cores (6 cores) are a ripoff, most games and programs can only utilize 2."
Programs rarely try to say, we're going to make sure we can take advantage of two cores, but not more than that. Rather, if they're not single-threaded, then they're trying to take advantage of as many cores as they can.
There are two common problems that limit games from scaling to more cores. One is if code isn't optimized well enough and too much of the work is consolidated in a single thread. Suppose, for example that a game engine manages to break the game into eight threads for the processor. If each thread always has the same amount of work to do, then the game will scale flawlessly to eight cores. If one thread has to do half of the work by itself, then you might see a little bit of benefit from moving from two cores to three, but no benefit for going beyond that. If you had eight cores, then the game could use all eight simultaneously, but just wouldn't perform any better than if you only had three. Change the 50% of the work that the "largest" thread has to do and you change how many cores the game will scale to.
The other thing that makes games look like they don't scale to more cores is if they're not processor-bound. The graphics engine for Civilization V will scale to 12 cores, for example. But if, with two cores, your frame rates are already limited by your video card and not your processor, then adding more cores won't improve performance. It just means that the extra processor cores get to spend more time waiting on the video card. This often makes it look like games that scale well to several cores don't actually scale beyond one or two.
The latter isn't really a problem for processors, as the solution to it is faster video cards. Or perhaps rather, the solution is that, if you've got a very high frame rate at high graphical settings, you call that good enough. The first problem of imperfectly balanced threads is a bigger problem, and one that both AMD and Intel try to address in hardware. Relatively recent Intel processors can shut down some cores and clock others higher to improve performance in programs that don't scale to many cores.
Among AMD processors, Thuban has turbo core (AMD's version of Intel's turbo boost) and Zacate has power gating, but no AMD processors have both just yet. Llano and Zambezi will, though, and they're both launching soon.
Zambezi should be interesting, and will try to further improve single-threaded performance with its Bulldozer modules. The idea of Bulldozer is that each module has a scheduler, L2 cache, a floating point unit, and so forth. But the module has two integer cores, and presents itself to the OS as two cores. This isn't like Intel's hyperthreading, where there's only one physical core there, and a second thread tries to fill in some gaps where the first thread wasn't doing anything and get some extra work done that way. A Bulldozer module has two physical integer cores sitting there, and both can run at once.
The idea is that you've got all of the cache and front end stuff needed to run two cores, but if you only have a single thread to run, then you can have all of those resources available for just a single core, which could make for a very powerful single core. There is also some speculation that, with enough resources shared between the two integer cores, Bulldozer might try to use both cores for a single thread and improve performance that way. That's probably just crazy talk, though.
Ideally, if you've got one very "big" thread that has to do more than its share of the work on a Bulldozer processor, you put that one thread on an entire Bulldozer module all by itself, for maximum single-threaded performance. The other, lighter threads can be divvied up among the other cores, and have two smaller threads running in the same module, with one on each core. There's still the question of whether Windows will be smart enough to do that, and my guess would be "no" for now. But everyone seems to think that heterogenous computing is the future, and this will be another step in that direction.
-----
"Windows 7 64-bit can ONLY use 4GB RAM. No more. The full 6GB RAM will never be used even if you somehow fill the 4GB."
Nope. Wrong. How much memory 64-bit Windows 7 can use depends on the version. Home Premium is capped at 16 GB, while Professional and higher are capped at 192 GB. A 32-bit programs can only use 2 GB by itself, so even if you have massive amounts of memory available, you might never use more than 4 GB. But that's not because Windows is stopping you.
-----
"Why would you put an electric car battery in a desktop computer? In case the power goes out?"
I'm not sure what you're referring to there. The idea of an uninterruptible power supply is that if you lose power, the computer just keeps working as though nothing happened. Some can also smooth out the voltages, so if there is something wrong with your electricity supply and it briefly sends you 130 W or 100 W, the UPS converts it to something near 120 W, and by the time it reaches your power supply, it looks like a good signal and the computer works just fine. Pulling high loads from the wall can also cause the voltage to drop.
This has two purposes. First, it means power problems don't crash your computer while you're trying to work on it. Second, it means power problems won't damage your hardware.
-----
"Heat here and performance per watt there, if you want a laptop just buy one."
The history of gamers deciding to buy a computer at random without knowing what they're getting is not pretty.
these things are fucking beastly and alot cheaper for what you get than other gaming laptops, i know from experience using them never had a problem. also they're very high quality with a brushed aluminium finish, i personally think looks better than the alienware.
"Heat here and performance per watt there, if you want a laptop just buy one."
The history of gamers deciding to buy a computer at random without knowing what they're getting is not pretty.
Haha agreed. I just meant, a gaming laptop is valid. He doenst have to go desktop just coz it fits other ppl's wallet better. Ofc he'll probably end up happier doing some research before buying =D
Comments
I would like to state that my $800 Dell outperformed my friend's $2500 Alienware in both speed of opening identical programs and multitasking. This was done in a side-by-side comparison at a LAN party.
1. Hexa-cores (6 cores) are a ripoff, most games and programs can only utilize 2. Some of the newest games that are yet unreleased have been confirmed to support 3 or 4. Unless you are planning on folding DNA sequences or plotting Astronomy data collected from a satellite, you don't need any more than 4.
2. Windows 7 64-bit can ONLY use 4GB RAM. No more. The full 6GB RAM will never be used even if you somehow fill the 4GB.
3. Why would you put an electric car battery in a desktop computer? In case the power goes out? This part is confusing, I don't see why it's even in there.
If you want to be ripped off, go ahead and buy it.
Heat here and performance per watt there, if you want a laptop just buy one. If money is no issue at all, it actually isnt for some ppl, just go ahead. Wife and I each have an Asus ROG and we're never getting a desktop again. I dont play the latest games claiming awesome graphics... we're mmorpg nerds after all. We do play FFXIV with fairly high settings, with no problems at all. Sure this will kill it faster, but like already said money is no issue for us at all. Being able to take the computer with us anywhere however IS, since we run a small business that involves travelling.
You wont be playing with it unplugged much like already said. I cant say if Alienware is pricey where you live, but before buying my Asus I did some research and both MSI and Asus did seem to make good stuff with resonable price, for gaming. Sony was always alot more expensive with lesser graphics. No idea where Alienware stands.
Anyways, let us know how it went
Yea, but you didn't get a hat now did ya?? WIN
Maybe I did.
Personally I say find the lap top with the stats you want and buy it, don't go for the band name, go for what it can do. AlienWare isn't the company it once was because it is now owned by dell, so it is pretty much a dell with a few different parts and a different casing, and while they are more difficult to mod than a desktop, lap tops now can be upgraded.
Well, I will say this, I was running Brink last night while also running 72 applications and not a hitch. That aside, I honestly do love ny rig! Never a problem, but mine is a desktop. Laptop gaming is like acustic metal. It's just stupid. EDIT: Nice hat!! Love the little heart.:P
It's easier to get a good deal if someone else is paying for half of it.
If you're using it for work and reliability is of the utmost importance, then going with Alienware probably isn't the best idea, as you have to hope that the corners they cut don't come back to get you. At minimum, you want a site that will tell you exactly what parts they use.
What you can do is to get overengineered parts all around that could handle a substantial overclock, and then don't overclock it. If you're not pushing any parts anywhere remotely near their limits, then the reduced strain means you're less likely to run into problems. Get a high end power supply, an uninterruptible power supply, and RAID 1 storage or at least periodic image backups together with daily incremental backups. While it's not possible to make absolutely certain that your computer won't die, that will allow quite a few things to go wrong without taking your system down.
-----
"Well the retailer in Canada was willing to do some modifications for me at www.fortnax.com but mine game with the 485M card and i cant complain, its running very cool, and for the games i play I am getting great performance out of my SB and 485M."
The Radeon HD 6970M appeared around the same time that Sandy Bridge processors came back after the chipset recall. If you bought your laptop before the 6970M was out, you might have one of the defective chipsets.
The problem with the GeForce GTX 485M isn't the performance. Rather, it's that a Radeon HD 6970M will get you about the same performance, while costing $200-$300 less, and using maybe 10-20 W less power. Most of the 6970Ms out there seem to be 2 GB versions, which is unfortunate, as laptops generally can't handle the sort of settings where 2 GB will work better than 1 GB, and it would be nice to not have the extra 10 W or so of power consumption from the extra video memory.
-----
"I myself have had a couple Dells, one being an XPS. I've also had HPs, and I can tell you from experience that Dells support is not that bad comparably. "
Good tech support is nice. Not needing tech support because the machine just works right the first time is nicer.
-----
"I would like to state that my $800 Dell outperformed my friend's $2500 Alienware in both speed of opening identical programs and multitasking."
Speed of opening programs is often storage-bound. The processor has some impact as well, but the video card usually doesn't. If you had a faster hard drive on an otherwise inferior system, you'll probably see programs open faster. Or if you have an SSD, then you win at program load times.
-----
"Hexa-cores (6 cores) are a ripoff, most games and programs can only utilize 2."
Programs rarely try to say, we're going to make sure we can take advantage of two cores, but not more than that. Rather, if they're not single-threaded, then they're trying to take advantage of as many cores as they can.
There are two common problems that limit games from scaling to more cores. One is if code isn't optimized well enough and too much of the work is consolidated in a single thread. Suppose, for example that a game engine manages to break the game into eight threads for the processor. If each thread always has the same amount of work to do, then the game will scale flawlessly to eight cores. If one thread has to do half of the work by itself, then you might see a little bit of benefit from moving from two cores to three, but no benefit for going beyond that. If you had eight cores, then the game could use all eight simultaneously, but just wouldn't perform any better than if you only had three. Change the 50% of the work that the "largest" thread has to do and you change how many cores the game will scale to.
The other thing that makes games look like they don't scale to more cores is if they're not processor-bound. The graphics engine for Civilization V will scale to 12 cores, for example. But if, with two cores, your frame rates are already limited by your video card and not your processor, then adding more cores won't improve performance. It just means that the extra processor cores get to spend more time waiting on the video card. This often makes it look like games that scale well to several cores don't actually scale beyond one or two.
The latter isn't really a problem for processors, as the solution to it is faster video cards. Or perhaps rather, the solution is that, if you've got a very high frame rate at high graphical settings, you call that good enough. The first problem of imperfectly balanced threads is a bigger problem, and one that both AMD and Intel try to address in hardware. Relatively recent Intel processors can shut down some cores and clock others higher to improve performance in programs that don't scale to many cores.
Among AMD processors, Thuban has turbo core (AMD's version of Intel's turbo boost) and Zacate has power gating, but no AMD processors have both just yet. Llano and Zambezi will, though, and they're both launching soon.
Zambezi should be interesting, and will try to further improve single-threaded performance with its Bulldozer modules. The idea of Bulldozer is that each module has a scheduler, L2 cache, a floating point unit, and so forth. But the module has two integer cores, and presents itself to the OS as two cores. This isn't like Intel's hyperthreading, where there's only one physical core there, and a second thread tries to fill in some gaps where the first thread wasn't doing anything and get some extra work done that way. A Bulldozer module has two physical integer cores sitting there, and both can run at once.
The idea is that you've got all of the cache and front end stuff needed to run two cores, but if you only have a single thread to run, then you can have all of those resources available for just a single core, which could make for a very powerful single core. There is also some speculation that, with enough resources shared between the two integer cores, Bulldozer might try to use both cores for a single thread and improve performance that way. That's probably just crazy talk, though.
Ideally, if you've got one very "big" thread that has to do more than its share of the work on a Bulldozer processor, you put that one thread on an entire Bulldozer module all by itself, for maximum single-threaded performance. The other, lighter threads can be divvied up among the other cores, and have two smaller threads running in the same module, with one on each core. There's still the question of whether Windows will be smart enough to do that, and my guess would be "no" for now. But everyone seems to think that heterogenous computing is the future, and this will be another step in that direction.
-----
"Windows 7 64-bit can ONLY use 4GB RAM. No more. The full 6GB RAM will never be used even if you somehow fill the 4GB."
Nope. Wrong. How much memory 64-bit Windows 7 can use depends on the version. Home Premium is capped at 16 GB, while Professional and higher are capped at 192 GB. A 32-bit programs can only use 2 GB by itself, so even if you have massive amounts of memory available, you might never use more than 4 GB. But that's not because Windows is stopping you.
-----
"Why would you put an electric car battery in a desktop computer? In case the power goes out?"
I'm not sure what you're referring to there. The idea of an uninterruptible power supply is that if you lose power, the computer just keeps working as though nothing happened. Some can also smooth out the voltages, so if there is something wrong with your electricity supply and it briefly sends you 130 W or 100 W, the UPS converts it to something near 120 W, and by the time it reaches your power supply, it looks like a good signal and the computer works just fine. Pulling high loads from the wall can also cause the voltage to drop.
This has two purposes. First, it means power problems don't crash your computer while you're trying to work on it. Second, it means power problems won't damage your hardware.
-----
"Heat here and performance per watt there, if you want a laptop just buy one."
The history of gamers deciding to buy a computer at random without knowing what they're getting is not pretty.
go with anything frrom here:
http://eu.msi.com/product/nb/#/?sk=Gaming Series
these things are fucking beastly and alot cheaper for what you get than other gaming laptops, i know from experience using them never had a problem. also they're very high quality with a brushed aluminium finish, i personally think looks better than the alienware.
Haha agreed. I just meant, a gaming laptop is valid. He doenst have to go desktop just coz it fits other ppl's wallet better. Ofc he'll probably end up happier doing some research before buying =D