It's always a lucky day for the writer who gets to cover a new Alienware release, because you wouldn't be doing your readers justice without building your own fantasy rig on the retail site and seeing just how high you can jack the price up. So today is especially thrilling, because we got to throw together two $12,000+ workstations without breaking a sweat: the Intel Xeon-powered
MJ-12 8550i and AMD Opteron-powered MJ-12 8550a. This being Alienware and all, you can load up either machine with two top of the line chips, creating either a 2.8GHz quad-core Opteron 2220 monster or an outlandish 1.86GHz octo-core Xeon 5320 beast. Add to that 1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA Quadro FX 5500 graphics (or 2 FX 4500's in SLI on the 8550i), 16GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM, up to four HDD's (max storage: 3TB; max coolness: 600GB worth of 15,000 RPM drives), and two dual layer burners -- and well sir, you've got yourself quite a workhorse right there. Unfortunately for the average consumer whose games and apps aren't optimized for multi-core processors, these specs wouldn't really translate to blazing fast performance for day to day tasks -- plus both rigs only ship with XP, which might be a dealbreaker in and of itself. Since not everyone is gonna want to blow twelve grand on their email and web surfing box, (much) cheaper configurations are available, with both the "a" and the "i" starting at $2,550.
posted March 6th 2007 4:37PM
The only question is: Does it come with a clearcoated car paint option? I'd like mine in candy apple red with sparkle coat please.
Has Alienware gone corporate?
And they'll be here for review and donation in 1-2 weeks, right Engadget?
yet another article begging for a "yes...but will it run doom?" comment
so...without further ado... on behalf of all fellow endgadget readers i present to you: "yes...but will it run doom?"
I think the cliche is more along the lines of:
"Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!"
...playing Doom!
well its good to know that im not the only onewho goes to alienware and makes a kick-ass computer thats costs as much as a small car. i feel loved.
This one is for the film and cg production studios.
So Alienware slaps some parts together that I could buy from Newegg for about two grand, jacks the price up to 12k, and suddenly they're news?
They don't innovate at all, beyond having a shiny case. All they do is create overhead and dupe idiots into believing they're getting their money's worth.
I guess I'll just cut to chase, then.
So where are you finding, let's just say, 16GB of that memory for "about two grand", that would all fit in one box?
I'll spare you the embarrassment of trying to locate that 1GB Quadro for significantly under $2,000.
Also, cue the mac fanboys: mY ZMAC is WAAAYYAYAYAAAYYYYYY fastar tahn taht!!1!!!!!!11!!1one!!1!!!!1!!!1eleven!11!!!!!!!!
Haha, yeah, hard to get THAT system for $2000... if you do, please tell me where I can get one.
Actually the specs pretty much sound like a top of the line Mac Pro (if you change the processors, that is. When will Apple finally offer quad core chips?). Oh, and you can add a few more of those Quadro FX cards in a Mac Pro. And you might have to pay a bit more for that Mac.
Btw., if you want to play around, Dell allows you to add like 64 GB of RAM, which will push the price up to Porsche niveau.
Oh, and I don't think that Alien head on the case looks professional enough. A Mac Pro looks better... more serious.
Wow, I remember back when dual core was big. And HT too, wow, it's gone far in a few years.
This is so sad. Not headline news at all. Go to dell.com, their parent company, and configure a precision 690 workstation! Instead of the pathetic 1.8ghz quad cores, you can configure it with the 2.66ghz quad cores for nearly the SAME PRICE! And the PWS looks better to boot.
I knew the mac fanboys would emerge. It just took a little longer than expected.
Again, I'll cut to the chase.
Whatever/how many videocards you can put in a mac, you can easily put at least the same kind/amount in a PC. That's obvious.
And there is no question: you would pay more for that mac, despite it performing worse than the PC using the same applications.
I don't want to hear "But, but...Final Cut! They make real movies with it!" OK, take a hard look at Avid Xpress Pro HD then get back to me.
And of course, case aesthetics. What a non-issue. As long as it cools properly, it doesn't matter what the case looks like. That's the problem with mac users. They think if their case has a little white apple on it as opposed to a little Alienware head or Dell logo it will perform better.
if it's anything like my £3.5k alienware area51-m lappy, it'll be 12k worth of multiple hardware failures and return-to-base antics.
plague, like, avoid, the
"plus both rigs only ship with XP, which might be a dealbreaker in and of itself."
Are you complaining because it doesn't ship with Vista ?
For professional applications, vista is useless. Most apps (Maya, XSI...) aren't certified for vista, and the drivers are still sub-par compared to the XP versions.
Believe me, it'll take quite some time for the CG pros to go Vista.
No, not really. All the PCIe slots in a Mac Pro are physically of x16 size... can't find out what they are in the Alienware, though from the photo on their site it might be the same. But in ordinary PCs you may install 2 video cards, not more.
Will the Mac Pro perform worse... don't think so. The specs are the same, the hardware should be pretty much the same, designed by Intel anyway, the only difference is the OS, and you can run Windows on it anyway.
No, not really.
Even basic enthusiast boards come equipped with 3 x16 slots these days, on PCs anyways. I'm surprised (not really) that that hasn't made its way over to mac hardware yet.
Oh well, I guess it doesn't really matter once that apple starts chugging in about two years, you can't really upgrade it anyway. Time to drop another five grand on an over-priced tower with holes in it with an apple logo on it.
And yeah, things like faster memory, faster hard disks, faster optical drives and the like don't mean any thing. Only processors, right?
There is faster hardware available for PCs than pre-built macs "pros".
Cue how "macs have a better operating system so inferior hardware doesn't matter".
Eli @ Mar 6th 2007 6:53PM
"So Alienware slaps some parts together that I could buy from Newegg for about two grand, jacks the price up to 12k, and suddenly they're news?"
WTF? 2 grand? Please, the CPUs will cost you that much. Sure Alienware is over priced, but everyone knows that, thanks Captain Obvious!