Alienware stoops lower with $1,049 Area-51 750i gaming desktop
By Darren Murph 
posted November 13th 2008 2:15PM
posted November 13th 2008 2:15PM
posted November 13th 2008 2:15PM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
...action hero
Wish alienware would change its case, its been using that case for donkeys years.
I was thinking the same thing, they need a sleek and interesting version without those fins. I think it would be cool if a manufacturer had a case where the intake was the bottom of the case, and the top was the exhaust.
also ribbed for your pleasure.
After Last!!
I like the Acer Predator cases much more than this... Oh well, I build my own gaming rig's anyway.
What is it? Some kind of pacifist ceylon sleeper, blue instead of red? Hrmmmmmmmmmmmmm
I find it interesting that people bemoan the price of certain fruit manufacturer but alienware comes out with this crap and gets a pass. It's made with the same parts as other companies right, so where's the hate now? Or voodoo pc and their lame hipster wannabe owner with his overpriced wares. I swear, here is a computer that is slightly better than a mac laptop but costs about 500-1000 dollars more and comes with windows and hardly any preloaded software worth anything. You know, a bad deal.
Mac Desktop (Mac Pro) starts from $2800....
Must be new at math, it's only $50 more than the cheapest white MacBook. Not to mention that it is $500 cheaper than the new MacBook.
The $1,050 setup comes with a Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR2 800, and a 512MB 9800GT. This would run circles around the white MacBook and probably the new MacBook. The only advantage the new MacBook has is DDR3-1066 which has been proven to have very little performance increase over DDR2, the main reason to go with DDR3 is battery life in laptops.
Also, you shouldn't really compare laptops with desktops. A fair comparison would be between the price of the Mac Pro and this with somewhat similar specs.
For the people that build gaming machines on a regular basis, yes this is very expensive considering what you can get for the money if you build your own. For your average user, with support costs and warranties taken into consideration, then this isn't a very bad price at all.
yeah, probably should have been more clear I wasn't talkign about this specific computer, I was talking about voodoo pc's laptop that came out recently. My mind kind of jumps.
Alienware has one of the worst service departments ever. Don't even get me started...
How long ago? Because they're owned by dell now, dell has decent support. You still have to jump through the "yes I removed the bios battery, yes I rebooted" etc but they're decent now
Wow, even the "high-end" version is a 750i. Talk about a ripoff.
Guess who they are owned by...
Dell!
Oops, that was supposed to be a reply to my own comment.
Borders Engadget, we need BOARDARS!
@brian
Did you say that Dell has decent support? All of they're answers come from a fµcking step by step manual! And they are in India, I can barely even uderstand anything they say. Every problem that I have had with Dell I solved them by myself or with forums in half the time they Dell Support can get it fixed. The thing I hate most about Dell Support is that if they can't figure out the answer, THEY HANG UP ON YOU! Fµck you Dell!
Dude... you're getting a Dell!
@peter
All tech support is from a manual, Do this, if it doesn't work, do this, then this, else RMA. I haven't had to call dell in about 2 years so they quite likely have gone down hill but in the past I've been able to call them up, say here's my problem, I did this, this, and that. I need this part. And they ship it to me. Then again I'm a DCSE so that might have something to do with them shipping me whatever I ask for ;)
Just because you hear an unusual accent doesn't mean it's Indian.
750i?
Why'd they rip that from BMW
They didnt, the motherboard chipset is 7th generation of nvidia nforce, the 50 denoting that its the midrange, not sure on the i though.
Only a 750i? I'm guessing that the higher end models are 790i/780i? But seriously, they couldn't throw in an extra $50 and get the FTW edition from EVGA?
you sound like an accountant....i should know, i am one
And buying premade rigs is needed....some of us like warranties with the products we buy.
@ nick
"I swear, here is a computer that is slightly better than a mac laptop but costs about 500-1000 dollars more"
Please show me this $49 - $549 mac laptop that you speak of, because I'm ready to buy.
sorry, I was referencing voodoopc at that point. I didn't make it entirely clear.
Where doesn't engadget list the specs for the $1,049? Instead of showing all the max options.
http://www.alienware.com/customize/area-51-750i-desktop.aspx?SysCode=PC-A51-750I&SubCode=SKU-DEFAULT
Looks good, but what is the configuration you get for the basic price? Also, from my experience, the perormance gain of the 1066 RAM over 800 is very small if any at all.
my comments at http://www.commentino.com/orim
I think buying premade makes the most sense at the low end. You really can't build cheap computers as cheaply as you can buy them.
Great computers. Why do they have to be so goddamned ugly?
Never understood Alienware, it always seems like you just paying for the case..
Once again, an overpriced piece of machinery. And don't even think about asking me to prove it. I already did.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/03/alienware-teases-evolutionary-product-should-unveil-today/comments/15297953/
New Computer parts COME with warranties. You don't get any greater value by buying pre-made because the profits from computer sales come from the LABOR costs not the PARTS costs. It's like paying more for an overclocked graphics card. Why the heck would I pay for an overclocked 9800GTX when I can do it myself in LITERALLY 5 seconds? Same goes for "pre-overclocked" processors. You pay more for the warranty than you would to buy a new processor in 6 months.
If I was 5 years old, I'd think that a computer case that looks like an alien head is hella awesome.
Not every one is G33K and/or has the knowledge and/or desire to build their own. Sometimes it's just best to get all the stuff from one place and in the event of trouble, you have only one vendor vs a dozen to deal with; plus they do the trouble shooting for you, something a lot of people cannot do themselves. If you don't belive me, go read support forums: They are full of ignorant folk.
Being a PC Gamer does not mean you should have to know about the workings of a PC. People that believe otherwise are more smug than the most die hard mac users.
http://www.answerbag.com/c_view/20
No one, not even one, picked up on the: "(or dueling GeForce GTX 280s, if you prefer)" ???
"dueling"
Anyone?
No?
It's true that all your home parts come with warranties, and anybody with a decent intelligence can build a computer. Unfortunately, not everyone is an IT admin, so when your power supply blows out you won't be able to tell whether it's your power supply, or your motherboard, or your video card, or a bazillion other things. And if it's your only computer you can't even go online to get help or look for information to help you diagnose it.
Oh and if you are able to diagnose it, good luck getting your RMA back anytime soon. Compared to some of the turnarounds on the better OEM warranties you're looking at anywhere from a week if you're lucky and the part maker will cross-ship to a friggin' month or even more if they're out of that part. Samsung once took three months to replace my monitor and they replaced it with a different monitor in the end (a monitor which sucked but they basically told my brother to take it or leave it [I wasn't home when they called]...thanks Samsung-you guys suck).
For people with multiple computers and thus spare motherboards, spare PSUs, spare sticks of RAM, and hopefully a spare video card you're pretty much screwed when something goes wrong. For example, when my motherboard went nuts and refused to correctly boot with my existing RAM (Micron D9) no matter how many times I reset the CMOS (my best guess was that it was trying to fire it up at 1000Mhz with only 1.8V or something similarly stupid even though resetting the CMOS should have bumped it to a bootable spec...had no problems the first time I put together the system) it basically fixed itself when I put in some spare DDR667 sticks I had lying around. Or when a BIOS update failed on this same motherboard, I popped in my friend's BIOS chip for the same board and hotflashed my BIOS chip back to working condition. Or that time my video card fan died and I didn't want to wait for a new fan to come in so I just swapped video cards. The list goes on and on and on.
To put it very simply, for normal people there's NO WAY IN HELL the shoddy warranties offered by most motherboard manufacturers, video card manufacturers, many of the RAM manufacturers, etc. will come even close to the fact that Dell can send someone to your house to take a look at your computer, or guarantee overnight shipping back to you, or worst case you might be looking at 2 weeks of downtime with their most basic warranty. Let's not even get into the fact that random electronics companies are fairly likely to go bankrupt (remember Epox? My motherboard warranty wasn't real useful when they went and disappeared. Remember all those great video card and sound card companies that used to exist?)
Quite frankly if you're not an IT professional the sheer time and money investment to diagnose your own computer problems will quickly rack up. For someone who owns exactly one motherboard, one CPU, whatever RAM's in their computer, and one hard drive, WAY too many things can go wrong and be a pain in the butt to diagnose without spare parts. There is NO way to tell if your motherboard has killed itself or your PSU has killed itself without either using spares or having a specialized PSU tester. Even if you did something stupid like shorting the PSU to power it up you'd have no clue whether there was something wrong with the power going to motherboard-maybe it still runs the fan but doesn't have enough power to power up the motherboard. Just because it's insanely easy for you, an IT admin to fix your own crap doesn't mean it's easy for 99% of people to do it.
And as the accountant can tell you, some people have jobs where their time would be much better spent just telling Dell to come fix it (or having someone else call Dell to come fix it) than wasting their time trying to diagnose what's wrong with their computer, then RMAing the random parts, then reinstalling their OS and all the drivers. If you're a neurosurgeon who has more important crap to do you're wasting both time and money trying to diagnose this crap when you can call Falcon Northwest or Voodoo PC or whatever and get them to fix your system ASAP. Even dealing with the idiots at Dell is likely to take less time, especially if you've paid for the better warranties.
Just because I know how to fix pretty much everything on my car doesn't mean I'm actually gonna go and do it. I change my oil myself now because I went back to school so I don't make any money, but even now it's not worth the investment in time/tools and risk of injury for me to do something like changing the struts when it'd be the same price or even cheaper to pay for a bit of labor instead. And I know damned if I made $250K a year even if I can afford all the tools I'm not going to do that stuff myself because it makes no sense at all not to just drop it off and let someone else fix it. If it's something I enjoy doing I might do it when I have time for fun-like someone who has a project car, a labor of love. But that doesn't mean that you should waste your time trying to rebuild your daily driver's engine just because you could, it'd be a huge waste of time and money for someone who has a decent income and who doesn't want to have their car out of commission while they replace random engine parts.
Seriously, get over yourself "IT Admin". Plenty of 17 year olds could do your job. I actually even knew a IT Admin who still went to high school during the day and made a pretty decent 80K a year salary after class, and while it was impressive since he was 17 and went to school the whole day you need to get over yourself and how great at building computers you are and how everyone should build their own PC or they're an idiot. Actually, you might actually be 17 since that's about how mature you sound.
And just for the record? I have 7 friggin' computers and even then 3 of them were prebuilt (2 laptops, and I bought a brand new Compaq years ago for under $150 with an Athlon 64 3400+ there's no way you could possibly even have come close in price back then and I've never even had to use the warranty which is more than I can say for most "leet" gaming motherboards).
tl;dnr
While I enjoy DIY and it can frequently be cheaper than buying a pre-built system, people who comment just to flame the piss out of anyone who doesn't build their own computer have a serious chip on their shoulder and a lack of better things to do. I've built my own PCs but obviously not my laptops or the Mac.
The problem is this. The self important pricks talk up how easy it is to build your own computer, which is true. It's just dead simple. But then they get all excited about how cool they are for making their own l33t rig. Sorry dude, can't have it both ways. Building a computer is easy, so you're not special for doing it. Therefore, you are not automatically superior to the folks out there who buy prebuilt systems.
Stupid case,
I'm going back to Poland
does this mean 6bit drivers for alien fx?
I don't know where you buy your parts, but all my custom built PC that I built never fail. I have pc's that I built 5 years ago and still running. The ONLY reason I replace parts is to upgrade. I do you really think that buying a pre-built PC is cheaper. You pay more for the warranties, plus the person who fixes you PC rips you off. And they do NOT test you computer. Why you think computers arrive at you house DOA. The computer is put together on an assembly line, packaged up and sent to the store warehouse. Maybe sits there for weeks, why the manufacturer builds another on with newer parts. One of my computers failed this week, replaced the ddr2-sdrams chips and had my pc running in 3 hours ($72). A repair place would keep your computer for weeks and would probably tell you it's the motherboard or hardrive and charge you 3 times the price and have you lose all your data. 99% of them tell you re-install windows for the 10 time.