Alienware vs. Dell

[Evak]

I've been pretty lucky with building my own. Most of my computers stay in use for 4-6 years and usually sit in the shed in perfect working order after. The one thing that does seem to need to be replaced every 4-5 years seems to be the HD.

[Moohasha]

The one thing that does seem to need to be replaced every 4-5 years seems to be the HD.

Is that because the HD actually stops working, or because after 4-5 years you can't put anymore music on it?

[Nauk]

I can only agree with what most said: build it yourself. Take some time to read carefully through hardware tests and don't buy the latest high-end hardware, look out for stuff that has been out and running on the market for at least 6 months to a year. By that time you get the best price / power ratio and there is a very high chance that the drivers are stabile, the hardware had at least one revision, the bios has at least been fixed once, etc.

[Moohasha]

So even though we're way off topic now (which I guess is okay, since this is the Off-topic lounge ), I took everyone's advice and picked out some parts to build something myself. I don't have the money yet, so it'll be awhile before I buy it, but I thought I'd get you'z guy'z opinion on what I've picked, since you're more likely to notice problems/incompatibilities/other issues, or simply say "it's worth it to go with this one instead of that". So here's what I've got (all from newegg.com):

Mobo: MSI DKA790GX AM2+/AM2 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 3.0 GHz
Video: ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
RAM: CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 SDRAM 800
Power: RAIDMAX HYBRID 2 730 Watt
HDD: HITACHI Deskstar 500GB 7200 RPM
DVD: SAMSUNG 22x DVD+/-R Burner w/ LightScribe
Case: APEVIA X-TELSTAR-JR S-Type (red) mid tower case
Extras: Killer K1 NIC
ARTIC COOLING Freezer 7 CPU fan
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound
Total Cost: $976

I'm building this for the primary purpose of playing WoW, and I wanted to keep it around $1000-$1500. Since this only comes out to $976, I'm a little flexible with the budget if someone can recomend some improvements. The main feature is the ATI Radeon 4870 1GB. I just noticed today that newegg has the same card available with 2GB for only $30, so I may look at that instead. I'm not sure if 730W PS is too much, but I didn't want to get too little.
Also, not reflected in the price, I'm planning on running Vista 64-bit to be able to use 4G RAM. Please, no slams on Windows. Since my #1 reason for building this is to play WoW, I'm stuck with Windows or Mac, and honestly I just like Windows. I drink the koolaid.
I'm not sold on the Killer K1 NIC, but I've heard/read that it's supposed to do a good job of reducing lag. The thermal compound and CPU fan are to replace whatever comes stock with the CPU for a little extra cooling.

So what do you guys think? Will this work out well? I think for my budget it's a pretty good machine. More power than what I was looking at from Dell OR Alienware, and much cheaper.

[xavier]

So even though we're way off topic now (which I guess is okay, since this is the Off-topic lounge ), I took everyone's advice and picked out some parts to build something myself. I don't have the money yet, so it'll be awhile before I buy it, but I thought I'd get you'z guy'z opinion on what I've picked, since you're more likely to notice problems/incompatibilities/other issues, or simply say "it's worth it to go with this one instead of that". So here's what I've got (all from newegg.com):

Mobo: MSI DKA790GX AM2+/AM2 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 3.0 GHz
Video: ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
RAM: CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 SDRAM 800
Power: RAIDMAX HYBRID 2 730 Watt
HDD: HITACHI Deskstar 500GB 7200 RPM
DVD: SAMSUNG 22x DVD+/-R Burner w/ LightScribe
Case: APEVIA X-TELSTAR-JR S-Type (red) mid tower case
Extras: Killer K1 NIC
ARTIC COOLING Freezer 7 CPU fan
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound
Total Cost: $976

I'm building this for the primary purpose of playing WoW, and I wanted to keep it around $1000-$1500. Since this only comes out to $976, I'm a little flexible with the budget if someone can recomend some improvements. The main feature is the ATI Radeon 4870 1GB. I just noticed today that newegg has the same card available with 2GB for only $30, so I may look at that instead. I'm not sure if 730W PS is too much, but I didn't want to get too little.
Also, not reflected in the price, I'm planning on running Vista 64-bit to be able to use 4G RAM. Please, no slams on Windows. Since my #1 reason for building this is to play WoW, I'm stuck with Windows or Mac, and honestly I just like Windows. I drink the koolaid.
I'm not sold on the Killer K1 NIC, but I've heard/read that it's supposed to do a good job of reducing lag. The thermal compound and CPU fan are to replace whatever comes stock with the CPU for a little extra cooling.

So what do you guys think? Will this work out well? I think for my budget it's a pretty good machine. More power than what I was looking at from Dell OR Alienware, and much cheaper.

You can run 32-bit XP with 4GB too, you know. But agreed - at this point I see no reason not to install a 64-bit OS if you have the option, simply for the future.

Along those lines, only 4GB? I have to assume that there is plenty of room for more RAM in the future if needed, but it seems "chintzy" to go with 4GB at this point in time (considering how cheap RAM is).

BTW, the only thing that will reduce lag is lower latency between you and the server -- any sub-millisecond gain you might feel you're getting from a "gaming NIC" is going to be swamped, by several orders of magnitude, by factors out of your control. And if your primary concern is WoW, then lag should hardly be the overriding concern there, given how laggy a game it is inherently, almost by design.

I have to advise against the Deskstar (formerly made by IBM) -- having used those in the past, they *will* fail, in my experience, around the 2-year mark (on the nose). I would advise against Western Digital, for the same reason -- Maxtor has been good to me. I also have to recommend going with two HDD (I run mine striped) -- the disk performance is night and day vs. a single drive.

[Moohasha]

You can run 32-bit XP with 4GB too, you know. But agreed - at this point I see no reason not to install a 64-bit OS if you have the option, simply for the future.

Along those lines, only 4GB? I have to assume that there is plenty of room for more RAM in the future if needed, but it seems "chintzy" to go with 4GB at this point in time (considering how cheap RAM is).

I was not aware a 32-bit OS would recognize 4GB of RAM. I was under the impression that the limit was 3.5 or something. But regardless, like you said, it's a good idea to move to a 64-bit OS for the future. As for why only 4GB instead of 8GB...I dunno! I originally had 8GB, but I reduced it to 4GB and upped the CPU to 3.0GHz with the price difference, but you're right. RAM is cheap now, and maxxing out at 8GB (which is what this mobo supports) wouldn't hurt.

BTW, the only thing that will reduce lag is lower latency between you and the server -- any sub-millisecond gain you might feel you're getting from a "gaming NIC" is going to be swamped, by several orders of magnitude, by factors out of your control. And if your primary concern is WoW, then lag should hardly be the overriding concern there, given how laggy a game it is inherently, almost by design.

That's why I'm not sure if I really want to spend $150 on it. I've read reviews on both sides, from people saying they see a huge difference when raiding and in pvp areas where you have lots of users in the same small area with lots of effects, and from people saying that they see no difference whatsoever.

I have to advise against the Deskstar (formerly made by IBM) -- having used those in the past, they *will* fail, in my experience, around the 2-year mark (on the nose). I would advise against Western Digital, for the same reason -- Maxtor has been good to me. I also have to recommend going with two HDD (I run mine striped) -- the disk performance is night and day vs. a single drive.

Thanks, I'll see what the prices are for other HDDs. But why two? Do you use one specifically for the OS and the other for games\programs? Why does it make a difference?

Thanks for the feedback! This is exactly what I'm looking for.

[Nauk]

I have to advise against the Deskstar (formerly made by IBM) -- having used those in the past, they *will* fail, in my experience, around the 2-year mark (on the nose). I would advise against Western Digital, for the same reason -- Maxtor has been good to me. I also have to recommend going with two HDD (I run mine striped) -- the disk performance is night and day vs. a single drive.

I made exactly the same experience, EVERY IBM harddrive I ever owned shot sooner or later, and 2 year margin sounds about right, same for several customers. To suggest an additional HD manufacturer I made good experiences with: Samsung seems a good choice too, the last one I bought, runs since 3 years 24 hours a day, no problem.

[xavier]

You can run 32-bit XP with 4GB too, you know. But agreed - at this point I see no reason not to install a 64-bit OS if you have the option, simply for the future.

Along those lines, only 4GB? I have to assume that there is plenty of room for more RAM in the future if needed, but it seems "chintzy" to go with 4GB at this point in time (considering how cheap RAM is).

I was not aware a 32-bit OS would recognize 4GB of RAM. I was under the impression that the limit was 3.5 or something.

WinXP is a 32-bit OS, which means that it can address a 32-bit memory space (4GB). Other factors weigh in, such as GPU VRAM shadow (which will make some of the memory inaccessible due to the fact that GPU memory has to live in the 32-bit address space too). The "2/3/3.5" thing is not how much XP will recognize, but how much it will allow for each process -- by default, processes in XP can only read/write in the lower 2GB of their memory space (in user-mode, anyway, with the usual additional restrictions), unless you flip the switch to let them access 3GB of their memory space (which usually isn't needed). On the OS' part, having the additional RAM means less virtual paging, which is always nice.

BTW, the only thing that will reduce lag is lower latency between you and the server -- any sub-millisecond gain you might feel you're getting from a "gaming NIC" is going to be swamped, by several orders of magnitude, by factors out of your control. And if your primary concern is WoW, then lag should hardly be the overriding concern there, given how laggy a game it is inherently, almost by design.

That's why I'm not sure if I really want to spend $150 on it. I've read reviews on both sides, from people saying they see a huge difference when raiding and in pvp areas where you have lots of users in the same small area with lots of effects, and from people saying that they see no difference whatsoever.

I would have to think that those who think they see a difference, are creating the perception that there is none, where there is none. Alternately, they could be correlating otherwise unrelated external network/server conditions to their new hardware.

I have to advise against the Deskstar (formerly made by IBM) -- having used those in the past, they *will* fail, in my experience, around the 2-year mark (on the nose). I would advise against Western Digital, for the same reason -- Maxtor has been good to me. I also have to recommend going with two HDD (I run mine striped) -- the disk performance is night and day vs. a single drive.

Thanks, I'll see what the prices are for other HDDs. But why two? Do you use one specifically for the OS and the other for games\programs? Why does it make a difference?

For the same reason that multiply-threaded processes on multi-core machines run faster -- you can do two things at once. In this case (stripe), the data fetch is shared across two drives, and you can get (theoretically) twice the throughput since the data is coming from two places at once instead of having to come byte by byte serially from a single drive. Also, the seek time is amortized across the multiple drives, for the same reason. I noticed this most doing compiles/links (links especially, which are very I/O bound with usually a random access pattern) -- very noticeable speedup.

[Moohasha]

Ok, I had never heard of striping hard drives. If you had said RAID-0, I would have known what you were talking about, but still not understood what it was.
I looked it up and ran across this:

To set up a striped set, first, install the hard drives. However, your primary hard drive cannot be included in the striped set because you can only create striped sets on empty hard drives.

Does that mean you really need 3 HDDs to use striping? Or does this just mean to setup striping after Windows is already installed? That is, can you setup striping before installing Windows, thus needing only 2 HDDs? I would assume so...

[Moohasha]

edit: lag caused multiple submissions...

[Moohasha]

edit: lag caused multiple submissions...so I'm just going to add some other stuff
Two other questions I've been concerned about.

1) Is the power supply sufficient or is it overkill? I think I am going to get 2 HDDs setup with RAID-0, but I don't know really how much juice this thing is going to be drawing as is.

2) What about the case? I don't really care that much about case asthetics, and to be honest I think a lot of the cases with windows and lights look a little tacky (man, maybe I'm getting old!). My concern is more with size and ventilation. I want everything to fit and have room to breath so it doesn't turn into a sauna.

[Kojack]

Case wise, Lian Li all the way. Awesome quality, but they cost more than an average case.

Many people have different hard drive experiences, they all go through bad batches. Google any brand and you will find horror stories about how unreliable they are and how another brand is better.
I've been using Western Digital for years, and will keep doing so until they become the next crap brand (currently Seagate, a firmware bug has recently been bricking around 5 series of Seagate SATA hardrives).

Whether the Killer Nic really helps games to a noticable degree on a modern cpu is debatable I guess (on a slower cpu system it would help more), but having a 333MHz Linux based pc embedded on a pci card which runs a firewall and various network apps (ftp, bit torrent, etc) with zero host cpu usage is pretty cool. With the higher model of Killer Nic, not only is the tcp/ip stack and the firewall offloaded to the nic, but you can plug your headset into it and let it handle voice compression for teamspeak without bothering the rest of the pc.

[Moohasha]

So THREE MONTHS LATER I finally bought my new computer! Every week I was going on NewEgg and updating my wishlist, swapping things out, looking for new deals, but I finally came up with a really nice, affordable machine. Here are the specs:

Mobo: ASRock A780GXH
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 940 (3.0 GHz)
Video: Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon 4870 HD 2GB (killer)
RAM: G.SKILL 8 GB DDR2 800
PSU: Roswell 850W Crossfire Ready
HDD: 2x Seagate Barracudea 500GB (Raid 0)
Optical: LG Blu-Ray DVD-ROM (plays BD/HD, burns DVD/CD)
Case: Apevia X-Cruiser (Red)
OS: Windows 7 RC
Total: $1,050

The 850W PSU is serious overkill, but it was $50 off, had great reviews, and the fan has a blue LED which matches the case fans and video card fan, so I said what the hey. I thought I might eventually buy another video card for Crossfire (if I need it, probably won't), but I don't know if there's room in the case! I had to move one of the hard drives around just to get the one video card in. And this friday I'm buying a 24" monitor for it, and eventually a 3D SpaceNavigator (SO much fun to play with in Ogre apps!!).
Right now (while my wife's out of town ) I've got it hooked up to the HDTV in the living room as a monitor and the resolution is cranked up to 1920x1080. And because it took me 3 months to buy it, I'm able to use the Windows 7 RC until it comes out instead of buying Vista. I haven't gotten to play anything on it yet except X3: Reunion, but it doesn't even break a sweat on that game.
Thanks to everyone who offered input/advice.

[Kojack]

You won't regret the space navigator, it's so painful for me now to use programs like google earth, sketchup, 3dsmax without it.
Hooking it to ogre is pretty easy, I used mine to apply linear force and torque (3 degrees each) to PhysX objects, it's like the ultimate gravity gun. Although a Novint Falcon would be cool too.

[Moohasha]

Absolutely! I use it at work to drive the camera in my app, and when I don't have it I feel crippled. Which is why I'm getting one to use at home.

[Ruud v A]

About the graphics cards: the 260 can also run in SLI (which is the same technology as CrossfireX but nVidia's). Ati doesn't list the important features on it's site so I can't really compare them, but overall nVidia is better supported through games (using PhysX or shaders optimised for nVidia hardware).

[Moohasha]

Yeah, but ATI's are usually cheaper. Plus, I wanted to stay consistent, and I was getting an AMD processor and a mobo with AMD chipset. ATI graphics cards work better with AMD CPUs, and AMD is definately cheaper than Intel. I wanted something powerful, but if you look back at the original post, cost was a major concern too.

[jjp]

ATI graphics cards work better with AMD CPUs,

Where have you got that superstition from? There is no truth to that. Nothing wrong with that gfx card. But any claims about compatibility being better/worse between specific combinations of Intel/AMD/ATI/NVidia hardware are complete nonsense.