Surely the ultimate gaming PC?

[Taffy]

Heres the spec of the PC I was configuring and will buy if we win the lottery:


[1] Auroraâ„¢ 7500

Processor: AMD Athlonâ„¢ 64 FX-60 Processor with HyperTransport and Dual Core Technology

Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional UK with SP2 - English

Warranty: AlienCare 4-Year Free Phone 24/7 and Collect & Return w/ AlienAutopsy / Respawn (in English)

Automated Support: AlienAutopsy: Automated Technical Support Request System

Case: Alienware® Full-Tower Case - Space Black

Chassis Upgrades: Alienware® Liquid Cooling with AlienIce™ 2.0 Video Cooling System

Power Supply: Alienware® 650 Watt ATX 2.0 Power Supply with Active PFC

Motherboard: Alienware® nForce™4 SLI™ x 16 Motherboard

Memory: 2GB Low Latency DDR PC-3200 at 400MHz - 4 x 512MB

Video Card: Dual 512MB PCI-Express x16 NVIDIA® GeForce™ 7800 GTX - SLI Enabled

System Drive: 1TB Serial ATA-II 3Gb 7,200 RPM w/32MB Cache (2 x 500GB) - RAID 0

Storage Drive: 500GB Serial ATA-II 3Gb 7,200 RPM w/16MB Cache - Quantity 2

Optical Drive One: Premium 16x Dual Layer DVD±R/W Recorder

Optical Drive Two: Premium 16x Dual Layer DVD±R/W Recorder

Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster® X-Fi XtremeMusic

Network Card: Integrated High Performance 3Com® Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (DSL-ready)

Floppy Drive: 1.44 MB Floppy Drive - Black

AlienRespawn: Alienware® Respawn Recovery Kit

Digital Photography: Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 4 plus Premiere® Elements 2.0

Security Software: Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal Professional - English

Keyboard: Logitech Internet Keyboard UK - Space Black

Mouse: Logitech® MX™ 1000 Laser Cordless Mouse - UK Plug

Monitor: 19" LCD Samsung SyncMaster 930BF Black Ultra Fast - 4ms response! - Quantity 1

Speakers: Creative® 7.1 THX® GigaWorks™ S750 - UK power supply

Tuning - Cable Management: Alienware® Cable Management System

Tuning - Performance Optimiser: AlienAdrenaline: Video Performance

AlienInspection: AlienInspection - Exclusive Integration and Inspection - £50 Value - FREE!
AlienWiring: AlienWiring - Exclusive Internal Wire Management - £50 Value - FREE!

Free T-Shirt: Alienware® T-Shirt - Black - XL

You even get a free tee-shirt! Surely there is no better out there?

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

Oh yes, for long have I lusted over that kind of muscle. Then you see the '£5k' in the corner and you're like, maybe not...

 

[Taffy]

lol so true. If my parents win the lottery, I will be getting that PC!

 

[Gopha]

can ur parents spare 1 for me aswell lol

 

[MoTo^]

tbh you can get much better PCs than that and for cheaper. for one, 2Gb RAM is not exactly high end stuff by todays standards (it doesnt even say what make it is), and surely having 2 7800 GTX SLI's would be more close to the 'ultimate gaming pc'
never been too fond of Alienware anyway, building yourself is the way

 

[Pestcontrol]

There's no better out there? There's _always_ better out there, Lieberman (www.go-l.com) used to deliver overclocked, cryogenically cooled out-of-the-box systems, with solid state drives. A reporter from the inq had some real bad experiences with the Lieberman though (not the actual hardware). You don't hear much from them these days. And i wouldn't be surprised if there are even more extreme builders out there. They're just hard to find because they cater a tiny niche market.

If i win the lottery i'd build the system by hand, i'd get cryogenic cooling for the cpu and peltier chilled water or alcohol for the dual graphics cards (they're too close together to fit anything cryo), after soldering them for a bit of extra voltage of course. Maybe submerge the rest of the system in mineral oil, it would be useful in preventing condensation, too.

For the harddrives, i'd get a nice little SCSI/SAS RAID controller and some 15Krpm SCSI drives. Motherboard would be a problem though, it's hard to find socket 939's with PCI-X or PCI-E x4 that's not in between the graphics cards slots.

It's a shame AMD don't sell any unlocked Opterons, dual CPU still beats dual core (for having double the memory bandwidth and double the installable memory), you get access to the server hardware world with reliability increasing features like ECC memory, and better-built motherboards with much more IO bandwidth. Alienware and similar systems are still somewhat akin to hotrods or muscle cars, i'd prefer the supercar approach, even if it means some raw stats may not be as impressive.

I'd also definitely get a beefy UPS.

 

[Pubic_Warrior]

best thing to do is make your own comp then you know that you have the ultimate beast, imagine the feeling when you buy a 'good' comp and it has intergrated graphics.

 

[Taffy]

never been too fond of Alienware anyway, building yourself is the way

Not for us folks who know bugger all about what you need in a PC!

 

[Taffy]

pestcontrol i'll pay u 2 build me da best PC den. But won't da pc get drunk wif alcohol lol

Is there any way of cooling your external modem? Mine keeps overheating and losing its ADSL connection

 

[thatbloke]

pestcontrol i'll pay u 2 build me da best PC den. But won't da pc get drunk wif alcohol lol

Is there any way of cooling your external modem? Mine keeps overheating and losing its ADSL connection

Are you sure its the fact that its overheating thats the problem? try pointing a fan at it and see if it helps

 

[Taffy]

Are you sure its the fact that its overheating thats the problem? try pointing a fan at it and see if it helps

Fans actually create more heat. Yea i'm sure its overheating, no 'vents' or anything, just plastic casing that doesn't conduct heat too well...

 

[Fi$hy]

I'm not sure about this, I'm not sure how a modem works, but surely heat shouldn't affect a optic-cable's ability to transfur data (heat within reason that is)

 

[Taffy]

I'm not sure about this, I'm not sure how a modem works, but surely heat shouldn't affect a optic-cable's ability to transfur data (heat within reason that is)

Well it's the only reason I can see... mayb it's overheating the phone line or something? I don't think it is an optic cable...

 

[Fuzzy Bunny]

Maybe submerge the rest of the system in mineral oil, it would be useful in preventing condensation, too.

I quite like the idea of submerging the computer in some kind of cooling liquid. Then you could just drop the whole thing in a large bucket

 

[Pestcontrol]

Fans actually create more heat. Yea i'm sure its overheating, no 'vents' or anything, just plastic casing that doesn't conduct heat too well...

Well, the average ADSL modem doesn't sport a 3.8GHz P4 either. It's designed to work this way, just like a phone, a pocketpc, or a dvd player, and they're all little computers in their own right, and more powerful ones at that. Also, there just isn't a whole lot that can fail about no cooling system at all.

Then again with cheap modems/routers, it _is_ possible they overheat (sitecom is one brand i don't go near), adsl disconnects due to a poor line should be more or less random, if you start it cold and it's fine for hours, then you get disconnects every few minutes every time, it's a heat problem, you could open it up and glue on a headsink scavenged off of an old motherboard if you're adventurous, or just toss it out and get a new one. Another thing you could try is to put it horizontally instead of vertical, it may help internal air convection.
It's just quite rare for anything that isn't a pc to have heat problems.

Fiberoptic cables themselves aren't affected by heat much, thermal noise as it is called is an electric phenomenon, the warmer something gets the more electrons will randomly move about, that's what noise is. In addition to that semiconductors will switch slower as temperature increases, normally there is quite a bit of headroom with regard to the speed of a chip's transistors and the clockspeed it is running at, but when something's overclocked and/or running hot, the situation can reverse and the clock ticks before all of the functional units have finished their work, leading to erroneous results. This in itself isn't damaging, by the way.