Alienware Aurora Desktop (not a DSM I know)

[Kevin Standeven]

A challenger appears!

I built a tower for myself a few months back:
-i7 930, overclocked at 3.63GHz (Prolimatech Megahalems heatsink)
-6gb tri-channel DDR3, overclocked at 1650 9-9-9-24
-overclocked ATI 5870, 1GB
-1.5TB Caviar Black HDD
-850 watt PS
-Coolermaster case
-DVD/RW
-etc

Came to just under $1500, but it should be future-proof for a while. Planned upgrades include a second 5870 in crossfire, SSD (possibly two in RAID 0), 6GB more RAM, and maybe bumping the overclock to 4GHz.

How are the overclock settings for the Alienware PC's? Can you overclock the cpu/memory/gpu to the point of melting or are you limited? Alienware is oh so sexy...

[John Hartman]

Kevin, while I was reading your specs I was thinking "it needs one more 5870 and a solid state drive", then I read on...  

[Chad Giffen]

The one thing I dont like about dual video cards of 1Gb or less is the space they take up. 2 vid cards dual pci really take up 3 pci slots, which is the most average commerical motherboards can handle. No sound cards or wireless card allowed after that.

with my 1.5gb card, my wireless and sound card still fit

[Graeme H Burvill]

That thing is friggen beautiful, i always said if i ever purchased a packaged computer it would be an alienware. i can only afford to build my own though. Nice one man!

[Kevin Standeven]

My motherboard has three 16x PCI slots that are double-spaced so there's still lots of room. Plus on-board 7.1 sound, so no soundcard needed for me. Have you 3dMark'd it yet Chad? That vid card of yours should throw some great numbers

[Chad Giffen]

Just installed a solid state drive to boot my OS.

Def faster, but nothing to make a big deal about.

I could see a SSD being a bigger upgrade if u had 4gb ram. Not 12gb that came with the setup.

[Chad Giffen]

For anyone who is interested.....   On the intel i7 chip platform, any memory is chopped of at 1066Mhz.

Hence, which is very controversial, 1333, 1600, 1800Mhz are all cut down to 1066mhz speeds on boot up.

Pretty gay.

[Kevin Standeven]

 

I'm running an i7 and my RAM's overclocked to 1650 MHz, as reported by CPU-Z in Windows 7.

[John Hartman]

and does the OS recognize all that ram?  I thought windows stopped using anything past 4gigs?

[Chad Giffen]

I'm running an i7 and my RAM's overclocked to 1650 MHz, as reported by CPU-Z in Windows 7.

sorry I did some more reading and this feature can be over-ridden in the bios to ramp up the ram speed.


No John, Windows 7 does recognize all RAM usually upto 24GB

[John Hartman]

cool, good to know.

[Remi Raymond]

Just to clear something up about that last question -

A 32 bit operating system can only address 4gb of ram max, It doesn't matter which OS. The issue is hardware related, with 32 bit architecture it can only access 32^2 memory locations, or about 4.2 billion locations, each byte is a location.

If you have 64 bit windows 7 it can support more (as will xp 64, vista 64, etc...)

Source:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7


 There is one exception to this which is certain server versions of windows use something called PAE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension) to physically use more than 4gb, but as far as the applications are concerned it's still only 4gb of performance available.

[John Hartman]

ahh, even better thanx Remi.

I have 32bit XpPro on my desktops, and 64bit 7premium in my lappy.

[Kenneth Law]

930 i7s r over  rated 

I am running i7 920 @ 3.8 ghz (2.66) stock on just A70
Got a 6970 for my birthday and vengeance ram clocked @ 8-8-8-24 1600

I wish i knew more about cars like i do about computers

Alienware is epic.... But I'd rather spend it on an alien laptop caz i know i can get the same specs for less for desktops.

Ps. Get 6950s. U can unlock them to a 6970 and its $120 cheaper

[Drew Sale]

definitely a nice setup. i'm not sure why they wouldn't give you SSDs if your dropping 3 G's on a new desktop. a buddy of mine just built a new machine a few months ago and installed 2 SSDs in RAID and when installing windows 7 it took 16 seconds (we timed it haha). optical HDDs are ancient technology in the computing world.

as for the vid cards being too big to fit any other cards, with the new USB 3.0 you wont need anything else really. wireless cards would be faster on USB 3.0 anyways.

on a side note, if anyone is wanting to build a new machine let me know. just let me know what it is you want to do or what parts your looking for and i'll price them out, figure out the best system for you, pick everything up and build it for you. once all the software is installed and ready to go i'll bring it to your place, set it up and show you how everything works. i'll be posting a new thread offering these services so as to not hijack this thread.