I’m thinking of buying a computer from Alienware . Does anyone have any experience with these guys? The prices seem to be pretty good for high quality components. I customized a stripped down version of the Hive-mind for about $1200. Right now, shipping is free and it’s out of state, so there’s no tax.
I would buy one but the one I want costs $4k which I don’t have at the moment.
I thought about building myself a new computer again but I hated doing it the first time and I hated dealing with warranty replacements with the manufacturer when I bought some bad parts.
Alienware has a great warranty. I say, get it. They pick the best parts money can buy.
Some major developers like Compaq tend to cut corners wherever possible, throwing in the cheapest brands of RAM or crappy motherboards (and good luck finding a brand name like Sony or HP that puts anything other than a GeForce-4 MX into their computers).
Alienware, however, throws in quality hardware. This hardware results in extra price… however, if you want a computer that will run well for more than a week before it starts behaving like an old 200 mhz Pentium, you’ll want to spend that extra cash.
Not just top-notch components, but Alienware also seems to go the extra mile in the little details. Look at the power and drive cables - everything’s bundled up nice and neat, so airflow isn’t blocked. Compare that to the mess in a mass-market PC.
They’re also one of the few vendors that’s not afraid of doing RAID hard drive systems (multiple drives set up to speed up data access)
From what I’ve seen, they’re PC performance fanatics. For what it’s worth (probably not much) my “short list” of vendors for my next PC is just two: Alienware and Dell.
AFAIK, RAID drives don’t speed up access. You use RAID setups to protect yourself against drive failures. With a RAID drive array, your data are written across multiple drives in such a way that even if one of the drives fails, you don’t lose any data. It doesn’t actually write multiple copies of the same data, but by maintaining some parity checks, it can figure out what the missing bits are, even with the information from one drive missing.
Your system will run a little slow with one dead drive, but you can replace the dead drive (on a server, they’re typically hot-swappable, so you don’t even need to shut the sucker down), let the RAID array rebuild the new drive (it can figure out the missing bits from the information remaining on the other drives), and be back in business, without having to resort to backup tapes or CDs.
I built my latest machine, but my previous one was an Alienware system. Great components, including an aluminum case and cooling system which allowed me to overclock the Athlon Thunderbird processor (which ran notoriously hot). I can’t vouch for tech support, I never had a need to call.
You may want to consider putting a machine together yourself. It isn’t very difficult and there are a plethora of how-to sites out there.
I’ve been running with a Alienware machine for ~two years and couldn’t be happier. If you don’t want to put one together yourself and you don’t mind spending the few extra bucks, I don’t think you can go wrong. Voodoo PC and Falcon Northwest are supposedly pretty good boutique builders as well, though they’re even pricier.
- Tamerlane
There are many types of raid. you can write the same data to both drives and have file protection, or you can write half the file on each drive and double access speeds.
it works sorta like that, I don’t know the specifics, but raid definitely speeds up access times.
These are very expensive computers:
USD2219 for this system? You can build a better one at $1500.
Only RAID 0 increases speed, but it doesn’t matter anyway. If the RAID is based on DMA100, the max you can have is 100 MB/s theoretically, but since IDE has a very high overhead, the max you have is around 75 MB/s. You don’t need RAID 0 for that, particularly when fast HDDs are cheap.
Besides, with RAID 0, the failure of one drive kills every single bit of data you have. You are better off with RAID 1 or RAID 5.
Actually RAID 1 increases read speed a little because you can read from both drives. RAID 5 can be fast, but it’s very computation intensive. Software-based RAID 5 tends to be slower than a single drive. You need a hardware RAID controller to get any speed improvement with RAID 5.
I currently run a 4-drive RAID 0 array on my Linux box at work. The array is about 80% faster than the individual drives for reading and writing large data files. And for my particular purpose it’s more convenient to have one huge partition (320 GB) than 4 smaller ones.
Of course RAID 0 is only useful for non-critical data. In my case I use it for storing downloaded data files which I need for my research.
I have two Alienware machines, and I have been quite happy with them. I know perfectly well that I am paying more for them than I would if I were to build the system myself, but I really like being able to call up tech support when I have a problem.
Their tech support, by the way, deals fairly well with you installing hardware yourself – it doesn’t void the warranty or anything. They may ask you to take it out as part of the troubleshooting process, of course.
I fully intend to purchase more of these excellent machines.
Disclaimers:
- I’m relatively price-insensitive.
- I get a (smallish) discount on these as my employer is a reseller of them.
- I’m kind of a sucker for fast-looking machines.
My son (the gamer) bought an Alienware. This thing rocks. No glitches, no BSDs, no lockups. And fast as hell.
As has been mentioned, well thought out, matched pieces, great workmanship, no problems what so ever.
I have a friend who bought one and had lots of problems with it, and he stated that his experience with getting support for it was quite futile. I believe him, as he’s pretty trustworthy, but his is also the only complaint I’ve ever heard about Alienware (aside from price). I think he just happened to get a lemon which can happen with even the best products.
I’ve had mine for over a year with no problem. I got tired of building my own and as a gamer I wanted something with top-notch name brand components, so that is what I went for. I would gladly buy from them next time I need to upgrade.
The only downside is that they don’t warn you about glaring omissions you might have in your pc. I was so excited about getting mine that I went through and plugged everything in and then could not find the modem. I managed to miss including one in my order (I ran out that night and bought a cheap external). The good thing is that I eventually moved up to cable modem, so it did not hurt much.
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Alienware makes great computers, but, unless you just have to have a neon green (or purple,etc.) case with matching mouse, you can build the same box for a good bit less.
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I’ve used a two-drive hardware IDE RAID 0 setup on my computers for 2 years now, and it is considerably faster for most tasks. Throughput rocks, write speeds are fast, but access times can be a hair slower.
The only potential downside is that if one drive blows up, you lose access to everything. But, today’s hard drives are incredibly reliable. And everybody backs up their really important data anyway, right? :rolleyes: