As a casual videogame player I am having trouble understanding the benefits of a liquid nitrogen cooled monstrosity of a machine that costs 5x as much as a typical PC. Will a $5000 Voodoo or Alienware computer make my gaming experience that much better than a mere $1500 standard PC with a decent Nvidia card? What’s the usuable lifespan of such a PC?
Playing one of the high end games on one of them is going to be better than a $1,500 machine. Buy a high end game machine if you can and take pride in it. It’s sweet and you own it. I personaly could never afford a $5,000 Alienware gaming computer, but I’d like one. Those computers are also put together for that purpose and the bugs worked out, so you get a great working gaming machine. I think many people have experienced the $2,000 computer that isn’t stable or doesn’t do what you thought it would.
There is no need for such an extreme machine besides the WOW factory and bragging rights ownership of one affords.
The only benefit of a machine like that is that it will remain near top of the line for its entire usable lifespan. A 5K desktop will be able to run new games at top performance for several years.
Also, it seems to me that performance isn’t increasing as quickly and as drastically as it used to a few years ago. A decent machine doesn’t become obsolete as quickly as it used to.
The point is the same point that any uber-expensive top-of-its-class item has; it’s a status symbol. Yes, you get a high-quality machine, but you’re paying for prestige.
With Alienware, you have 2 things going that are jacking up the cost.
First - components. They do have high end components (cutting edge, if not bleeding edge). With some of the games that are out now, specifically Vanguard, which was just recently released, the components will make a huge difference in how the game plays and how much of the graphics you can actually run. It’s not hard at all to drop over $1k on just the video cards (the Alienware gaming machines I looked at have 2).
Second - name. Even with the components that Alienware puts in their machines, they are vastly overpriced. I could build the same machine for 75% of the final cost? But it wouldn’t come in a “Cyborg Green” case with “Plasma Purple” lighting, or have the little alien face on the front.
A $5,000 PC will give you better performance than a moderatly priced PC. It’s definitly in the land of diminishing returns, but there’s something nice about knowing that, for the next year or so, you can go into the video options menu of any game you buy, max everything out, and still have the game run like silk. Sure, a $1,500 PC can run most any game and still look very pretty, but you almost always have to spend sometime dicking around with the graphic settings to find the right “pretty:speed” ratio.
Comparing it to an expensive sports car would be a good analogy. It’s not really going to change your daily driving experience significantly, but it’s still a lot of fun just having one.
WOW - I just went on the Alienware website… they list up to 3 terabytes storage.
Are they kidding?
But as we all know, there are only a handful of components in a gaming computer that really make any difference. Having the most expensive graphics card money can buy is one of them (hell, buy 2 for SLI). A buttload of fast RAM is another.
However, when you get into the super high end setups, you start paying for stuff that doesn’t really matter. You don’t need a $300 motherboard, a $150 one with the above mentioned items will still give you bleeding edge. And then there’s the $100 ethernet card…
Nope.
I’m old enough to remember when the servers in our lab had 5G hard drives and my CS pals drooled all over their keyboards every time I said “pst. Hey guys: 5 gigs” Now that’s almost RAM size!
I guess my question is how much better does, say, Battlefield 2 or Quake whatever look with 2 GeForce 8800’s instead of 1? And at what point do you say “screw it”, I’ll just buy an XBox360 for a fraction of the price?
Turn all the graphics settings to the maximum on a 400 dollar machine. you’ll find everything gets bogged down and slows the game up. A 5k machine will look better and function fine with all the graphics effects maxed out.
The point of 2 video cards is so you can be watching your porno clips on one monitor while playing your game on the other.
Personally I just play older games with my crappy machine because I can’t justify buying an expensive computer just to play more time consuming games. My machine does just fine playing Wolfenstien et. It does terribly with city of heroes or WoW
The point at which you say screw it, is when you have to worry in anyway about $5,000 on entertainment. Like I said a sweet system would be great, but it’s not something I could buy in the past.
At the moment - nothing. A single 8800 (on a decent machine) will easily run Battlefield 2 with max settings.
AFAIK, Flight Simulator X is the only game at the moment that really requires an uber-machine. There are also older games that always benefit from increased performance. Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 is a good example - a giant 3D theme park is going to be a challenge for years to come.
Realistically, $2000 should get you a really sweet machine (if you’re prepared to assemble it yourself). After that it’s really just diminishing returns. When you consider that you need a computer anyway, gaming or otherwise, the price doesn’t look as bad.
You also get to watch things unfold literally month by month where, in about a year to eighteen months, computer magazines are reviewing $2000 KILLEZ systems that can stomp your previously $5000 into the ground. The best bang for the buck is a nice, big monitor, some decent sound and some good peripherals that you can hang onto for a little while. At least those will last longer than your underwear. The cost-value curve on just the PC itself is ridiculous and I would never consider buying a $2000 for personal use let alone a $5000 one.
Fortunately I still like Heroes 3 and Civ 4. 
No need for an expensive machine!
I don’t understand why Voodoo pcs cost as much as they do. The specs are really good, but not nearly $3,000 worth better than ones you could customize on HP’s regular site. Is there something really special (expensive) about the brands of components they choose to use? Like the PC component equivalent of Monster Cables?
It’s not almost RAM size, it is RAM size. 2 gigs of RAM is middle of the road. You can easily jack that up to 4 or 8 gigs. At some point you can just ditch the hard drive and install the OS and applications directly on flash memory. You’ll still need a hard drive for your data…but still…
I’m a hardcore gamer. My friends and I have always laughed at the people who actually consider spending $3-5k for gaming and casual use.
We water cool and overclock the hell out of our budget PC’s (about $1.5k) and they perform just as good as, or better, in every benchmark area (cpu, gpu, HD read/write speeds, memory timings, etc) compared to the $5k machine. My PC’s have always been able to run the newest games on high res (1280x1024 or 1600x1200) with highest settings with good FPS; games like CoD, FEAR, BF2, Half Life 2. I played Lineage 2 for eight months (a MMO like WoW) and always ran four instances of the game (four different accounts) without a hitch.
If I did have unlimited money of course I’d spend $5k. But that’s because I’d buy the processors that are brand new ($1,000+). And buy 30"+ LCD screens. And buy the industrial $1,500 raid controller for my 12 500gb harddrives that I’d put in RAID 0 so my average read speeds wouldn’t be 50-100 MB/s, but more like 500 MB/s+. I’d like to shave my 3ds max load times from 40 seconds down to 15 on it’s first load, and reduce windows xp’s load time as well.
And forget shopping around for prices. 
If the point where you say “screw it” and buy an XBox instead of a PC exists anywhere on your spectrum, you’re wasting your time worrying about high end PCs versus midrange PCs. This isn’t a perfect analogy, but it’s like asking about the difference between a Jaguar and a Ferrari, and wondering at what point do you say, “screw it” and buy a Volvo. If you can be happy with a Volvo, you’re wasting your time and money worrying about sports cars.