How much power is enough? Introduced as the most powerful workstation from Alienware to date, the MJ-12 8550i has a Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5300-series processor. The first offering in a series, the computer targets demanding applications like CAD engineering and digital content creation.
Features include a capacity for up to four 15,000-RPM Serial Attached SCSI hard drives and up to 16GB of DDR2 FBDIMM memory. You can also get NVIDIA Quadro FX and ATI FireGL graphics cards.
I wonder how well it plays games? Whenever I think about how far computing power has gained in capability, shrunk in size, and increased in density, it gives me pause.
Anybody out there have one of these and have a comment?
Yeah but when you buy it, it makes some difference…
I’m a MAc user fallen from grace. I no longer am a MacHead, and thus pretty much set myself not to buy expensive equipment (macs) just for the marketing pressure they put on.
But evidence is evidence and MAcs are so much better designed. And that’s a fact.
22. Better designed in WHAT way. Are you talking about a case? If so you are dead wrong, the laptops are horribly designed for a technicians ease of repair. I know, because I repair them and THAT is a fact.
ex. What is the hardware device that fails most often. The hard drive. The hard drive can take 2 hours to extract from a Mac laptop. 2 minutes (if that) from ANY PC laptop. And dont get me started on the stupid G4 we refer to as the “lamp” design. You have fallen for the hype.
No. I agree with you. I myself own (to my misfortune) an original iBook. And that SOB is a bitch to upgrade the HD. I tried but ultimately I went for and external firewire 3.5 case.
No, I was talking about purity of form. The iMac is a beauty. But also, for economical and practical reasons, I wouldn´t recomend buying one. Simply because it’s the least future proof machine you can get. The integrated display is all very nice but the fact is that in three years time you are stuck with a obsolete machine you can’t afford to upgrade while the screen is still very usable. I’ve talked about this before. Apple has been leaning towards a kind of laptop design throughout it’s entire line, except for the MacPro. And the MacPro is overkill for the average user. Apple, because of marketing and design issues, has been neglecting the simple and sucessful design of the two piece desktop machine.
My friend, I’ve not fallen for the hype. I’m the first guy saying that I would never buy an Apple machine. Not unless they can come up with a two piece design, affordable and powerful, that permits me to swap processor, HD and DVD drives at my hearts content. And ultimately able to accept a standard Motherboard later on.
24. “I’m the first guy saying that I would never buy an Apple machine. Not unless they can come up with a two piece design, affordable and powerful, that permits me to swap processor, HD and DVD drives at my hearts content. And ultimately able to accept a standard Motherboard later on.”
And you realize that is never going to happen. I am surprised they “switched” to Intel Processors and allowed Windows to run on them.. If they complied with the rest of your statement, then its a PC.
Sounds like we are on the same page. Sorry if I misunderstood you.
#24
I wonder how long until Lauren starts bashing you?
Angel. He can bash me, I aint scared.
Yep. This thread is already on the way out of the blog… so no chance of flaming battles here…ha ha ha!
Just to finish this, and more to the point of this thread, the UberPC shown by Alienware is, IMHO the way thay found to say: “Hey, we can be Pros too, we can produce sexy hardware that’s not just to frag virtual entities on FPS games.”
#13
You need Windows XP Pro 64 to get more than 4GB of ram. Then you CAN have dual quad-core with 16GB of ram of kick-ass.
I’ve got a similar setup to the one that BHK mentioned (3-year old Dell Dimension 8300, P4 3GHz, 3GB RAM) and it is holding up pretty well with all of the games that I’ve thrown at it, as well as happily multitasking with half a dozen apps open – it only really slows down with really CPU-intensive stuff like audio/video conversion (to put stuff onto my iPod) and 3D rendering.
PC Pro magazine in the UK have tested the Xeon 5300 chips in a pre-production system – applications like Photoshop made no use of the extra cores, and it was only with 3DS Max that the chips got fully utilised. So if you’re thinking of buying such a system, you would want to be sure that the applications you’re using will actually benefit, otherwise it’s probably better to hold off until support for quad-core CPUs (and 8 cores in a dual-CPU setup) is more widespread. The other interesting fact from that article was that extra cores mean that the chips are clocked lower (maximum of 2.4GHz) in order to keep power consumption down to 80W.
One final note – I checked on the UK Alienware site, and the price for the MJ-12 8550i is about the same, so for once you don’t get stung for being on the wrong side of the Atlantic…