Alienware workstation uses Quad-Core Xeon processor

Published on February 6th, 2007

the MJ-12 8550i

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?

Fact sheet link.

29 users responded in " Alienware workstation uses Quad-Core Xeon processor "

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# 1 RuralRob said, on February 6th, 2007 at 9:17 am

Drool…

# 2 SN said, on February 6th, 2007 at 9:18 am

“Anybody out there have one of these and have a comment?”

Anybody out there want to provide one for free so I can have a comment? I’ll pay shipping.

# 3 cjohnson said, on February 6th, 2007 at 9:41 am

It probably runs game pretty good, but this thing would probably scream running through some stress simulations running Solidworks and Cosmosworks. Now, I just have to convince my boss to pony up some cash.

# 4 The Lawyer said, on February 6th, 2007 at 9:50 am

Will this help me type faster?

# 5 Jerk-Face said, on February 6th, 2007 at 9:58 am

Wow, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

# 6 edwinrogers said, on February 6th, 2007 at 10:14 am

Yes, very pretty, in a “Dell wanting to look like a Mac” kind of pretentious, counter-corporate way. Very good. Keep it up, Alienware. We need more interesting looking computers which are too powerful for any sane purpose, too expensive for the average user to buy and which depreciate faster than a diesel Alfa Romeo.

# 7 Jägermeister said, on February 6th, 2007 at 10:26 am

#4 – Will this help me type faster?

Being a lawyer, you will sure appreciate the number of personalized cease-and-desist letters it can send out per hour. After all… time is money.

# 8 ethanol said, on February 6th, 2007 at 10:47 am

Wicked cool! Glad to see it loaded with SAS drives. Did you happen to check out the AnandTech performance review of SATA vs SCSI vs SAS?

# 9 SN said, on February 6th, 2007 at 10:58 am

6. “which are too powerful for any sane purpose”

While I tend to stay a couple of years behind technology I’d have to say that there are sane purposes for this computer. Sure, the quad cores won’t really help gaming. But there are people who use computers for more than computers than games.

Think about this, you probably have no personal need for a semi truck. And neither do I. But that does not mean they should not be built.

# 10 sheva said, on February 6th, 2007 at 11:10 am

this machine is amazing, but the Dell XPS is also saucy… nham

# 11 BHK said, on February 6th, 2007 at 12:10 pm

I’ve got a 3 year old P4 3.2ghz w/ ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256mb video and 2gb RAM. It was as fast as any machine on the market when I built it – and it still runs any game as well as any game is designed to run on the highest setttings. I work in the games industry and I can tell you that we don’t test for these machines because it’s too expensive to bother with when most users are running cheaper computers.

However, having a fast machine like this is great if you are a software engineer. It crunches numbers and compiles fast. The time savings might ultimately be worth the extra cost and it’ll likely still be a great machine in 4 or 5 years.

# 12 Joe said, on February 6th, 2007 at 1:57 pm

Hmmm. You can’t really combine the top components. i.e. 8 core with 16GB memory… The site doesn’t say why either. I think MacPro is the real option for a top spec machine that also runs Vista.

# 13 Angel H. Wong said, on February 6th, 2007 at 4:16 pm

I can’t wait to hear someone yap “My iMac can outperform that machine just because it runs OSX and has a better version of Photoshop!”

# 14 Sam said, on February 6th, 2007 at 5:24 pm

#14: Someone’s already done it with a Mac Pro: http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2832&p=6 … though not sure if they’re running Photoshop on it.

# 15 Angel H. Wong said, on February 6th, 2007 at 5:35 pm

#15

Now THAT is a kick ass machine, not unlike it’s overpriced, overhyped iMac cousin.

# 16 pedro said, on February 6th, 2007 at 10:51 pm

#6 is this the first time you hear about Alienware? Jeez!

# 17 JoaoPT said, on February 7th, 2007 at 1:58 am

This machine is just for braggin rights. Dell is well encroached in the CAD niche market to need help from it’s “Gamers & Modders” Alienware branch. The fact of the matter is that this machine probably has the same bowels of the MacPro: intel server chipset and serial ram.
Intel has a better price to performance quad core chip that can use DDRII ram.

As for the Mac alike implication, is bogus. Have you ever really looked at PC cases and Mac cases ? It’s Industrial Design at some very different level.
The only way PC makers could ever reach this level of Ind. Design is to ask some good Italian or German design centers, not from the PC-making sphere, to design some cases. IMHO there’s no such Design culture in american PC makers (or worldwide for that matter).

# 18 JoaoPT said, on February 7th, 2007 at 2:05 am

I just forgot to attach the link:
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2866

# 19 TheGlobalWarmer said, on February 7th, 2007 at 5:55 am

It’s not possible for any computer to be “too powerful”.

Too powerful for your budget maybe, but we’ll never reach a point where we don’t need to continue working to make systems faster or more powerful.

# 20 Mark said, on February 7th, 2007 at 12:08 pm

“As for the Mac alike implication, is bogus. Have you ever really looked at PC cases and Mac cases ? It’s Industrial Design at some very different level.”

And therein lies the difference between Mac and PC users. I look at my monitor when using a computer, I dont give a damn how pretty the chassis is, for crying out loud, its a case, WHO CARES!!!!

# 21 JoaoPT said, on February 7th, 2007 at 1:11 pm

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 Mark said, on February 7th, 2007 at 1:33 pm

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.

# 23 JoaoPT said, on February 7th, 2007 at 2:18 pm

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 Mark said, on February 7th, 2007 at 2:37 pm

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.

# 25 Angel H. Wong said, on February 7th, 2007 at 2:40 pm

#24

I wonder how long until Lauren starts bashing you?

# 26 Mark said, on February 7th, 2007 at 3:31 pm

Angel. He can bash me, I aint scared.

# 27 JoaoPT said, on February 7th, 2007 at 4:43 pm

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.”

# 28 Eddy said, on February 8th, 2007 at 8:02 am

#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.

# 29 Alan Ralph said, on February 11th, 2007 at 7:15 am

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…

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