Digital Trends
The title of this article sounds like I’m writing for an Irish publication of some type, and I suddenly feel the need to talk about the Wii people and a pot of gold.
That pot of gold has been elusive to both Microsoft and Sony of late. Sony has been in search of sales for the PS3, and Microsoft has just instituted a massive repair policy change and taken over a $1B (hint: that is about what a small aircraft carrier costs) charge to earnings.
While Toshiba and some other notebook manufacturers have opted to use HD DVD optical drives in their systems, Alienware (now owned by Dell) has chosen Blu-ray as their partner – at least for now. And while the Alienware Area-51 m5790 Special Edition laptop might come jam-packed with features, its base price is surprisingly affordable at just $1299.
So what makes this system so special? Well for starters it comes with new Intel Core 2 Duo processors, supports up to 2GB of dual channel memory, gives you a choice between ATI or Nvidia graphics (X1800, X1900 or GeForce Go 7600), allows you to add up to two hard drives in a RAID configuration, and as icing on top – gives you an optional to add a Blu-ray drive to the setup.
From Alienware’s press release:
Alienware today announced the immediate availability of 4.0 GHz processors on Area-51 ALX Systems. Powered by performance-enhanced Intel Pentium 4 processors with Hyper Threading Technology, Alienware’s elite Area-51 ALX systems surpass previous barriers on speed.
Area-51 ALX systems are optimized to reach 4.0 GHz clock speeds that result in performance increases of approximately 10 percent over previous 3.6 GHz processors. With Alienware’s rigorous 200-point quality control inspection and extended burn-in process, Area-51 ALX systems deliver smooth and reliable performance even at turbo-charged processor speeds. Excess heat generated by elevated processor performance is controlled by Alienware’s exclusive ultra-quiet Liquid Cooling technology, which cools components with specially formulated liquid and gold-plated, pure copper coolers. Prices start at just over $4,000.
Quote from the review at Motherboards.org:
“The ASUS A8V-Deluxe is one of the first motherboards to hit market for AMD’s new socket 939 platform, and it comes loaded with all the bells and whistles needed to satiate the minds of the enthusiast crowd. Built around VIA technologies K8T800 Pro and the SB VIA VT8237 chipsets the board sizes in at 12″x 9.6″(30.5cm x 24.5cm) in the standard ATX Form Factor and will fit most mid tower or larger enclosures. The board comes with its own removable rear I/O shield that comes in the retail box; this is needed to fit your board correctly in your enclosure. Featuring dual-channel memory support and utilizing un-buffered DIMMs the board can accommodate up to 4GB of PC3200 DDR SDRAM via the boards 4 DIMM slots. Making the change to using un-buffered non-ECC memory in lieu of only buffered ECC memory should help alleviate high CAS latency times, and help speed up the systems overall performance. “
Quote from the review at HardOCP:
“Performance wise, the SK8V definitely delivered. However, the proximity in performance on most benchmarks between it and the Athlon64 board coupled with the 3400+ CPU was rather disturbing, on multiple levels. The SK8V should have blown the Athlon64 board out of the water, just due to the fact that it has an incredible amount of memory bandwidth available due to its Dual Channel memory bus. This is really where the cracks start to show – for the price, the SK8V / FX-51 combo performance when compared with the Athlon64 / 3400+ just don’t justify the cost differences between the two.”
Quote from the review at 3dGameMan.com:
“”The Corsair XMS4000 Pro Dual Channel Memory is rated at 500MHz DDR which equals blistering fast performance and is stable even at levels well beyond its default. Also, this memory stands out from all others currently on the market with LED’s which show memory activity and look great. Watch the Video to find out more…”
Quote from the review at ipKonfig.com:
Quote from the review at HardOCP:
“The 8KRA2+ performed close to expectations. The initial memory problems plagued us for a while, but things settled down with a BIOS upgrade. Other than the few minor issues (and some major ones below), I didn’t have a big problem with the board. The layout is good (aside from the AGP/DIMM space contention) with all components logically placed and easy to get to. The parallel IDE RAID problems are a cause for concern as this should be working. A BIOS update will likely fix this issue in the future.
“With today’s introduction of our new AMD Athlon XP processor 3200+ and NVIDIA’s nForce2 Ultra 400 platform processors, AMD and NVIDIA are providing gamers and PC enthusiasts leading performance, cutting-edge features, and driver stability for even the most demanding desktop applications,†said Tim Wright, AMD’s director of desktop business segment, Microprocessor Business Unit. “With the product introductions, AMD and NVIDIA also offer system builders advanced technologies to design innovative new PCs that provide superior features and performance with mainstream pricing.â€
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