Quote Originally Posted by Bovidae View Post
@Nitro: Judging by the OP, yes, it is out of the question.

IMOP the Alienware Aurora ALX is overpriced, but that is true of many pre-built i7 rigs. I'm bored, and at work, so I'll go through the customizer with you.

Processor: the i7 920 has proven itself the beast of the line-up; cheap, overclockable, durable. So much so that Dell offers an OC option from 2.66 to 3.2ghz for ONLY a $200 upcharge. Highway robbery for an overclock job, but your only OC option if you're buying from Dell.

Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit; if you don't know the difference already, you won't miss the addons that make Ultimate ultimate.

Video cards: While dual gpu utilization has improved recently, it hasn't won me over. That said, Dell is only offering 1 option with a single processor and its ATI... (I'm not an ATI fan) nor am I a fan of putting two $100 GTS250's into a $3000 rig. I use an old 512mb card and will be upgrading shortly, 1gb seems like enough, but if you can afford the better card, go for it.

Ram: 6gb would be sufficient, 12gb would be better, 24gb just costs too damn much. You will never notice the difference between 1066 and 1333 in RL usage (you would in synthetic benchmarking)

Hard Drives: Dell is offering Raid 0, which is essentially two hard drives, each of whom get half the data, so they only have to do half as much work, theoretically making it twice as fast as a single drive. (further reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID) I would venture a guess that 600GB RAID 0 (2x 300GB SATA-II, 10k RPM, 16MB Cache HDDs) are dual VelociRaptors (two thumbs up)
Additional Hard Drives: They offer Raid1 arrays, which again, are overpriced, but offer you good storage that is protected from loss due to HDD failure.
200 dollars to have dell overclock your PC may not seem reasonable, but if you factor in additional cooling and the time to run stability tests/ensure said stability could be worth 200 dollars. (That's with a higher overclock, I don't see a reason outside of heat restrictions for an i7 920 to not be able to do 3.2Ghz) For my current overclock (3.8Ghz) I actually took over a day consciously running very stressful tests on my computer (linX at max settings) to ensure stability under the voltages that I wanted. After that I had to tweak settings a couple times after I blue screened. (The day running LinX I basically left the computer alone, after that I did my daily what-not while running folding@home to stress it) . It took a couple days of actively stress testing (Folding@home/whatnot) before I got my computer to where it is now - Running stable for months. That's what Dell is trying to ensure by charging so much for a meager upgrade. They don't want to have to troubleshoot their own overclocks for joe schmoe. Basically, if you're going to overclock, do the research and do it yourself, rather then spend dell 200 dollars.

Why the non-love for ATI? They currently have one of the most powerful line-ups of new tech, and very nicely priced old tech (old tech being 4870/4850/4890) cards that perform either on-or-slightly less up to par (in some cases, mileage and benchmarks may vary, just stating that for the sake of the thread) than the latest nvidia tech. Nvidia will NOT have a new generation of enthusiast level cards out until march of 2010. Also, do you realize that that GTS 250 is actually three generations old, give or take a few tweaks? GTS 250 = 9800GTX = OC'd 8800GTS (Although some die shrinks did happen, meaning less power usage)