Dell - A cautionary tale

[Anozireth]

LOL Skuggo, Alienware is only awesome if you want to pay $1000 more to have an alien logo on your computer. :P

[Ughmahedhurtz]

LOL Skuggo, Alienware is only awesome if you want to pay $1000 more to have an alien logo on your computer. :P

This. But for folks that can't/won't build their own, it's the premium you hafta pay for real gaming PCs. (Note that Dell's high-end XPS OC'd gaming rigs are about on par with them for pricing from what I've seen.)

[Wilbur]

I'm yet to see a PC supplied by a vendor which I couldn't do a better job of building myself.

[Sarduci]

I'm yet to see a PC supplied by a vendor which I couldn't do a better job of building myself.

Quality, Ease of setup, Cost, pick two.

Quality, Cost = build it yourself
Quality, Ease of setup = buy an expensive computer from a company
Cost, Ease of setup = buy a cheap computer from a company or pay someone who builds cheap systems to do it for you

[Aeraxeur]

I'll start off by saying: I WORK at DELL (Nashville). I work in Gold Tech Support, though now more commonly known as ProSupport. We only support businesses/Govt./HIED/ect in our group. I've been with the company for 3yrs now and own 7 of our systems (4 xps, 1 latitude, 2 insipiron).

As others have said.. you do get what you pay for- you buy a cheap/cheaper system, don't expect great reliability on the parts.. or not as much as you would on one of our other systems. IMO with our systems, if you want to do multiboxing.. I wouldn't bother with anything but an xps of if you really have some money to spend, a precision workstation (but really, you dont need dual xeons and 164gb memory support to multibox).

So if what you bought was like say... a Vostro (which is like an inspiron only painted black), or a Dimension system... I wouldn't expect great gaming, reliable parts, nor fantastic upgrade options out of it.

And to the alienware comments.. I dunno who/where you got your info from that we're stopping the xps line... last I looked on the development pages.. we're still pushing those out...

One other note I'd suggest. I you do buy a DELL, get a warranty, especially if you bought one of the lower end systems. I feel sorry for the people I have to tell that they don't have a current contract and they've gotta pay for their parts replacements &/or tech support. Granted most of you may/maynot need tech support.. but do yourself a favor.. fake having a business (say, self employed).. and get yourself a gts/pro support contract/warranty.. otherwise after that 1yr after your purchase date, not only are you out of warranty, but all of your support is overseas... so if you *do* need a part replaced.. you've gotta deal with non-native english speeking persons, who have scripted questions/responses.

It's not even close to like that where I work- *sigh* It's really awesome *sigh* I love it there......

[Tasty]

You do know Alienware is owned by Dell, correct?

Seriously?

[Sarduci]

http://www.google.com/search?q=dell+...ient=firefox-a

Results 1 - 10 of about 294,000 for dell buys alienware. (0.22 seconds)

[Catamer]

DELL does make a top level gaming machine however it is not cheap at $4.5k, it doesn't come with x64, it is limited to 2G of ram.
for $4.5k you should be able to build an x64 machine with 8G of RAM and still have money left over for a vacation.

[-silencer-]

DELL does make a top level gaming machine however it is not cheap at $4.5k, it doesn't come with x64, it is limited to 2G of ram.
for $4.5k you should be able to build an x64 machine with 8G of RAM and still have money left over for a vacation.

Not cheap.. but that doesn't mean it's not a ripoff for anyone else. To put it into comparison, here's what $4,500 can get you if you don't go XPS:

Q9650 $560 (3.0GHz 12mb cache, same as QX9650)
Asus P5Q Premium $260
16GB (4x4GB) OCZ DDR2-800 $442
2x GTX 280 $860
2x 24" Dell Ultrasharp WFP2408 $1358
Antec P182 $140
Corsair 1000W PSU $260
2x 300GB WD Velociraptors $560
..and $200 left over. (Keyboard, Mouse, DVD Drive)
How much would this rig cost from Dell/Alienware/Whoever? $5500+?

[Sarduci]

Lol, for $5400 I'd have 8 22" monitors, 4 video cards, and only 8 GB of RAM on a dual socket Q6600. I don't think there's a mobo out there right now that'd let me do that though..... I'm 100% certain I can do half of that at well under $2700.00