Alien Ware for Trainz
- Thread starter mutanay77
- Start date
cascaderailroad
New member
It will work $3000 times better.:hehe:
Not necessarily. If I had the dough for an Alienware five years ago I would have one - but Dell took over Alienware in 2006, and Dell (1) has gone to outsourced tech support that's nowhere near as good as it was 10 years ago, (2) uses non industry standard components making it very difficult to upgrade, and (3) doesn't have the same reliability as it had back in the 80486 days. Dunno what a good alternative is now, but with Dell running the show I would stay away from Alienware.
I have one of their M17x laptops, and it works pretty well with Trainz. The model I got came with ATI video cards instead of the NVIDIA, which I like, but that was all they had at the time. The NVIDIA video wasn't available at that time.
At $3200 it better work! I agree with you Justin!,
bunkerrattmk2
CNW the left hand road.
they are overpriced .over rated .and owned by dell . build your own.you'll never buy bugs in a box again.
INTEL e6750 core2 duo 2.66@2.75/thermaltake big typhoon cpu cooler
8gbpc6400 ram in dual chanel
twin asus eah 3850's in crossfire
dual asus dvdr rw optical burnner drives drives
twin 100gb hdd's in raid 0
asus p5q deluxe mobo
collermaster850watt psu
thermaltake full armour full steel case
creative x fi extreme gamer sound card/5.1 surround.
22 inch ws lcd
INTEL e6750 core2 duo 2.66@2.75/thermaltake big typhoon cpu cooler
8gbpc6400 ram in dual chanel
twin asus eah 3850's in crossfire
dual asus dvdr rw optical burnner drives drives
twin 100gb hdd's in raid 0
asus p5q deluxe mobo
collermaster850watt psu
thermaltake full armour full steel case
creative x fi extreme gamer sound card/5.1 surround.
22 inch ws lcd
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That's true for desktop machines, but it's kind of hard building laptops from scratch.
I don't know about you, but I find the very small size of the components and the gazillions of plastic snap-and-break-to-make-them-fit parts in them, makes them hard to put together myself.
The quality of my laptop is far better than the laptops I've seen from other manufacturers, and the overall prices was the same. When I was looking for a mobile workstation to run Trainz, I looked at HP, Lenovo Stink Pads, Hateways and Dell Precision Mobile Workstations. All of these machines had lower-end video cards even though they were supposed to be high-end graphics workstations. The Alienware equivalent, which was slightly less expensive, had the best video.
This is of course my opinion, and I won't get upset and into a snit if someone disagrees with me. LOL
John
Long as we're on the subject, what IS the new standard for killer gamer's premade rigs? I know if you build it yourself you get what you actually want, but not everyone has the know-how to build their own.
When I do build myself, I usually buy components from http://www.newegg.com/ and make it simple by buying packages - power supply and case preassembled, motherboard and CPU as a package to avoid incompatibility problems, that sort of thing.
When I do build myself, I usually buy components from http://www.newegg.com/ and make it simple by buying packages - power supply and case preassembled, motherboard and CPU as a package to avoid incompatibility problems, that sort of thing.
New Egg is awesome for parts. This is where I go for desktop parts, and so far I've had an excellent shopping experience with them.
For specs, I would say that the i7, or AMD equivalent of the fastest processor plus at least 8GB or more of RAM, 1 TB or more of hard drives, most likely RAID 0, which I don't recommend unless you've got a good backup, but that's my opinion. Remember RAID 0 means bit heaven if one drive in the pair goes south.
Anyway, the rig usually contains dual NICs and decent audio card, or even decent built-in sound, plus a high-end video card like one of the latest and greatest of the NVIDIA or AMD offerings.
Then machine will cost between $900 to $1500 for parts, not counting a decent case and power supply to cool things and power all the bits efficiently.
This is quite unbelievable considering the first machines I ever worked on had a whopping 8K of RAM and no hard drives! When they did have hard drives, they were a golly-gee 5MB and about the size of a cement block.
John
Yeah, I remember paying $200 bucks for a 5 1/4 inch external floppy disk drive for my TRS80, $500 bucks for a 20 meg "hard card" - a WD hard disk mounted on an 8 bit expansion card that took up two internal slots in my Tandy 1000TX.
As for RAID 0, what about these newfangled solid state drives with no disks at all? Seems to me that would cure a lot of "stuttering" since the seek time would be next to nada. Biggest bottleneck in any system used for gaming is the time that the CPU, RAM, and video card are twiddling their thumbs waiting for the next set of scenery files from the hard drive.
As for RAID 0, what about these newfangled solid state drives with no disks at all? Seems to me that would cure a lot of "stuttering" since the seek time would be next to nada. Biggest bottleneck in any system used for gaming is the time that the CPU, RAM, and video card are twiddling their thumbs waiting for the next set of scenery files from the hard drive.
My primary hdd is the slowest thing evaluated in my Windows index score, I'd have a nice solid 7.4 or 7.9 scoring if my Velociraptor wasn't dragging me down to 5.4
) with a Asus P8 p67 pro motherboard. I get no stutter with mine.nfitzsimmons
New member
I had Falcon Northwest build me a box last fall, and I've been very happy with it.
In the past I rolled my own, but I build and support PC's for a living, and didn't want the hassle of building another one for myself.
If you go to their website you can spec about anything you want, and they'll even overclock it for you if you want.
And warranty the overclocked machine, too.
When I was machine shopping, I forgot about Falcon. A late buddy of mine used one of their machines years ago, and it was great back then.
When I got my Alienware, it was for the same reason as yours. I support over 450 people all day, and the last thing I wanted was to support yet again another machine, meaning my own!
That's good to know about the warranty on the OC. Most companies won't OC, and if they do there's no warranty with it. It's all use at your own risk.
John