Be Excellent To Each Other

As I have discovered there really isn't anything better than an Alienware.

And then I realised there was

Alienwares come in two different types. You have the low range sort of affordable Area 51s that start at 700 quid and cap around 4 grand.

And then you have the ALX which start at 4 grand and sky's the limit.

Differences.

ALX comes with double dippled chrome trimmings. (inc all the heads)

ALX has the electronic version of the lighting system that can be configured in windows.

ALX is fully powder coated in gun metal.

It's always been my absolute dream to drop an absolute bollock and order an ALX fully kitted (triple GTX295X2, 6tb array etc) but it ain't gonna happen really.. Doesn't stop you wanting one.

So today I went on Ebay and found another company who have gotten their mitts on some brand new Alienware gear and are knocking it out cheap.

And what did I find?









All for the tremendous price of £144.95 delivered.

So I ordered one and will be doing a full transplant lmao.

Canna fuckin wait. Best part is I'll have full spares of everything. All the fans are in there, all the wiring, the daughter card and electronic ELC card. Everything. And after a scare with one of my bulbs last week I found out what they want for replacements.

"Sorry, we don't sell the bulbs as they are proprietory units that come in the case. You can send your case in and we will replace it. £350 for regular area 51 and £500 for ALX"

it's a 150 quid computer case, or am I missing something?

<thinks>

Jesus, those must cost, at most a tenner to make.

Just noticed: Weight = 22kg. What the frig's it made of, lead?

It might look that way. But it's not so.

The bulbs in them are triple filament LEDs designed, researched and manufactured by Alienware. They have 3 colour switches in one bulb. That's how they can make 32 million odd colours.

Chrome dipping and powder coating both cost a fortune no matter who you are and each case is 2 pack sprayed and piano finished..

I've used every case made by every manu (some costing 300 quid) and I've never seen one as good as my Predator. The space, the scale, the quality (all 27 kilos of the cunt) and everything else.

This is AlienFX electronic and what it does. All of it comes with the case.



That's the command center software which of course is all proprietory and had to be designed and paid for, and then of course there's the cost to have 4 PIC chips programmed so that it works.

This is the thing. Honestly man, people shoot down Alienware all the time but they just don't understand.

The case is triple wall rolled steel. The side panels go together in about 10 parts.

Base triple steel, black mesh, silver panel (chrome on ALX) then the top panel (the coloured one).

The back is 3 pieces thick.

They really are built like a rolls royce. Better than anything I have ever seen or used before (inc silverstone, cooler master, lian li etc).

I'm not on about your Alienware one, I'm on about that 1 grand case I linked to.

It's 5 kilos lighter than an Alienware

To be fair, taking away all of the lights and the stick on tat, the Alienware cases are fucking awesome. The amount of room you get to work in, the amount they've been thought about, designed and re-designed, etc. £150 is a bargain.

the very definition of 'over engineered'

Alienware cases look cheap and nasty to me. The design looks like something from a kid's Doctor Who toy.

They do look that way. Until you get into one and have a play and realise how incredibly solid they are.

Your cheap OMFG PC bill is still totting up then JC

Could have bought a Mac for that money

Aren't Alienware owned by Dell? *shudders*

why would you ever need a 32 million colour LED on the front of a PC?

Currently it stands me in 590. I'm not counting the cost of the new case because I'll still have a spare one that has nothing to do with the internals. The green one will sell for anything between 120-200 (I've seen them go for, without any lighting. Mine has the full passive lighting system).

However, when you take into account that I have a dual cored 2.9ghz machine with 4gb ram and a GTX 280, plus blu ray 1kw psu and X-FI etc 590 is absolutely bugger all.

I paid 270 for it, 175 for the videocard, 20 for the extra ram and 50 for the blu ray (sony drive, plays only but I have 2 dvdrws)

Infact, even with the Noctua cooler it stands me in at 550 (just added it all up).

A boggy standard low end Alienware with an Athlon 64 in (blows a large raspberry) 2gb ram and geforce 9800gt costs £699.

So even if I took into consideration the 'pimp my ride alx case' I'd still be 4 quid less than the bottom bumberry alienware with fuck all in it

Still not buying into this idea. At all.

The case is a box to hold the stuff you need for the PC to work. It has to stop things getting in, and let hot air out. It lives under a desk.

Once you put things in, they don't come out again, until you change them.

Just like cars there are standard run of the mill ones and high performance ones. The design of the Alienware is for ultimate cooling and overclocking. What it looks like tbh really doesn't matter (even if the fit and finish is the best I have ever seen) it's the engineering behind it.

If they really were just pretty looking run of the mill computers they wouldn't have been in business for 10 years, and wouldn't have been bought out by Dell because they couldn't even compete with their XPS systems.

But without the case, you're £150 better off. And still have a perfectly capable case. What new does the case bring that needs £150 over the old?

Everything that this one didn't have that I have longed for for about 4 years.

Silly I know, but hey, I don't drink and I don't have any other hobbies so it's all good

Plus I will have a spare. Whatever I decide to do with it (sell, keep for spares, build into) it won't go to waste

hahaha that's fucking brilliant

Even I'm not that extreme and I'm an eccentric bugger.

13 EvE accounts and flying all identical ships with similar layouts with synchros, or something like that.


interesting, I'll grant you that.

More here

If you're going to put serious gubbins in there, they tend to run very hot. A good case is the difference between a quiet, cool PC and a noisy one that shuts itself down every couple of hours due to overheating. Of course, if you just use your PC to surf the web and only upgrade when it grinds to a halt, you're not going to be arsed about that sort of thing.

The perfect solution

That looks troublingly like an evaporative cooler.

Pah.

A mate of mine did this as his final year project at Uni after seeing pictures like this.

Oh my gosh this is beautiful

Hnngh! I just spoffed.

Fabulous. Fabulous.

Err umm sorry, but NO.

Pissing on chips mode engaged.

There's no such thing as an LED with a filament, for a start. LEDs are Light Emitting Diodes; p-n junctions. Alienware do not make LEDs and certainly didn't design them.

RGB LEDs are widely available. I remember when they first became available in fact, approximately 22 years ago, when I bought one for £15 and built a circuit that was in a magazine to make it slowly cycle through all the colours of the spectrum (infinity different colours, in fact, as it was an analogue circuit). This was highly impressive at the time.
But now they are found in everything from Samsung mobile phones to cheap LED tat to affix to chavvy cars, to the spotlights which illuminate the millennium bridge in Newcastle.

Here's one in a catalogue if you don't believe me: http://uk.farnell.com/kingbright/lf-5wa ... dp/1168585



So I'm sorry but you're completely being taken for a ride with all this bling nonsense. You can spend your money how you like but if you're mainly doing it to boast about how much the bits you own sold for, you may as well go the whole hog and buy the gold-plated, diamond encrusted Nokia phone for £50,000. Then I'd be impressed.

Mass-produced tacky PC cases with multi-coloured lighting and a dishonest sales pitch? Not so much.

Now I like those! Very Chaos Engine and you can see some decent work has gone into it.

The ones in this PC were R&D'd by Alienware. They don't look anything like the ones you have linked to. They have 4 legs, and are about 1/2 the size of a regular LED. They're also fitted to PCBs and not user changable. Again, the entire PCB and LEDs on it were R&D'd by Alienware.

I hear what you're saying, but these aren't normal LEDS. Just the same as a DB9 Aston Martin doesn't use normal parts.

Here, this is the front LED board from an Alienware.



And here is the proprietory ELC (electronic lighting controller) that goes into the daughterboard.



Both of which are soley unique to them because they researched and developed both.



That's cool. And yes, Alienware do charge the earth for them. But then R&D doesn't come cheap and as with any specialty product you pay for it one way or another.




Well it's pretty hard to compare an Alienware with another case until you've owned one. Also a good understanding of why their PCs cost so much is a bonus.

A friend of mine just phoned me and said he had specced a system on there. But, it cost £350 more than one he had specced elsewhere. I asked him to link me to both, the Alienware and the Yoyotech.

Firstly the Alienware had one of these in it.

http://www.yoyotech.co.uk/asus-rampage- ... 71483.html

And the yoyo had a cheap POS. Then we got to PSU. The yoyo had a 650w psu, the Alienware a 1kw. And it just went on. In the end the Alienware actually seemed like good value and was about £200 more than building one specced the same himself. However, that didn't include their 24/7 free phone support, didn't inc any peripherals (no kb, no mouse nothing) and didn't come built half as well as an Alienware. So he ordered the Alienware.

There's a reason a company can stay in business for 10 years and beat Dell at their own game (XPS range. has now been discontinued) and it's not through ripping people off. They must be doing something right. Infact, they were doing so well the only way Dell could beat them was to buy them.

Those are really cool

If I had read this thread a year ago, I would have come to your houses, strangled you to death, and spent your money on food.

This year... I instead implore you to consider what else you could do with £150 that would be less mental than buying a glorified box. Like buying half the GOG catalogue, an hour with a moderate quality escort, or buy tonnes of drinks and a slap-up meal for a whole bedroom full of friends. Or rolling it up and stuffing it up your urethra. Iono, whatever, really.

Hey man, I wouldn't spend 150 sponds on a box. I would spend a grand on this keyboard if I could afford to, though.

hehehe. A year ago I had fuck all.

I've got most of the GOG catalogue any way in my collection (granted most won't run in windows but I could use dosbox)

Looks like it could rip all your fingers off. Awesome

Dude an LED is an LED.. no mater who makes them.

JC you looked up gulable in a dictionary? You have spent £1000 on a pc..

Where did the £1000 come from? My PC cost £695 (with a spare case left over) and is a very capable gaming machine (blu ray added too).

I could not go out and replace my system for £695 so I've done very well.

And a 4 legged machine soldered LED is not a normal LED. They're completely different both size, fitting and wiring wise.

As for gullible? As I said, my PC cost less than a pile of shit from PC world (like the one I had last year that started to fail after about 2 months).

I call it clever.

So it is a coloured LED you can get them in 1000s or different sizes and shapes... so yes it is just an LED
Just because they are soldered to a daughter board does not make them anything special

But you could've spent £580 on functionally exactly the same machine

I think you would struggle to find a single person here who considers that clever. I'm also fairly sure that you'd ahve to ask an awful lot of people on the street until you found someone there who thought it clever - and the other responses there would outweigh that one by some magnitude in terms of severity.

You've spent more than, for instance, an XBox360... on a box with lights. That's madness.

You may like it, but that doesn't alter the fact that the vast majority of people here think it's fundamentally a daft move.



But they both work functionally the same - they both produce light of different shades. How they are wired is a complete irrelevance.

You have to love steam punk stuff

I spent ~£180 on a quality case, PSU, heatsink and fans but it's lovely and quiet -- during the day I can't hear it above the sound of nearby traffic, and at night it's an innocuous whoosh noise. Compare it to my girlfriend's PC, which sounds like a fucking jet taking off and it's money well spent, especially since mine has at least a little oomph to it -- dual core processor, 7900GT graphics card -- while hers is powered by a 1GHz Althon Thunderbird and a 10-year-old TNT2 Ultra graphics card. You may laugh but it plays FX Fighter perfectly.

Would I spend £150 on a flashy case stuffed with twinkly LEDs and the like? Definitely not -- been there done that, and I've got the Lian-Li case (ALU CASE COZ IT HELPS DISIPPATE HEAT FASTAR!!!) with side window, blue cold cathode and dreadful piece of shit ThermalTake cooler to prove it.

Wheras I spent about £30 on a decent case - does it's job and easy to work with and £50 on a decent 800 odd Watt PSU. Heatsink is the standard intel C2D. GPU heatsink is standard whatever the card was. Inaudible, cheaper to run (Funnily, all those lights consume electricity), and is perfectly suitable for developing DX10.1 games.

I don't understand the problem with someone spending a bit of money on a good PC case, but spending ridiculous money buying your way out of phone contracts and keeping up with Apple is alright? I don't see anything massively wrong with either, but some of the folk in here saying the case is stupid are the same people who were arguing with me yesterday in the iPhone thread.

Pretty sure we decided in there, it's his money and if it makes him happy...

My case was £40, a Coolermaster. It's in the loft, no-one sees it but me. No lights, no fancy features. There are 5 hard drives in it and a Athlon 64 running constantly. It stays cool and keeps the bits safe. It works for me.

I've been down the case modding route. I didn't have the skill, money or time to do a decent job, so I gave up on it.

Stock ROCKS!

Why do I read this thread and keep hearing the words "audiophiles" and "speaker cable"?

This isn't the case at all. (HAW HAW). A good case keeps high end systems cool and they do it quietly. You might consider a £150 case to be ridiculously expensive, but when you're spending a couple of grand on a top-end PC, you'd be fucking retarded to stuff it all in a £30 box.