Be Excellent To Each Other

Origin are giving Dell their ass?

That is how I read it..

I am not sure what you mean by this. How and why?

Here, big yin? Want to keep an eye on ma donkey for me?
\


Is that a donkey or a mule btw?

a meringue?

I think he means the 'new' company are a lot better than Dell.

Although I think the target markets could be different.. Dell do commercial units and basic home units and the odd gaming machine. I don't think there prices start at $7000 either!!

For ten years Dell tried to compete with Alienware (their XPS series). And they failed time and time again. In the end in 2006 they won by simply buying the competition. Things were going really well too, right up until they decided to 'Dell' all of the Alienwares absolutely fucking ruining them in the process. Whilst I don't absolutely hate the new cases they do remind me of a crashed stealth bomber. That's not the problem however. The problem is they have 'Delled up' the bioses stopping you from being able to overclock, going against EVERYTHING that Alienware stood for (unfuckedwith gaming PCs to save you getting your hands dirty). So they're not spasticated monopolised shite, just like the XPS range.

And this is where Origin came in. Some time last year (when all this new shit released) Dell decided to fire all of the original staff replacing them with cheaper 'units' in India. Said staff were obviously rather peeved and decided to enact revenge by starting another company based on all of the original philosophies (hence the name Origin). And since then they have done incredibly well. So incredibly well that they can afford to fuck around making $16k dream machines knowing they will sell.

Dell just simply don't understand what people want. They just have no fucking idea at all. They thought people wanted Alienware because of the name and the cool case and the association with aliens. Now some do, but most just wanted a well made solid computer with good air flow and cable management that they don't have to build themselves (and all completely covered by warranty, unlike seperate parts where Intel et al fuck you if you don't use an 'authorised system integrator') and good customer service.

All of which Dell have tossed in the trash and are now knocking out total fucking garbage like they always do.

Note how Craster saw that machine and posted it here? Well on every forum I visit some one has posted about it. So they're definitely doing something right for word to spread like that, and they're not even available in the UK (yet, and I emphasise yet).

Yeah, but everyone's posting about it because it's got a 360 in it. Get a 360.

JC it is a $17000 games machine, I guess it is a different target audeince than Dell are aiming for..


I really don't think Dell will lose sleep as they sell PCs and Laptops in the 100s of Thousands per year.

£17k for a PC? Sheesh.

Anything costing that much should have ignition keys and road tax disc! Is it really that much better than a £2k high spec PC with top notch graphics card?

In the same way your Porsche is better than, say, a Lancer Evo, yes.

Difference being that you aren't going to get laid for having a £17k gaming PC, sort of opposite in fact, unless you're into sweaty men.

Heh, I see now, good analogy Mark.

(Besides which Doc, an top spec Evo and Cayman are vaguely similar money anyway and cater for vastly different requirements).

It's dollars, not pounds, making it a bargain at nearly £11k.

Well that's fucked my analogy then.

Anyway, my point is, there's a sharp law of diminishing returns on both high-end anything, and pretty much no-one needs the top 10% of performance (that you pay 90% of the cost for), whether it's a $17k PC or a half-million Ferrari. But the world would be very boring if we only bought the things we need. And the difference is there, yes.

Those LEDs cost, you know.

Alienware are gaming machines. It's an area Dell wanted control over.

I doubt Dell ever cared about the hardcore gaming segment, they just wanted a name with a bit of kudos to be able to sell PCs to those people for whom gaming was one of the requirements, to shift people's perception of their PCs away from being mainly office equipment.

If they didn't care why would they try and compete? why buy Alienware?

Dell want to control every sector. They don't do things for fun they are a corporation.

And that's their problem right there. They just don't understand.

If you are going to spend $6000 on a computer then you are going to want to overclock it. You are going to want to make it as fast as any other $6000 computer.

Reviews of the first new Dellienwares stated quite the opposite. Out of the box they were quite simply shit, and there was no way to wring out the performance.

Basically every one knows that an I7 920 can hit 3.8ghz piss easy. So when you bought one for £300 or whatever they were you did so knowing that out of the box it wasn't all that great (2.66ghz with four cores). However it's when you rubbed a little magic through it and pushed it harder it just blew anything else out of the water.

Using cars as an analogy no one would buy a Porsche with a fucking great restrictor whacked on the engine. That's not why you buy one. Sure, there are a few cunts out there who buy them and drive them at the speed limit just for the attention but that is not what sports cars are built for. They are built to be driven the way they were designed to be driven.

And the exact same goes for a high performance gaming PC. No one wants one that is choked to the hilt and locked down making it no faster than a budget PC with a good graphics card in.

For the reasons I just said. Same reason they tried with their own XPS brand. Even I have heard of Alienware and I don't give a toss about gaming PCs so someone similar who decides for whatever reason that they want a PC that is good for games might look at them.

They saw your account history.

Or folks would just buy and use the PC out of the box with out the need to overclock it.

The car analogy works well. You can buy a car and use it, or you can re-tune it or chip it i.e. overclocking the car.

The car or pc is what you bought not the ability to chip it.

CARS EH?

well maybe..

I don't buy a pcto fuck around with it, I buy it to use it.

If I want a faster PC I buy a faster PC.

Perhaps JC is the one that does not understand business processes..

And maybe that's why you dont have an Alienware?



Maybe you just don't understand that most people who buy massively powerful PCs overclock them? seems Dell don't either.

do you really get that much more benefit from overclocking? Why not buy something that you don't have to overclock!

Ah, but you'd overclock it anyway because you can & that's how you play PC gaming

lol

It's like buying a car and not driving at 150mph everywhere on a phone.

Ah now overclocking makes sense. If you do it right you can get more for your money.

Sadly the days of the Athlon 2500+ are long gone

*posts from phone, in the car*

i do get that, but i don't see it as bad as JC is making out. He does think all Corporations are evil.

*posts while bunnyhopping a souped up car that's accelerating slowly because of turbo lag, garroting Rodafowa with Dimrill's cock & hitting a big polisman about the face with a sack of plums while shouting into his phone*

i think that covers everything

As you can see lies are very much like making love to a beautiful woman pc gaming, it's all about how far you can take things before they become fucking stupid.

i think i am falling for you

It doesnt matter how much you spend there are huge headrooms for miles more on chips now.

The I7 920? 2.66ghz stock core clock. Does 3.8 piss and in some cases (depending on the manufacturing run) 4ghz. On an air cooler.

That's free performance, 33% more. AMD chips are nowhere near as good (they were tho back in the XP Athlon days !) because AMD cannot afford to leave those kinds of headroom in their chips. My Phenom 2 940 (3ghz stock core clock) will only go to about 3.6 before becoming unstable. Whereas, for example a quad core Intel can do double that.

There is a reason for that of course, you're paying for it. Intel basically hide the max speed of the CPU and charge for it so that you go looking for it. False ecomony of course, because you've paid for it. Intel chips are expensive. People say it's down to the headroom Intel leave but sense says that they could have OCed it themselves and locked it at 3.8ghz. Thing is there's no point, cos as I said you are paying for that performance but you need to squeeze it out yourself. And people love doing that, old cliche 'something for nothing'.

So of course the more you spend the more you CAN expect. Now obviously an overclock is not a god given right but with every single CPU ever made you WILL get an overclock. It depends on the price/manu/end of the quality spectrum but you will get at least something. My E4500 Dave bought from me was 2.2ghz native, I ran it at 2.85 for every waking hour I used it. My Phenom 2 is at 3.4 from the stock 3ghz but only 'cos my motherboard was cheap and the voltage regs are crap.

So yeah, when you pay thousands of dollars you do it for the OC factor. Alienwares are water cooled, you're paying for that. The reward however? well, water cooling is far superior to regular cooling so you can overclock higher and get even more 'free?' speed. Sadly they lock down the bios to prevent you doing so so it's a total oxy moron.

"Here. Have this very expensive and exclusive computer gaming system with water cooling designed to keep your CPU super cool when you overclock but you can't overclock so it's totally stupid"

So basically an Alienware now is no different to what you have Kovs. It comes at standard and you can't really change that. So you may aswell buy a 'normal' system like yours and whack in a graphics card.

you do realise how chips are graded? Or used to be? Is that the same, one mask and the speed is what it falls over at? Something has to give.

Also don't Dell give good warrenties. So want to protect their kit by it stopping it being destroyed by overclocking too much or killing the Bios?

They all come from a single 'run' yeah. They're then tested to see what speeds they can achieve (including headroom for OC) and then 'locked' to a certain speed

But yeah, headroom is there and you do pay for it TBH. AMD can not afford to lower their clocks to allow for more OC as their CPUs are cheap. They need to squeeze as much out as possible. Never used to be like that when they were winning though. They also left in masses of headroom

You do get a year's warranty with Dell yes, but then you do with any system builder TBH.

Awww

I'm not going to that wedding.

How close are you to Troon again?

It's not free at all. Generally, early on in a new process lifecycle, the effects of what you're building are less controllable and predictable. Especially when you only have 4 atoms between the bridge and the path of a transistor or whatever they're down to these days. A missing atom makes all the difference. The reason you have this "33% headroom" is because a majoirty of the chips fabricated will fail their critical paths when run at the overclocked speeds. Thankfully the critical paths of most x86s are in the bizzaro functions, and given that mad-overclockers never actually /use/ their PC for anything other than fps-score-generation, they never see it crash, or the effect of a wrong instruction doesn't cost them much.

Remember when intel had a slight flaw in the FPU about 10 years ago? Everyone was up in arms about their buggy chips, and Intel just said "look, if you can prove the faulty FPU actually affects your use of a computer, we'll refund you, otherwise STFU". It's the same here. The dangerous effects of overclocking aren't noticeable to average joe who doesn't run a statistics datacentre or uses the chips to calculate astronomical fight paths etc. But they're still not going to sell you faulty things that fail on a regular basis, so they clock them at a 'safe' speed. It has nothing to do with this laod of conspiracy based horsepoo:



As usually, it's the standard ramblings of someone who doesn't understand what they're talking about, but said in a fashion that makes people think they do.

No no no, they deliberately under-rate their chips which they could otherwise charge much more for and/or sell in greater volumes, don't you understand how businesses work?!

They do sometimes fill lower bins from higher ones to meet demand, especially when a process matures but before a product line-up refresh, but it's definitely not standard practice.

Pretty sure that no-one who does either of those things ever overclocks the boxes they're running.

The hell they don't. NASA mission planning is run from about 8 vastly overclocked Alienware PCs, cooled by liquid nitrogen and surrounded by a bank of 100,000 LEDs. The have a team of engineers who do nothing but constantly flash the BIOS.

Yes, they don't. Nor do chip manufacturers sell them chips that are at their limits, which is what overclocking does to most chips.

You're more right than JC is but this bit is poppycock. Why do you imagine the chip is doing radically different things when it's playing Crysis, crunching SETI data, rendering images in a Pixar server farm, or playing back a CPU-heavy Flash movie in a web browser? It's not. It's all just a lot of very simple instructions glued together.

It would be more accurate to talk about electron migration over time, which will eventually fuck any CPU as energetic electrons blow holes through insulator layers and thus ruin transistors. This process is accelerated when you increase core voltages, which overclockers commonly do of course.

Yes that's why we all run Intelburn and Prime95 for days upon days before claiming our trophies.

But think of all the electrons in your transistors, blowing your insulators!