Gave Dell Another chance on the Alienware side of things.

My wife's computer went kaput, wasn't sure what rout to go.... So I looked around and decided to clean & restore mine and give it to her.

Then i was like well i guess i have to find myself something, saw that they had this Alienware Alpha on sale for $400 with a coupon code at dell.

Core i3, 4gb of Memory 500gb hd...They had pretty decent reviews for even the base model looking around at the web.... Well it works extremely well and whisper quiet unless your playing a demanding game.. then it gets a little loud but no louder than a game system. Its about half to 65% of the size of a ps4

Easy to upgrade 4 screws and the top and bottom snap apart...I put a extra 8gb of ram & replaced the hd with a 120gb ssd from a shotty laptop i have sitting around..You can upgrade everything but the graphics.


Essentially its a console and a desktop 2 different UI's... Im liking it so far.

http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-alpha/pd?oc=dkcwa01&model_id=ali...


Edited by thcrw739 2015-04-05 6:54 PM

So what games do you play in 64bit mode Win 8.1? I mean does it play Xbox games or do you buy PC games for it?

Rich,

It plays pc games, whatever works...I usually buy from gog, but since the gaming mode ui is meant for steam I've been trying those out too.

Edited by thcrw739 2015-04-05 9:20 PM

Back in my Commodore Amiga days, I played every game they made for it...had several favorites that I played over and over.

Dawn Patrol, Arctic Fox, Flight Simulator, M1 Tank Platoon, Populus, Silent Service, and Air Warrior. When I went to the PC, I was sorely disappointed in the poor graphics and sound for gaming.

But eventually they caught up and as we know, far surpassed the Amiga standard. I still play Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge on my PC. But haven't played much of anything else.

What is "stream" you are talking about?

Yeah alt bass gave the link so you can see... I've been playing pc games since i was little but took i hiatus in the early 2000's when i got a playstation 2 then around 2004 started playing again.

This is really the first PC i've had that was built for gaming, The rest were just normal desktops with the best graphics card that the psu could handle. I purchased this to go with it i match up all the led's to the same color

Nice to have a PC designed for gaming I guess, but really, how powerful does one have to be to play most all games these days? My old desktop which is slow by today's machines standards seems to play most all things just fine.

My nephew is a game player...has one of those Alienware custom built desktops that he paid a small fortune for...but only has DSL where he lives. I have my old dual-core Intel, but have 60mb/sec internet and I can tell you that for online gaming...it is much more enjoyable at my house than his.

That was a cool looking keyboard/mouse combo however....

I agree with you about the internet speed, I average about 75 mbp/s with cox cable here in Vegas with a 19ms ping from a Mojave,Ca but it also helps where the servers are.

My other computer wasn't bad, but they also put certain things inside that just work together better on gaming machine, Normally no outrageous bottlenecks as they say & you also get prettier graphics and smoother movement. My old desktop could play most but no where near the setting's i have on this new one.



Edited by thcrw739 2015-04-06 11:33 PM

Didn't we used to have a post your workstations thread? Perhaps we should have one with spec's

... might have to tidy my office up for that

Hey...rule #7...

b..b..b... I didn't break rule #7

You can't tell me what to do, you're not my father

Well as long as you dont break rule number #1

Better stop posting pictures of your workstation then