alienware
Banned
As you said there are pros and cons to everything. I worked, nay, ran a computer shop for five years. In that time you would be utterly amazed at some of the things that happened.
I had a guy come in and by a build set. It was back a week later, motherboard held in with dustbin ties (those plastic things with the metal through them).
I had some one buy a CDRW, fitted it and then proceeded to put a two pin 12v wire from the psu (for an aux fan) onto the slave header on the back, frying it and the IDE cables down to bare wires.
Posts in the wrong place causing all sorts of problems.
I mean take a look around the internet. I've seen people spray paint a motherboard and then colour in the fets and VRMs with a red marker, duck tape their pc at the seems and then fill it with water. You name it, where there's an idiot there's a problem.
Now yes, *most* of the world's population does have the patience to figure stuff out. But, even a very close friend of mine who is skilled enough to district manage a Gamestop has made some really silly mistakes. Ended up getting annoyed during a build, threw it across the room before realising he hadn't plugged in the 8 pin EPS. And so on and so on.
I have been building computers since I was 7. I'll give my age away now, I'm 38. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX80 'kit' that my uncle and I soldered and built. From there I built my first 286, then 386 which was upgraded to a 486 and so on. However, even *I* have had nightmares along the way. When I upgraded to Thunderbird during the early noughties I bought a Abit board (top of the pile) an Athlon Tbird (1ghz) and some SDRAM. It came, it kept locking up during install. Now at that time the only other machine I had was dual xeon with RDRAM. I had nothing to put in it to compare, and the company I purchased it from were telling me that I was welcome to back the lot, but anything found to be working would be subject to a 15% restocking fee and I would not get my postage back. I stood to lose about $150 so I just put it all in the attic and left it there.
Last year I bought a Sapphire pure motherboard from Scan. It was DOA, at least I thought. All over the box it said "Supports Phenom X4 processors" however, it didn't support MY Phenom X4.
£10 testing fee, quelle surprise it worked, no postage back, I lose £17 odd.
Now that was on a £50 motherboard. Imagine that happening with over a thousand pound's worth of hardware? Retailers get shipping discounts, end users do not. Just sending all of it back would run you £30.
So as I maintain, there is a perfect niche in the market for Alienware, Dell (who are now in something ridiculous like 80% of homes and businesses) and so on. Whether you want to think about it or not the onboard graphics business is the biggest graphics business in the world. It makes up something like 90% of all GPU based sales. Whoever can grab the crown and offer something with it will win the day. AMD now have an onboard GPU that can not only run games but also make them playable. For £90 of your hard earned beans you get a 2.6ghz X4 Phenom 2 with a 6750 Radeon aboard. So for less than £250 for an entire computer you can join your friends in smashing zombie skulls in Left 4 Dead/2 and all manner of other games.
With the money that will no doubt come from Llano (especially in the 'gaming' laptop world, you find me one that can run L4D on high for less than £800) they can then reinvest into newer faster CPUs and GPUs and keep the likes of Nvidia and Intel from pulling our pants down and reaming us.
And that is a very good thing. Look at what Rupert Murdoch has done with Sky satellite (taken every known sport from terrestrial TV and made people pay for it). It would be a much darker world with no competition given that part manus are pretty evil (new gpu every month, yours is then worth squat).
I had a guy come in and by a build set. It was back a week later, motherboard held in with dustbin ties (those plastic things with the metal through them).
I had some one buy a CDRW, fitted it and then proceeded to put a two pin 12v wire from the psu (for an aux fan) onto the slave header on the back, frying it and the IDE cables down to bare wires.
Posts in the wrong place causing all sorts of problems.
I mean take a look around the internet. I've seen people spray paint a motherboard and then colour in the fets and VRMs with a red marker, duck tape their pc at the seems and then fill it with water. You name it, where there's an idiot there's a problem.
Now yes, *most* of the world's population does have the patience to figure stuff out. But, even a very close friend of mine who is skilled enough to district manage a Gamestop has made some really silly mistakes. Ended up getting annoyed during a build, threw it across the room before realising he hadn't plugged in the 8 pin EPS. And so on and so on.
I have been building computers since I was 7. I'll give my age away now, I'm 38. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX80 'kit' that my uncle and I soldered and built. From there I built my first 286, then 386 which was upgraded to a 486 and so on. However, even *I* have had nightmares along the way. When I upgraded to Thunderbird during the early noughties I bought a Abit board (top of the pile) an Athlon Tbird (1ghz) and some SDRAM. It came, it kept locking up during install. Now at that time the only other machine I had was dual xeon with RDRAM. I had nothing to put in it to compare, and the company I purchased it from were telling me that I was welcome to back the lot, but anything found to be working would be subject to a 15% restocking fee and I would not get my postage back. I stood to lose about $150 so I just put it all in the attic and left it there.
Last year I bought a Sapphire pure motherboard from Scan. It was DOA, at least I thought. All over the box it said "Supports Phenom X4 processors" however, it didn't support MY Phenom X4.
£10 testing fee, quelle surprise it worked, no postage back, I lose £17 odd.
Now that was on a £50 motherboard. Imagine that happening with over a thousand pound's worth of hardware? Retailers get shipping discounts, end users do not. Just sending all of it back would run you £30.
So as I maintain, there is a perfect niche in the market for Alienware, Dell (who are now in something ridiculous like 80% of homes and businesses) and so on. Whether you want to think about it or not the onboard graphics business is the biggest graphics business in the world. It makes up something like 90% of all GPU based sales. Whoever can grab the crown and offer something with it will win the day. AMD now have an onboard GPU that can not only run games but also make them playable. For £90 of your hard earned beans you get a 2.6ghz X4 Phenom 2 with a 6750 Radeon aboard. So for less than £250 for an entire computer you can join your friends in smashing zombie skulls in Left 4 Dead/2 and all manner of other games.
With the money that will no doubt come from Llano (especially in the 'gaming' laptop world, you find me one that can run L4D on high for less than £800) they can then reinvest into newer faster CPUs and GPUs and keep the likes of Nvidia and Intel from pulling our pants down and reaming us.
And that is a very good thing. Look at what Rupert Murdoch has done with Sky satellite (taken every known sport from terrestrial TV and made people pay for it). It would be a much darker world with no competition given that part manus are pretty evil (new gpu every month, yours is then worth squat).
