mwp

my son has just given up on his alienware power laptop.

he's now looking for a power desktop in the £1800 range (inc monitor).

he's looking at alienware again as the service has been good albeit the laptop had cooling problems ... i've suggested he look elsewhere ... i've had 2 mesh pcs that have been very reliable.

any advice ?

AVZ

I used to build my own but cannot be bothered these days.

For that sort of money you will get a really impressive setup and i doubt that you would really notice the difference if you went with Alienware. Alienware have recently been bought up by Dell so i would imagine that you will notice Dell machines coming through soon with some impressive figures.

That said, i always look at www.pcpro.co.uk and look at what they recommend under A list.

They rate Mesh highly and given your experience i would stick with em

lightning101

These look good for that sort of budget

www.overclockers.co.uk


"Ultima Extreme SLi 7900 GT" AMD Athlon 64 FX60 Dual DDR System (FS-008-OK) <FONT face=ARIAL size=-1>
If you are looking for the ultimate AMD box then look no further than the Ultima Extreme SLi AMD Athlon 64 FX60. Supplied pre-built it has an impressive specification to say the least :-

- AMD Athlon 64 FX60 Dual Core San Diego (Socket 939) Dual DDR400 CPU
- AMD Approved cooler
- Asus A8N32-SLi Deluxe nForce4 SLi Dual Channel PCI-Express Motherboard
- Corsair 2GB (2x1GB) DDR XMS3500 Low Latency CAS2.0 Dual Channel Kit
- 2 x 250GB Western Digital 16mb cache SATA-2 Hard Drive (RAID 0 Configured)
- Black Floppy Drive
- 2 x Gainward NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT 512MB DDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Cards (SLi Configured) ***As quick as two 7900 GTX's in SLi***
- Plextor PX-755 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty Sound Card
- Tagan TG580-U15 580W ATX2.01 Easycon SLi Compliant Modular Silent PSU
- Windows XP Professional pre-installed with License and CD supplied

Note - All Ultima systems are built and installed on demand, during busy periods this may cause a delay of between 24 and 48 hours in despatching your order. The Ultima is supplied without keyboard, mouse, speakers or monitor (all of which are available elsewhere in this on-line store).

You must choose a case to go with this system (pictured on the left) Pick an option below.

jaytc2003

iTrader: (1)

I would try building one around the intel chip that overclocks like crazy on air and beats the fx60 in most benchmarks. Alows to spend more on other areas like a decent monitor etc

lightning101

So would I, if that's what he had asked for

ru'

Which chip is that? I thought that intel weren't in the game these days (until core duo or whatever is released).

smike

The Pentium D805 2.66GHz has been overclocked to 4.3Ghz. Shall be getting one for a new system build and clocking it to 4.1GHz with watercooling.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2006/0..._ghz_cores_uk/

ru'

And it beats an overclocked fx?

lightning101

It can only reach 4.1ghz with an expensive water cooling system and a huge voltage increase, along with some damn good RAM - PQI PQI25400-1GDBL

You can only get stable air cooling at 3.3ghz before requiring a more expensive fan, then once above 3.8/3.9 you need water cooling. So in reality its not 79.99

Daz34

No that would be the Intel Core 2 Duo which hits the shelves in a week or two.
Going by the benchmarks that are out, A 2.4Ghz E6600 cost less than half the price of the FX-60 chip yet beats it (and the FX-62) quite convincingly.
Thay appear to overclock quite easily in excess of 3ghz on air as well.

Scoobless

I have a mesh comp....lasted for just under 2 yrs,now its dead(Motherboard and graphic card went),sent it back under warranty and they are replacing the motherboard for an SLI one,putting in a 1 gig 7950gx2 gfx card,1 gig extra ram and a bigger psu...can't really complain

ru'

Now you're talking; I haven't seen any totally independent benchmarks yet, but the conroe (?) looks mighty fine so far. I won't be upgrading for a while though, so there's plaenty of time for the dust to settle.

(sorry for the thread hijack)