With Alienware, I'm in Australia, so I don't know if we even have it over here, and my guess is that the support would be even sketchier. I'm presuming all your prices are in $US dollars, the Aussie is trading at about 78 US cents right now, so I'm hoping that's a pretty good guide.
Anyhow:
Some of the beasty looking machines are giving me headaches, they seem good, but I'm not sure exactly what's more important, processor or RAM?
Then I find stuff like this on Cnet:
Quote:
CNET tested an HP Pavilion zd8000 configured with a top-shelf 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1GB of 400MHz memory, and a 5,400rpm 80GB hard drive. The Pavilion zd8000 scored about as well as the best-in-class Dell Inspiron XPS, which runs a slightly slower 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor. However, the Inspiron XPS's CPU makes up for its lower core clock speed with two large caches--a 2MB L3 and a 512K L2--and a faster 7,200rpm hard drive; in comparison, the Pavilion zd8000 has only 1MB of L2 cache and a 5,400rpm hard drive. (Caches are small pockets of memory on the CPU that can be accessed more quickly than retrieving information from main memory.) The ABS Mayhem G3 houses a much slower 2.2GHz Athlon 64 3400+ processor, but it's extremely efficient, and it held pace with the higher-clocked Pentium 4 CPUs.
Unreal Tournament 2004 performance
Our Unreal Tournament 2004 performance test evaluates video adapter prowess and, in particular, CPU speed. The HP Pavilion zd8000 came in just a few percentage points lower than the Dell Inspiron XPS, which has a large L2 cache, and the ABS Mayhem G3, whose Athlon 64 processor delivers better 3D performance on games that are CPU limited.
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So it seems like a beastly processor means crap games and video-wise unless it has decent cache storage?
Some have upwards of 3Gig processors, but only say 512RAM with both DiMM slots used.
Also, any processor above 2Gig effectively seems to render the battery useless.
Hyperthread processors have a maximum battery life of 2 and half hours if you're lucky.
So totally avoid
any shared RAM video setups, dedicated RAM only. What's the optimum here? 64 megs dedicated seems to be pretty standard, but some go up to 256.