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In the Forums... |
Posted: April 5, 2000 Written by: David "Spunk" Grampa Estimated retail price: $2,399.99 + S&H Hard Drive (IBM 13.6GB Deskstar 34GXP) The battle between ATA-33 and ATA-66 hard drives is long since over. It's safe to say that ATA-66 hard drives dominate the current and future markets. With that in mind, we can understand Alienware's pick of an ATA-66 hard drive. Next, we'll have to understand the hard disk in whole, then hear a rundown on performance. As always, here are the specifications:
As with many things in life, the price to performance ratio of a product is usually very poor with budget components. According to countless reviews and roundups, the IBM Deskstar 34GXP line of hard drives is the best for your money- price and performance wise. We have no objection. CPU/Motherboard Performance Many of the performance tests already taken in this article directly reflect the capabilities of the CPU and motherboard as a whole. Rather than bombarding the Aurora with hundreds of synthetic benchmarks (which will mean nothing without comparison), we'll discuss the features and benefits in going with the AMD Athlon. MSI's IR3 Irongate motherboard is not the winner of countless awards and acclamations, rather a stable and reliable motherboard to home your Athlon. Sporting 1 AGP, 6 PCI, 1 ISA, and 3 DIMM (768MB Max), the motherboard has plenty of room for expansion. Based on AMD's own 750 chipset, you are ensured reliability and support for the entire Athlon family. Also, ATA-66 support is integrated into AMD's-756 peripheral bus controller. This allows for full feature support of IBM's Deskstar ATA-66 hard drive and up to four IDE devices (two simultaneously). You may also request the addition of Creative's CT5880 sound chip on the motherboard. As for connectors, you are looking at the standard 2 comm, 2 USB, 2 PS/2, and 1 parallel port bunch. All in all, the motherboard is your standard OEM config. Running this motherboard three months and counting we have not seen more than one minor problem, making the IR3 very reliable and a great pick for the Aurora. Without controversy, AMD's new line of microprocessors fly. Being the only true competition left against Intel in the Silicon Wars has only benefited we the consumer. Many publications have already proven the Athlon worthy over Intel's Pentium III and Coppermine in both price and performance. Therefore, there is no need for me to do so again in this article. Rather, I would like to discuss some of the Athlon's benefits over the Pentium line. Initially, AMD's only advantage over Intel was price. Then came 3DNow! Instructions dramatically increasing floating-point performance, and now the Athlon. Higher production expenses and market demand have eliminated AMD's price stronghold over Intel, yet the Athlon is still considered superior for games. Besides polishing off their 3DNow! instructions, AMD moved to their own 'Slot A' bus bumping their front side bus speed to 200MHz (100MHz on both the rising and falling edges of the clock). Also, AMD upped their transistor count to 22 million, lowered the voltage, doubled the L1 and L2 cache size, and slapped it on its own PCB. For you this means the best processor from AMD yet, and a deadly weapon against Intel over in Silicon Valley. By default, Alienware powers the Aurora with an Athlon 800. In concern to price, we configured our system with an Athlon 700. Reason being, us tweakers are confident that we can comfortably reach 800MHz with 'additional hardware'. In conclusion, the Athlon is the number one choice in power computing of 2000, and Alienware knows that!  
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