A Little PC Help

I'm eying A PC my mom showed me that she found, for $1299, i want to know will it be able to run CoX(and maybe Ultra Mode in GR) and at the time being i know nothing about Specs for PC's

Alienware Aurora
Specs:
-Intel Core i7-920 Processor
-Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium
-3GB DDR3 Memory; 500GB Hard Drive
-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260(1.8GB) Graphics Card
-525-Watt Power Supply
-Asetek CPU Liquid Cooling System
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If this is no good, let me know what is(Custom or Pre-Made)

I'm not an expert by any means and I'm sure FatherXmas will be along shortly. BUT I know a lot of people avoid liquid cooling because of the added maintenance and possibility of leakage. Which usually when someone is buying a pre-built comp they don't know how to or aren't willing to keep that up.

Otherwise the only thing I'd question is the Power Supply large enough if you plan to add anything down the road like a second GPU. Also isn't Alienware now Dell? They tend to have a lot of proprietary stuff in their comps. Maybe the Alienware division is different I don't know. But I know when I went to upgrade my old comp it became easier to just build a new one than deal with all the problems that came with proprietary parts. Heck I kept my old hard draive and for the life of me my system still says Dell on it even after a complete wipe and install of XP.

Just my $.02.

Looks good. Regarding Ultra Mode in Going Rogue, Positron said in this post:

(QR)

So that so a no go? for the maintenance and may power Supply.

I'm kinda hoping to get a New Pc(may not be now) that can Run Max'd in most places(not counting GV and Cim[ITF])

mewit. You have private messages turned off.

First of all, I wouldn't touch Alienware with a 10foot pole. They aren't exactly the... premium... vendor they were a couple years back. Their buy-out by Dell saw several cuts in product quality, and the customer service went from an Industry best to typical Dell levels. Which means if you have a problem and you pick up the phone, you get India.

Now, I do run a small business building custom computers, but I'm pretty sure the forum terms frown on self-advertising.

If I was given $1300 to spend on a computer, I'd buy most of the stuff from Newegg. The Processor, Motherboard, Heatsink, Hard-drive, memory, graphics card(s), optical drive, and so on. I made a quick list here of stuff I'd spend my own money on: $1300 Computer. (note, I think you'll need to be logged in to Newegg to read it)

That's about $1173. I'd drop another $100 on one of Thermaltakes Refurbed Power Supplies because you still get a 2 year warranty and save a chunk of cash.

Which leaves some money left over for the chassis, and I'd simply point you to a listing of available chassis and ask what you want.

Now, there are a couple of problems with this wish list, and you'll actually run into with smaller computer vendors. I'm not eligible for Microsoft's discount OS program, so in order for me to sell copies of Microsoft Windows, I have to pass the full cost of the operating system over to you if you went with Windows. Legally speaking, I could sell you the OEM version of Vista Home Premium, which is just over $100. The full version that Microsoft would prefer I re-sell is $190.

So we've shot over $1300 and are closer to $1400, if not $1500, if you wanted Windows. Then there's the problem of shipping. How exactly do I get this to you, in one piece.... without pannicing that UPS or Fedex is gonna screw something up.

Now, I could resort this list by buying similar components, but choosing lowest price instead of best rating or what I know to be good, and I could drop from Crossfired Radeon 5770's to a single RadeonHD card, and easily undershoot the Dell Alienware system.

Which is one of the huge problems I have with Alienware. Dell uses the cheapest components possible now. Really, with what was listed on that system, you should be paying closer to $1600 or $1700 for the hardware alone. That it's a couple hundred off either screams Black Friday or something is catastrophically wrong.

About that water cooling system:

The asetek sytem is basically a preassembled, (mostly) sealed system. They're designing it as a drop-in OEM piece, and they rate it at 50,000 hours without needing maintenance.
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/388
Or their direct link, which has this to say:

See my Guides and Tutorials

1) Yes it should run some level of Ultra Mode (see Ironblade's comment).

2) Liquid cooling in a gamer PC is like having a spoiler on the sports trim package of a car, it's expected but that doesn't mean it does anything out of the ordinary. A lot of the boutique gamer companies are adopting the no muss - no fuss self contained CPU liquid cooling system. However I've yet to see a review that shows that they outperform traditional heatsink tower coolers.

3) To keep the price only at $1300 while their profit reasonable, they offer only 3GB of memory (i7-9xx CPUs like memory modules in groups of 3), at least the upgrade to 6GB is surprisingly reasonable ($50, likely adding 3 additional 1GB modules rather than swapping out 1GB for 2GB). The double the standard memory for the video card is like the liquid cooling, because it sounds "right" to your average magazine taught PC gamer. In reality it will only make a difference in extremely graphic intensive games at high resolution and game settings. However it's questionable that the framerate will be high enough to meet player expectations even with the extra memory at those settings.

(QR) Been up since midnight so may not be understanding a lot of this.
1. unable to look at Newegg atm.

2. form what i THINK after reading both(je and Bill) posts that Alienware is not good(je) but LCLC might be good(Bill)

3. to a make a tad clear, i was looking as this as a temp(few years) while i take class in PC(Software/Hardware) to make a Custom PC at a later date. That can do Ultra Mode(Max'd) AND let me listen to songs on YT(or funnys). note: I'm a Multi-Tasker

best i can think atm, now off to hurry to the Red Hami red in 10Mins

Edit: it toke me a bit to write this and didnt see Xmas post till now, i'll have to read over it when im not waiting for Hami to start.

I hear you on that Radeon 7k bit. Back then ATi was selling cards directly, and I lost count of the driver issues on the original Radeon, the 7500 remix, and the 8500 series. I also recall listing the Rage 128 as a graphics decelerator. I also once tried to RMA a Radeon 8500 AIW. That... went over something along the lines of a ton of bricks.

In the history books you can actually track ATi's turn-around to one event, the ArtX buyout. The ArtX guys were largely responsible for the R300 architecture, and they were also responsible for revamping ATi's aweful driver program. The ArtX guys were also able to ... convince... ATi to move to Nvidia's business model of letting 3rd parties build graphics cards. I think the Radeon 9700 series was the first time you could buy a Radeon card that wasn't a branded ATi. That in turn helped solve some of the customer service issues as 3rd parties like TUL (the company behind PowerColor) and Sapphire started taking front line support for retail buyers.

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