We Can Rebuild It

Posted 05/27/2008 at 10:24am | by Gordon Mah Ung

1

Comment

Print

Our Alienware Upgrades

Total Upgrade Cost: $1,197

Remember our third rule of upgrading: Does it make sense? With the Alienware Area 51, it does and it doesn’t.

CPU and Motherboard

It didn’t make fiscal sense to keep the Asus Socket 939 board, so we swapped it for an MSI nForce 750i SLI board.

Upgrading the CPU was job one on the Alienware box. At first we figured, heck, let’s just drop in a Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and call it a day. Then we looked at prices. On Pricewatch.com, the cheapest new 4800+ was $439. Even on eBay, 4800+ procs were moving for about $100. That’s for a used processor. Our second option was that little darling the Opteron 185. A 2.6GHz dual-core 939 CPU, this chip works perfectly fine as a stand-in Socket 939 Athlon 64 dual core. Prices for this chip, however, are closer to $280. If we got a paper route and saved our money, we’d be better off buying a $500 bargain PC instead of buying this proc. Even with the Opteron 185 or 4800+, the box would still be a chump next to the Pentium E2160 in the $500 machine.

That tipped the scales for us. The situation clearly called for a more thorough overhaul. Thanks to Alienware’s use of industry-standard ATX parts, an extreme makeover was not only possible but quite easy. We replaced the Athlon 64 3000+/Asus A8N32-SLI combination for a Core 2

Corsair Dominator modules are pricey but give us low latency and full EPP support for our nForce board.

Quad Q9300 and MSI P7N-SLI Platinum. Intel’s $300 Q9300 is based on the new Penryn core and is the class leader of cheap CPUs. The $175 MSI P7N-SLI Platinum mobo uses nVidia’s nForce 750i chipset and gives us the SLI option, as well. In a nutshell, we’re talking budget SLI with full quad-core Penryn support. We, of course, recycled the 2GB of DDR in the box, but it’s not like DDR2 is expensive today. In fact, it’s even cheaper than DDR.

Thanks to our CPU/mobo upgrade, we went from a slide-show encode that took almost two hours to one that took 21 minutes. That’s a performance increase of more than 400 percent.

GPU

Nvidia’s new GeForce 9800 GTX is the top single-core card in town today.

This one’s easy, right? Just drop the original GeForce 7900 GTX into the upgraded Alienware, buy a second 7900 GTX, and SLI the two, right? Wrong. First, almost no one sells the GeForce 7900 GTX anymore and those who have them want beaucoup bucks. Newegg, for example, had an open-box MSI GeForce 7900 GTX card available—for $300. On eBay, prices for the cards ranged from $300 to $350. Holy GPU, Batman! Computer components are supposed to get cheaper as time goes by, aren’t they? Not when you’re talking about high-end parts, apparently. Still, isn’t it better to pay for a second card rather than buy a single newer part? Not necessarily. Performance might be close in some situations, but generally, a single top-end modern card will outperform cards of an earlier generation, even if they run in SLI mode. What’s more, SLI 7900 GTX still doesn’t give you DX10. And from what we can tell, the drivers aren’t a priority either.

Thus, for this upgrade, we decided to remove the 7900 GTX card and replace it with a brand-spanking-new GeForce 9800 GTX. While the 9800 GTX costs $350, we could probably sell our used 7900 GTX for $250 and end up paying just $100 for the GPU upgrade.

The switch certainly pays off. We went from 38 frames per second in Unreal Tournament 3 to 101fps, or the equivalent of a 166 percent increase in frame rates. That’s at a standard 1280x1024 resolution, too. If we cranked the res up to 1920x1200, the gap between the 7900 GTX and 9800 GTX would be far wider, as the 7900 GTX would undoubtedly run out of steam while the 9800 GTX would keep sailing along.

Hard Drive and Soundcard

As with the CyberPower, we performed a couple upgrades on this rig mostly for livability. We added an F1 1TB Samsung hard drive to the machine as well as a Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer soundcard and called it a day.

Some Upgrades are Just Plain Stupid

Tempting as it might be to upgrade, it’s not always prudent.

Pentium III: It’s dead, Jim. Really. It’s really, really, really dead. You could shoot a P3 onto the Genesis planet and the only possible result would be that you wasted a photon-torpedo casing. Just give up.

Athlon XP: Instead of throwing good money into an Athlon XP box, just send us the cash. At least then somebody would be happy when all is said and done.

Rambus: There’s a surprising number of Direct RDRAM boxes in service. If you have an RDRAM machine, don’t even bother cracking it open. Unless you can afford to spend a million bucks on memory, you’ll never see more than 1GB of RDRAM. RDRAM also limits you to a 533MHz FSB CPU, so there ain’t no way you’ll ever drop in that 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.