At my school/college in the media department the tech support guy has some how managed to convince the college to buy him an Alienware PC in order to do film rendering etc - and my college isn't some private school lol. Despite a few days after it arriving a hard drive failed. But I managed to take a look at the specs today. i7 960 (water cooled, stock clock speed lol) 12gb DDR3 SLI GTX 295 (think they are also water cooled, stock clocks). Forgot to check if he had any SSD drives, but got at least a tb or 2 in there. With x2 Samsung 24" monitors. I mean... wow, for a PC that spends most of it's time doing emails and the odd exporting/rendering video's with a crappy generic mouse and keyboard, speechless lol. He's a decent guy and a lucky *******, thinking of bringing Crysis or some games in for us actually allow the PC to make use of it's hardware. Nice enough to share that the tower alone cost him... the college £5,000. Good value as expected from Alienware..
I... wow. Why didn't he get funding to build his own? Or don't the school trust him and the warranties etc?
The above post read my mind. If hes stupid enough to be using an Alienware, you can probably get the whole rig folding without him realising.
I don't think he knows how to put a rig together. He most likely just heard of Alienware, so went onto the website and picked one of the most expensive set up's and checked everything to the highest price. Then went to the finance department and said "this computer is perfect for the college and the media department." I mean ffs, like a quad SLI system is necessary. I was asking if he even knew what he had under his desk. Give them both to me and I'll pass them a more than capable GTX 260. I'll say it's a better card and will save them money on their electricity bills.
I worked for a uni for 6 years and you wouldnt believe how retarded academics are, education does not equate to intelligence but because they had a docterate they often thought themselves kings of the world. used to piss the hell out of me as it was always me who was wrong and never them. you'll prolly find that he's just spun a load of **** at his superior as to why its the latest greatest thing (despite having the wrong gpu's for video editing) but be prepared to do your nut in when he uses it for basic word processing.
I see you are not well versed in the teachings of the BOfH, hack the bios, replace the proc with the cheapest i7 you can find, halve the memory. The graphics cards are a little more complex, head over to wikipedia andd knock up an article implying that quad SLi is simply a marketing ploy to get people to spend more and that it should really be called SLi^2 as it only requires two GPUs. Liberal use of triple syllable words to engage 'Dummy Mode' and you're sorted. Moriquendi
If he was planning on doing video editing/rendering, why isn't he using a workstation video card like a FirePro, or a Quadro, even a baseline workstation graphics card will come close to out performing a GTX 295...
I honestly have no idea. But the thing is, it's not even drastic video editing. Just A-level standard music video or a film trailer in the second year. So each video is only what... 3mins tops which 99% isn't even done on that PC - all the students work in the ICT suites on intel E7400's 2gb RAM and some with onboard graphics or very value/budget GPU's lol. I've seen a bit of 3d rendering... once or twice. Even when I was doing a bit of sound recording we used the PC sat next to it, the alienware was just sat there with a few emails open rofl. No one was in the office so I gave it a quick Dxdiag and was just wtf'd. To be honest... what he did was without knowing was pretty funny/smart as he got a 5k Alienware for free, not even hooked up into the college network so it's not running any server applications etc. He could probably take that home or swap the parts out of it and no one would notice lol.
At work we had a request for a laptop (???) for CAD work. He really didnt need it for the work he was doing and even if the requirement existed he would have been better off with a workstation. Because he jumped up and down enough though he ended up with a Sony Vaio, 18 point something inch screen, Blu-Ray, 9800GT (IIRC), 8GB RAM, Windows 7, 1080p, etc etc.
