Computers....

Alright, So I just came across a large sum of money through my inheritance. I spend most of my day on my computer gaming and doing photoshop and other things. I plan on buying a alienware. I am not sure which to get though. Money is not a issue and I want a laptop in case I go some where I can take it with me so please don't try to convince me to buy a desktop or to buy a different company. I am dead set on alienware. Anyways my issue is I am currently stuck between 2 builds for the alienware 18. They have the following....

-Overclocked 4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-4900MQ (8MB Cache, up to 4.0GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
-Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit, English
-18.4" WLED FHD (1920 X 1080) TrueLife Display
-16GB2 Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz
-750GB SATA 3Gb/s (7,200 RPM) + 64GB mSATA SSD Caching
-Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 770M with 3GB GDDR5 - NVIDIA SLI® Enabled
-Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BD-ROM, DVDRW, CD-RW)
-Broadcom 4352 802.11 ac 2x2 and Bluetooth 4.0

Price: $3349.00

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Or

-Overclocked 4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-4930MX (8MB Cache, up to 4.3GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
-Windows 8, 64-bit, English
-18.4" WLED FHD (1920 X 1080) TrueLife Display
-32GB2 Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz
-1TB SSD Quad Play RAID 0 (4x256GB SSD SATA 6Gb/s
-Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 780M with 4GB GDDR5 - NVIDIA SLI® Enabled
-Optical Drive Not included
-Broadcom 4352 802.11 ac 2x2 and Bluetooth 4.0

Price: $5199.00

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Money is not the issue, I really want the 2nd one but it says "Optical Drive Not included" while the first one has one but has lower specs. My question is would I be able to add a drive to it? or should I just go for the cheaper one and lower specs with the drive already in it. Keep in mind also that I spend a average of 10-15 hours a day on my computer, I like to play games in max settings. Would the lower price and lower specs hinder me?

Sure you can go alienware if you want to buy utter expensive crap. Rule #1 of computers: never ever buy alienware.


But if you're totally deadset nothing can change your mind on alienware. Go for the one with the optical drive. Don't believe in the digital age don't need disks bullflop.

Stay away from Alienware. It's overpriced and it feels like I'd just be buying a brand name. Go for the $3K one if you're so deadset though, as much as I think spending over $1200 dollars on a laptop is flat out absurd (unless it's a mobile workstation)

Besides, why exactly would you even need more than 8 GB of RAM at this point anyway? If you're not doing any video rendering, you barely need 8 GB at this point, let alone the 16 GB that are in the cheaper one. Additionally, a RAID 0 is only good for performance, and is more susceptible to outright failing, because instead of needing just 1 drive to stay alive, you need 2 or more to stay alive, and it looks in the case of the one without the optical drive you'd need to hope all 4 stay alive. If even 1 starts failing, your whole system is shot.

tl;dr: Go for the $3300 one. More stability, has an optical drive, 16 GB is still more than you'll probably need for the next 4 years, and it has a solid state to supplement the platter drive for potentially better performance than while using a RAID 0 on platter drives.

If it were my choice, I'd probably go with the first build from another manufacturer. It's mighty cheaper; you could pretty much use the extra cash to snag some other goodies to go along with it, like a USB mouse, headset, cooling pad, and what have yous.

However, if money truly is not an option, then it would be pretty hard for me to pick the second over the first. SSDs definitely go a long way. The RAM is certainly overkill, and the GPU should handle whatever you throw at it quite nicely. I'd also invest in a Windows 7 disc to replace 8, but that's just me.

As for whether or not you need an optical drive or not depends on how you use your computers. If you think you'd miss it, you can get a USB drive for the times you do need it. I wouldn't miss it personally, but that's just me.

I've really never had any good experience with Alienware or Dell products for that matter, but it's no questioning their popularity.

Make sure you do get a cooling pad for your laptop. You might also want to invest in a USB mouse, a headset, and possibly an external hard drive for backup purposes.

Repeating myself from earlier, the biggest red flag on the second one is the RAID 0 setup. That's just asking for disaster when one drive fails. The 6 Gb/s speeds aren't worth the higher risk of data loss. Now if it were a RAID 1 setup of just 2 drives, I would be okay with going for that one.

You can spend the money you save by getting a few external 1 to 2 TB drives to backup all your data onto.

Alright, I am going to go with the first one just due to the opitcal drive but I am going to max out and upgrade everything on it so it basically matches the power and speed of the second one.

I will post more once I finish building it.

Noblebeastx said:

Alright, I am going to go with the first one just due to the opitcal drive but I am going to max out and upgrade everything on it so it basically matches the power and speed of the second one.

I will post more once I finish building it.

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I anticipate seeing the specs. Try to get the hard drive up to SATA 6.0 Gb/s if possible, but if that means a RAID 0 setup, avoid it like the plague. RAID 0 setups have a shaky life-expectancy because they use striping instead of mirroring, so that means there's no redundancy.

i didnt get a alienware you can see the specs of the gaming laptop i got in my signature

I was actually going to recommend Asus at the time but considering you seemed set...yeah. You're not gonna need any more than that if you're planning on playing video games and don't need everything maxed out.

I agree, you can buy a powerful computer with more than half the price of the ones you posted on here. As for the optical drive, if it doesn't come with one then it is unlikely you will be able to add one in due to space inside the computer.

Now that's a powerful computer. I hope it has some serious fans to keep up with all of that raw power.

Such power indeed. I wish I had that type of system, but since I don't game it would be a waste for me anyways.

Damn son. You got the ASUS gaming laptop.

Probably want to invest in a monster cooling pad for that. But not the ASUS made one. That one doesn't have adequate cooling for the 17-inch laptop according to this technician at my local MicroCenter. Something about the fans being too small to adequately cool the gaming rig because they're apparently sized for a 15-inch laptop.

I feel like stabbing my eyes out looking at the prices associated with those things. My $500 budget desktop plays modern games just fine on medium. You could probably get a $1300 laptop that would play anything you throw at it just fine. This is beyond overkill, this is like over-overkill.