Craig's Musings

Christmas has come and gone, and Santa was very good to me - he brought me a brand new Alienware 7500 series, fully loaded!

• Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme QX6700 2.66GHz 8MB Cache 1066MHz FSB
• Chassis Upgrades: Alienware® AlienIce™ 3.0 Video Cooling + High-Performance Liquid Cooling
• Memory: 4GB DDR2 Performance SDRAM at 800MHz - 4 x 1024MB
• System Drive: Extreme Performance (RAID 0) - 300GB (2 x 150GB) Serial ATA 1.5Gb/s 10,000 RPM w/ 2 x 16MB Cache
• Graphics Processor: Dual 768MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8800 GTX - SLI Enabled - Requires 1000W Power Supply!
• Power Supply: Alienware® 1000 Watt Multi-GPU Approved Power Supply
• Sound Card: Alienware® Edition Sound Blaster® X-Fi® Elite High Definition 7.1 Audio

Man this sucker is FAST!! I've been running it overclocked to 3.2ghz for a week with no problems - the liquid cooling is great for overclocking.

I bought a copy of 3DMark 2006 from FutureMark and ran it on my various and sundry machines using the default settings (1280x1024, no anti-aliasing), and got the following results.

The XPS Dell and ALX Alienware machines both are running Vista. It looks like the ATI drivers for Vista don't support crossfire - the control panel help says to go to the "Crossfire" advanced setting to enable Crossfire mode, but sadly, that option doesn't exist. It would seem that the Alienware ALX 3DMark score should be closer to 10,000.

In any event, the Intel Quad Core Extreme Edition plus the NVIDIA Quad SLI 8800 GTX kicks some serious 3D gaming ass. My system was compared to 674,434 system configurations and there were only 1,167 systems with a higher score.

It's a long, long way from a 386 and a Mach 64 card, baby! Whooooooooooooooooooooooosh!!!