Ahh, the data center's heart and brain, the server room. Dim, cavernous, off-limits to most of our coworkers, and bathed in the soothing dual ambiences of CPU fans and high-powered air-conditioning, they're the perfect place to take a moment to cool off after a tough call or a sprint across a plague-wracked parking lot. All those boxen, miles of Cat6 just the way we want it, chilled to a component-friendly sixty-something degrees.

Well, so much for that particular workplace fantasy. We've spoken previously about the positive aspects of greener, more energy-efficient computing, but now they've gone too far. Folks have finally noticed that facilities cooling is one of the biggest costs for server rooms and data centers, and the thermostat is being kicked up to save money. Way up.

Apparently, there's some big event of some sort happening in Los Angeles this week. Supposed to be a huge deal in the video game industry, something like that? Lots of news? Anyone know what all the fuss is about?

BI just keeps seeing poorly-lit phone-cam pictures of hotel rooms from Callaham's Twitter feed and snarky IM's from our head honcho about how long the line at Starbucks is.

Why, yes, BI wasn't able to make it to the E3 party (apologies to the fine folks at $Unspecified_Vendor, at whose party we were not able to cause chaos the likes of which would be spoken of in hushed tones for decades to come; maybe next year). Truthfully, we're not actually bitter about it. Given the flood of news that's been coming from this year's edition of the expo, hardware, especially for anyone not using a console and/or prone to waving things around, seems to be pretty much an afterthought.

Well, there was a particularly festive flight sim joystick. Thank you, Logitech.

WIMP Environment [noun]: Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu) - A graphical-user-interface environment such as X or the Macintosh interface, esp. as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces.

- The Jargon File

These wonderful, powerful, magic boxes of ours can turn long strings of ones and zeroes into dazzling graphics with breathtaking speed, perform tremendous, complicated mathematical computations in the blink of an eye, and, in a pinch, do a fair impersonation of a space heater. They are ours to command, ready to do our (possibly nefarious) bidding. Whether we know what we want or not, if it's within the operational parameters and capabilities, a PC will do exactly what we tell it to do.

Of course, there's a catch or two. First, we need to know how to tell it to what we want. Heuristics be damned, other than on-the-fly spell-checking, no matter how sophisticated the modern PC is, it's not clairvoyant. Ask anyone who's done time in a call center how much disconnect can exist between what a user wants, and what they say they want. Unlike our not-so-hypothetical phone staffer, the computer can't ask questions or make inferences. They're fabulously literal.

The second catch is having some way to communicate our wants and needs to our willing digital minions. And that's where our input devices come into play.

We were halfway to Betelgeuse when the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters kicked in. We had two bags of--

... but first, we interrupt this column to bring you a Public Service Announcement:


At some point, whether it's because you're doing something warranty-voiding, or just because it's the worst possible time, the specter of data loss is going to rear its inconvenient head, maw dripping with negated bits. Whether this results in an epic cascade of profanity and spontaneous weeping, or just some muttering and the retrieval of some storage media is directly proportional to how recent your last backup was.

Yes, this falls solidly into the realm of Stuff You Think About Moments After It Will Do You Any Good Whatsoever, right up there with taking a headlong plunge into a room of whelp eggs, tasting day-old fugu, or doing that thing with the mayonnaise and the goat.

We spend most of our time in this space discussing the various ways we can make our games run faster, or look better, and rightfully so. However, that leaves out a fairly substantial portion of what brings us atmosphere and immersion in what we're doing (or, in some cases, what we're doing when we ought to be doing something else).

That something is audio. And no matter how good your sound card is, whether it's the motherboard's onboard offering or an add-on audio device, if your speakers suck, your gaming (and music-listening, and movie-watching, and Hulu-surfing) experience is going to suffer.

But first, let's see what everyone's using to turn those little electric impulses into sound waves:

In Conclusion

The laundry list of quality and performance accolades that could go here is, frankly, unnecessary. My colleagues all chivalrously offered to give me some time off and conduct the review themselves, or offer to house it for a week to provide a counterpoint. Boxing the A-51 X58 up for the return trip (after dutifully using Alien Resurrection v2.0 to do a complete reformat of the 2TB main partition -- for anyone keeping score at home, the nuke, pave, and reinstall took just 45 minutes -- was quite probably the least fun thing BI has had to do, professionally, without getting chewed out by the boss.

It's not without its flaws. There is the surprisingly modest cooling for the case, and the fact that the i7 965 is using the stock Intel heatsink. Under heavy loads, the twin GTX295s emit noise and hot air at "hair dryer on espresso" levels; during testing, it wasn't uncommon for BI's lab to go up ten degrees (Farenheit).

The Alienware A-51 X58 is a ferocious piece of equipment, and boasts a performance repertoire that, short of going bananas with an SSD RAID or something similarly outre, any other collection of off-the-shelf parts isn't going to top.

However, and you all knew this was coming, that level of performance comes at a price. The MSRP of the system we've had in our hands is a rather breathtaking $5,199. The question becomes, then, "Is it worth five grand to you to have the baddest box on the planet today?"

That's a question we all must answer for ourselves, but I will call to mind the words of the great sage, Ferris Bueller: "It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up."

To anyone with a second set of the means, I'll take one with green lighting.



BI would like to thank Kathryn, Raymond, Brittany, and the rest of the folks at Alienware for hooking us up with the review system.

Rafe Brox spends his days wielding a phone in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. When not causing friends and enemies alike to /facepalm electronically, he can be found extolling the virtues of the weird peripherals in his life, from kettlebells to the Trackman Marble. Those of you wishing to inflict or solicit hardware and gaming geekery in person can catch him volunteering at Dragon*Con. If you also share an unhealthy passion for PC hardware or know a good place he can get help for this addiction, the target coordinates are rafe.brox AT weblogsinc DOT com.

The Alien In Action
This could very easily become a tedious, eye-glazing benchmark-fest. Rather than inflict that on everyone, we'll just hit some highlights for comparison purposes. We don't think it comes as a surprise to anyone reading this that the A-51 X58 can steamroll pretty much every game currently on the market, though there are some that will make it sweat. It pretty much embarassed BI's desktop system across the board in synthetic benchmarks (Everest, Sandra, PCMark Vantage, and 3D Mark)-- by about 40% in CPU benchmarks, and by *mumble* 250% *mumble* in memory and video subsystem tests.

Weirdly enough, Vista rates this system a 5.9 across the board in terms of "Windows Experience" scores, which, given the ostensibly sliding-scale nature of this scoring metric, comes as a surprise. We'd expected to see scores above 6.0, but maybe there's a reason the upper limit of this particular scoring system hasn't adjusted upwards to which we are not privy.


Game-wise, I'll quote Steve here, because he sums up what we do very nicely:

Every performance slider was put to its maximum, and if there was a check box available for some kind of bell or whistle, we checked it.

Crysis: Warhead, under exciting conditions, will occasionally slow down to the point where a little bit of choppiness is noticeable, but not so far as to cause any extra deaths (beyond those resulting from BI's own considerable ineptitude). I think we managed to drop World of Warcraft into the high 40's once during a 25 player raid. GRID, Need For Speed, and, yes even World of Goo can all be run at wide-open throttle without a bottleneck in sight.

In short, at the maximum resolution available here at the BI orbital outpost (1920x1200), this system simply overwhelms everything in its path. Those folks with larger, higher-resolution displays (and, oh, how we envy you) might need to back things off a notch here or there -- probably in the realm of highest-quality AA or AF -- but even that isn't a certainty.

However, Supreme Commander is able to, err, reign supreme over even the A-51 X58 during massive battles on the largest maps. The framerate itself doesn't suffer -- frankly, it looks smooth and gorgeous -- but the CPU math required to track thousands of units and the attendant AI, even with a dedicated PhysX subsystem, reduced performance from one-to-one realtime to something closer to one-to-four (ie: one second of game clock time was more like four seconds out here in the real world). By way of comparison, similar situations on BI's 3GHz QX9450 run closer to six or seven to one, so the Alienware system is still demonstrating some impressive performance here -- four hyperthreaded cores giving an effective array of 8 CPUs to throw at the task -- but SupCom will gladly take advantage of twice that many cores.


They Did Say "Break It....."

Alienware's Tech and Marketing Folks: "We want you to push it hard. Overclock the CPU, the video cards, everything. Go nuts."
Big Iron: "You realize that's a really short trip, right?"

About that overclock... Not being one to do anything by half measures, we decided to go big right out of the gate, and pushed the FSB from 133 to 200 with a few safeguards and hopeful voltage tweaks, and promptly couldn't do anything at all. No problem, let's just reset the CMOS and get back in the saddle.

... at which point, the system helpfully informed us that there was no operating system or bootable media detected. Four-letter words may have been employed, along with hasty Witness Protection Program scenarios envisioned.

Suitably stymied, BI placed a call to Alienware's tech support line where, after a minimum of menu-option poking and a short time on hold (we called mid-afternoon on a Saturday), we were speaking with a very pleasant support rep who, within ten minutes, was able to correctly discern that the CMOS' "Reset to Default" did not, in fact, configure it to address the RAID array our test system was sporting. That change made, BI was back in business. Kudos to the knowledeable and friendly support rep we dealt with, despite the fairly arcane nature of the fix, they were able to get us on our way with a minimum of head-scratching (we may have overheard a telltale click or two in what we presume was their knowledge base, but that could just as easily have been Spider Solitaire).

This also gave us an opportunity to test out the "Alien Resurrection v2.0" system restore disk (not that there had been any any data loss, but we wanted to play with everything in the box). Restoring from the local partition on the hard drive, Vista estimated our restore time at 27 minutes. Fifteen and a half minutes later, we were at the desktop, and again ready to install just the aforementioned two Windows Update files.

What's In The Box?

Alienware's name is essentially synonymous with high-end, dare we say, "boutique" computer systems. They and Falcon Northwest more or less pioneered the market for premium pre-built gaming rigs, and, even with the recent acquisition by Dell, the brand carries a certain amount cachet. To that end, part of what you get for the relatively breathtaking price tag (more on that later) is what's beyond the performance envelope. And there's plenty, from the subtle schwa alien head in tone-on-tone coloring when you open the shipping box to a nice collection of schwag, to a user manual that wouldn't look out of place in a BMW's glove compartment. Alienware certainly delivers an experience in addition to an imposing spec sheet.


As you can see, the PC itself is swaddled in a tyvek cloth bag to protect the high-gloss finish, and the first words out of BI's substantially better half's mouth when it was unwrapped were, "Oh my God, it looks like a 1960 Cadillac." High praise from a classic car junkie.

Ardent fans of this column will doubtless have noticed that BI has been a little, shall we say, thin on the ground of late. There are two main reasons for this -- one, BI's biennial sojourn to the other side of the country for a week of testosterone poisoning, and, two, a multi-week stint with a rather demanding guest around the house.

The guest in question, however, wasn't an unemployed former college buddy, a surprise visit from the in-laws, or a couch-surfing second cousin. It was, rather, a sixty pound, gloss-black obelisk -- Alienware's top-of-the-line gaming system, the Area-51 X58, tricked out by them with damn near every bell, whistle, and go-fast toy in their arsenal. And BI had their blessing to, and we quote this with great relish, "Send it back as a smoking pile of slag. But, seriously, watch Iron Man on the Blu-Ray drive first."

We were skeptical. Surely, entrusting someone of BI's questionable restraint with a valuable piece of equipment would carry more stringent usage guidelines than, "Give it back when we ask for it." They were adamant -- this was the third such system released to the wild, and they wanted it to be abused.

Fortunately, the conference call ended before our mad laughter began.

We've had the Mimo UM-710 display in the Big Iron slag pit during the weeks since our initial coverage, and have taken the opportunity to see how it works in the real world.

Starting from the very first impression, the UM-710 comes in a very functional and cleanly-designed box, which is both sturdy and easy to open, and did a fine job of cradling the unit in transit. There are all of four components in it (plus a driver CD and manual): the screen, the stand, the finger-friendly screw that holds them together, and the USB cable. The cable features dual jacks at the PC end, in case a single port isn't able to push sufficient juice to drive the display; on BI's home rig, this wasn't necessary.

Due to the relatively modest length of the USB cable (6'), if your box sits on the floor, you're probably going to need to utilize the USB port(s) on or near the top of your case or jack into the nearest USB hub; the one(s) on your current monitor, if present, would be pretty much ideal for this.

As mentioned in our preview, it's advertised as a three-step, five-minute install, compatible with OSX and both 32 and 64 bit flavors of Windows. BI is pleased to report that this is absolutely true -- affix the screen to the stand in the desired orientation, plug it in, and put the install disk in. The only minor snag we encountered was that the installation window didn't close after it was complete.

Okay, no, not quite, but no collection of hideous headline puns that juicy escapes us. The news from Nvidia's neck of the woods is that the Green Eyeball Gang has gotten a bit cozier with both Dell and Apple this week.

For gamers, this certainly doesn't suck on either front, especially since there's a rather tasty bit in the Dell-centric press release that says, "the Dell Studio XPS 13 eliminates the typical notebook compromise between performance and battery life by offering two GeForce GPUs to give users the option of running one GPU for longer battery life, or combining both for greater performance."

SLI? On MY laptop?

To quote the great Federation philosopher J.L. Picard, "Make it so." (h/t to one of my WoW guildies, from whom that line was shamelessly appropriated). Admittedly, the benchmark figures cited (Futuremark and, the not-precisely-cutting-edge 3Dmark06) are a little bit cherry-picked (they're anything but apples-to-apples). Light snark aside, there's certainly no shortage of interest in having a potent but portable rig, especially if your budget dictates that you're going to have to choose either a desktop, or a desktop replacement.

We all love upgrades -- whether it's just an additional stick of memory, a new sound card, or a whole new rig -- but there's the small matter of what to do with the upgraded-from stuff. At some point, all your tech-averse family members will have systems built out of your cast-off components, and want something a tad more potent than a P3 800. At the same time, your significant other, who has caught onto the fact that fragging you is an excellent way of relieving stress, will demand to be on equal technical footing.

You are, in short, eventually going to be stuck with some dead tech. Or, as a reader of this column, something more akin to a moderately-sized drift of it. The laws of physics being what they are, and lacking a handy TARDIS in most of our spare bedrooms, we will eventually need to do something about it.

There is a tremendous amount of discussion as far as what to do when your PC reaches end-of-life (and, truly, this has hit close to home for BI, as the three-year old Dell at his day job gave him the electronic middle finger, and summarily refused to boot this week, earning much-needed retirement, and subsequent replacement with a shinier, faster, and far less recalcitrant black obelisk).

But what should you do with that dead tech? Googling "old computers never die" yields more than six million results.

So, the curtain is finally up on the Phenom II, and folks seem to be pleasantly surprised by what the green arrow group have pulled out of their collective hats, especially with the Black Edition X3 (model 720), which is aimed solidly at our enthusiast-flavored selves. The BE is the unlocked version, which means we can tinker with both the multiplier and the FSB to find the sweetest spot to hang our performance hats, and is a welcomed throwback to the old days when both chip manufacturers didn't try to dictate what their consumers did with our toys.

Fogey Check: Anyone else remember the pencil trick? Anyone ever do it? BI lacked the deft and delicate touch to succeed in his attempts, but it wasn't for lack of trying. Just another failed DEX check....

Coming soon will be the first installment of Ironed Out, our hands-on hardware review series. We'll be checking out the MiMo UM-710 and UM-740, a USB-driven LCD monitor. Intended as a secondary display (to park IM clients while gaming, or Photoshop palettes while doing full-screen image work, and whatever other stuff that comes to mind), it's a seven-inch, 800x480 chunk of real estate you can park pretty much anywhere the cable will reach. Both models offer portrait and landscape layout, depending on your space and display predilections.

One of the biggest and most interesting selling points for it is the USB-only interface, which means that folks already using multi-display setups can integrate one with their desktop, and people who only have a single DVI or VGA output can do likewise. It's advertized as a three-step, five-minute install, compatible with OSX and both 32 and 64 bit flavors of Windows.