Alienware is a fun company. Not only are its computers encased in some of the best-looking boxes you can buy, they perform as quickly as their outer skins imply. We took Alienware's Roswell 3200 Extreme for a spin, and it wound up in almost a dead heat with the fastest computer ever to grace these parts. It's especially built for DV editing, including the Matrox RT.X100 DV accelerator, complete with a full version of Adobe Premiere Pro. Even at a whopping $5586, the Alienware system proved itself to be a good value.
When I first opened Alienware's black shipping box here at our Midwest Test Facility, all who gathered around were in awe of the sleek beauty of its contents. The company sent us the model in what appeared to be a highly-polished, glossy black, and it reminded me of a souped-up 1955 Cadillac limousine, complete with chrome fins and shiny black paint. But then, there was more -- what's that? It's a little alien head front and center, to remind you that perhaps this machine is not exactly of this world. Who says PCs have to be plain beige? Take your pick of these monsters, which are available in crazy colors the company playfully names Space Black (the one we tested), Conspiracy Blue, Cyborg Green, Martian Red, Nova Yellow, and Plasma Purple. If that's not enough, get a special edition model in Chameleon Red-Gold for an extra $34, or for the gals, there's Venusian Pink for $19 extra. If you really feel like going all-out, opt for the AlienIce Video Cooling System, where extra fans are strategically placed inside the box, while special lighting makes the little alien face's eyes light up and the fins glow, all in your choice of eerie red, green or blue light. It's just a heckuva lot of fun, but then these computers are made for gamers, so the boxes will seem right at home at any LAN party. Even though the box is quite, uh, creatively designed, it could still fit into a digital video editing suite without too much distraction.
There are other distractions, however. With the two 3.06 Xeon processors inside and the two Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA disks spinning at 7200RPM, the thing generates plenty of heat. To cool things down are the loudest group of fans yet to grace our facility in recent years. It's too bad that such a pretty computer will probably have to be hidden away in a closet because it's so loud. We didn't test the aforementioned AlienIce cooling system, but can only hope its result is considerably more hushed than this configuration's cacophonous din. While we're talking Seagate Barracudas, the two drives turned in a respectable performance, showing us a read speed of 49MB/sec. and a write speed of 50MB/sec., not bad for single drives, but far short of Alienware's quoted 87MB/sec. Of course, we've seen much faster read and write times on RAID arrays, but then when you're editing 3.5MB/sec. DV, speeds way over 100MB/sec. would be considered by many practitioners as overkill. Click for enlargement -- things are tidy inside the Alienware computer, allowing for unrestricted airflow.
But then maybe the Alienware configuration-meisters were being a bit cagey, aware that our current king-of-the-hill BOXX dual Opteron computer (circa April, 2004) runs at just about the same speed, but then it's more expensive than the Alienware machine. Notice that the BOXX ($5728) costs about the same as this box ($5586), but then this Alienware comes with a Matrox RT.X100 and Premiere Pro, too. Take a look a the benchmark results below, and you'll see that the Alienware held its own in the After Effects benchmarks, although it was beaten by the BOXX in each one. But notice that the Alienware was only slightly outdone on each After Effects test -- by a statistically insignificant amount -- and then came back to bloody the nose of the BOXX in the CineBench tests. It wasn't out of the question to think that the Alienware machine, configured to fly through 3D games as if propelled by some weird antigravity device, could perhaps beat out the BOXX in the 3D-centric CineBench tests. These numbers are particularly interesting given the fact that the two computers were both running with the exact same NVidia Quadro FX1100 graphics card.
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