Power to the People

Needless to say the days of vanilla flavored white box computers are over. In fact, any high end computer today worth its salt has a few core requirements. Those are a mammoth powered Power Supply with at least 450 watts—I configured mine with a 650W monster to handle my Heat Exchanger. What’s that? You want to know why there is a Heat Exchanger? Can you say “Liquid Cooling” or as Alienware calls it: AlienIce! If you look at the photo below you will notice Alienware even lets you select the color of AlienIce to match your case.



I chose Terra Green to match my Cyborg Green case. Alienware’s Liquid Cooling System works like this. It uses a high-flow, compact pump to circulate a thermally conductive liquid through a closed-loop system to remove heat from the processor and expel it to the ambient air flowing through a liquid-to-air heat exchanger. By the way, the black thing on the left is the Heat Exchanger. The four red strips on the right are my system RAM. Not just any RAM, but Patriot brand premium memory low-latency dual channel DDR PC-3200 (at 333MHz) at 512MB each for a total of 2 Gig RAM!

At the heart of my system is a stellar AMD Dual Core processor. I selected the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ because I wanted a CPU that would scale and play nicely with Microsoft’s new Windows Vista OS coming out mid 2006. The 4400+ actually draws less power than the single core AMD FX-55 processor. In fact, tests show that at full load the X2 4400+ uses 60% less power than the Intel 840 XE processor. The X2 4400+ simply hits the sweet spot in dual core processors for both value and performance. Although the current top banana is the X2 4800+, it’s hard to justify the price tag as it uses the same Toledo core and the same amount of L1 and L2 Cache as my X2 4400+ (but the 4800+ is speedier).