Hmm... Who's going to foot the bill if the overclocked CPU and/or RAM go poof? Their respective manufacturers certainly won't. Is Dell so confident that the cooling system is good enough?

The SUN ultra workstations have better graphics cards, more memory and are generally faster, AND cheaper!

Why buy second best?

Is it really worth the 6000 your gonna pay for it?? When in 6 months time they are gonna want you to buy this upgrade for another 500 then another for 500 because the better the machines get the better the games will get, making it a vicous cycle for the consumer who will no matter wat have to pay out more money!!

I vote bring back the DOS games : )

...that it's a Dell.

As a hobbyist modder, I'm going to say thats one of the ugliest cases I've ever seen.

But then again I've done a robin's-egg-blue-with-pokemon-decals theme to an iMac once so I should probably just STFU.

I can understand DIY overclocking, but why would anyone buy a Dell which is overclocked? I'm sure Intel's warranty has been broken.

Well, all things considered, I still prefer to build my own gaming rig. For one, I'm not into overclocking - bad enough that my US$2500 rig runs very hot despite being underclocked.

Also, I prefer tweaking the specifications to the very minute detail, and I do have very tight specifications : i.e. if the motherboard is an Asus NForce4, the video cards must be Asus Nvidia cards which do SLI. If the motherboard is made by a company that doesn't make video cards, the video card must come from a company that doesn't make motherboards. And again both must have matching chipsets (i.e. NForce to GeForce, Radeon Express to Radeon). And oh, I personally inspect the devices for green and gold capacitors before buying. Bad experiences with capacitors of those colors exploding.

And oh, lastly, I'm an AMD fanboy. I avoid using Intel chips when it comes to building high-performance systems (lack of 3DNow = bad).

An Apple Mac Pro with:

2x 3GHz Dual core Xeons (Woodcrest)

500Gb SATA HD (same spec as Dell)

2Gb RAM (667MHz)

23" Apple LCD monitor

16x Superdrive (16x double layer DVD burner)

2x Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT 256Mb

Mac OS 10.4 "Tiger"

for US$4774.

Add: 2x 3GHz Quad Core Xeons (Cloverdale) +US$699 (Total:US$5473)

or replace 7300GT with: Nvidia Quadro FX 4700 512Mb +US$1500 (Total: US$6274)

Sure, they may be small performance hitches but, it'd be more reliable than ANY overclocked machine (done by the factory or otherwise).

With the base specs, you still have change to buy Vista Home Premium (or XP Media Centre) and the Blu-Ray drive.

It's not all that far off Apple's offerings. It looks like you're paying extra for the "factory overclocking". Ho hum....

So we've been waiting for this since Dell purchased Alienware over a year ago. No real surprises, with the possible exception of the ugly case, which not even 'boy racer' lights can redeem. Probably good airflow though. /shrug Still, if it bothers you for a similar price you can still pick up a machine directly from Alienware or one of the other dedicated gamer resellers.

As to some of the above comments:

- The point of buying a pre-overclocked machine (and paying the premium for it) is that the manufacturer warranty still applies. D'oh!

- With watercooling that overclock is by no means extreme, but still impressive. It will probably also be fairly quiet.

- And yes SUN workstations would provide much better performance. For applications that run on Solaris. This is squarely aimed at the 'gamers with a day job' market, who can (a) afford the convinience of not building and overclocking rigs themselves and (b) want a simple solution to play Counter Strike, or WoW or Everquest 2 (my drug of choice) or whatever.

Just my 2cp. ;)

Where can you find a 500GB 10K rpm drive?

667mhz close to 1066MHz?

2x Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT 256Mb is close to 2 8800 GTX w/768MB?

I have an overlocked Intel Celeron 366 running at 466 that's been running XP since the day it was purchased. Overclocked doesn't always mean unreliable or unstable, if done right.