The Alien dream of every Techie

Hardware, that single thing every techie could likely go on for hours about. Being myself, I’m a tad out of date as usual, but I did get to have a neat experience that nearly tipped my inner nerd over the edge.

I took a trip with my class to a local college, into a course called “Game Engine Development.” We were using UDK, the Unreal Development Kit for the entire day. Now at home, I had tried this before, on my computer, which is:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 @ 2.5 GHz
• 4GB DDR2 RAM
• nVidia GT 220 (1GB)
• Plain old stock coolers

We walked down an empty hall, to a plain white down. Entered a room, unlit. Then with the flick of a light switch, my mind was blown. A room, filled with monitors. Nice Dell ones, 23 inch at my guess. At first I thought we might be a little squished together, the monitors seemed close. But nope, it was dual monitors. Being stuck with just a 20 inch single monitor at home, I was instantly enthralled. I sat down at a chair, and looked around, seeing where my computer was. Under the desk, what I had originally thought was a cooler, was actually an Alienware Computer. The Area 51.

Now this is likely where most of you say “Wait, Alienware? Overpriced and overrated, get off my blog!” But hear me out; this was a great moment for me. Powering it up, it was silent. We often like to say silent, but really there’s still that fan noise. With some liquid cooling, and a 50 pound case, I wasn’t hearing much from this monster.

Once we got on, I instantly popped open the specs, wanting to see just how monster this thing was. Remember my hardware at home? The moment I took one look, I was done. This was a monster, like none I’d ever seen.

• (2) Intel Core-i7 960 @ 3.2 GHz
• (2) ATI Radeon HD 5970 4GB RAM
• 12GB Triple Channel DDR3 RAM
• Liquid cooling
• Ventilation control

If you don’t know what the ventilation control on the Area 51’s are, it’s quite impressive. Getting a bit too hot inside? Vents on top open like gills, letting the air out, then close up again. I fired up UDK and spent a good 8 hours on it, not hearing it once.

Returning home to my old machine wasn’t quite the same. But getting to use hardware like that; priceless. No pun intended.