New PC.. XPS 8300 vs Alienware

chrisgeary

chrisgeary

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I've currently got an Inspiron 545 with a core 2 duo E8400 2.8ghz processor.

My main tool is Lightroom so its pretty heavy on CPU.

I'm considering an XPS 8300 i7-2600K 3.5Ghz but saw Alienware models using the same CPU overclocked to 3.9Ghz. They are about twice the price.

Is an Alienware going to give me a noticeable boost in performance or am I better off sticking to the XPS8300? I realise the AWs are aimed at gamers (I'm not one) but wonder if any of those performance tweaks could help us photographers.

I suspect the difference is not going to be worth the money.

Another question: when I upgraded from a Dimension 8300 with a single 2.8Ghz P4 processor to my current PC, I was expecting a big boost in speed, but I didn't. I should have guessed since many apps don't take advantage of multi core processing and a single core is the same clock rate. Am I going to see a real performance boost going from the E8400 to an i7-2600K? Can you quantify what sort of difference I should expect... say for exporting 100 RAW D700 images from Lightroom?
 
re alienware - simple answer no. alienware like you say is generally aimed at gamers, photographers wont need the graphics spec they come with. that and theyre generally overpriced due to the name. you can easily clock the 2600k to 4.4GHz (with the right motherboard chipset) yourself with a couple of easy changes to bios settings.

re going from the E8400 to a 2600k - simple answer, it'll blow it away. going from a quad Q9550 to a 2600k made a very noticable improvement.
 
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Thanks for that. Seems like I was on the right track then. I've been a Dell man for years now, any other manufacturers I should consider? I've always like the Dell build quality and in more recent years the quietness.
 
Agreed with Neil - just don't buy an Alienware. My own Alienware has hardly been reliable anyway, it came out the box with parts broken.
 
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