Here are the specs.

PROCESSOR Overclocked Intel® Core™ i7 990x Extreme Six Core Processor (3.73 GHz, 12MB Cache)
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® 7 Ultimate, 64Bit, English
COOLING OPTION Alienware® High-Performance Liquid Cooling
MEMORY 24GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz - (6x 4096MB)
GRAPHICS CARD 4GB GDDR5 AMD Radeon™ HD 6990
HARD DRIVE 1TB - SATA-II, 3Gb/s, 7,200RPM, 32MB Cache HDD
SECOND HARD DRIVE 1TB - SATA-II, 3Gb/s, 7,200RPM, 32MB Cache HDD
ENTHUSIAST ESSENTIALS USB 3.0 Controller Card
SOUND CARD Creative Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ Titanium
OPTICAL DRIVE Dual Drives: Blu-ray Disc (BD) Combo (BD-ROM; DVD/CD Burner) and DVDRW

First question is that in past I have been an Nvidia guy. How does the AMD Radeon compare to that of Nvida in the same class.

Is there anything that you guys see as missing that is raising your eyebrows?

For such a killer machine, no SSD? Also you can buy a Blu-Ray burner that does everything the Blu-Ray combo does and will burn Blu-Ray disks for less than a hundred dollars.

i still like my LG combo drive...
CD (R/RW), DVD(R/RW), HD-DVD (Read), Blu-Ray (RE/R)

Shame they are Discontinued...

What on earth are you planning to use that for?

24GB of ram is massive, I'd wind back to half of that, as you'll probably be paying exponentially more for 24gb than 12.

As for the card, a $700 video card seems pretty steep, give you can get an AMD 6970 for less than half of that. The 6970 will still deliver amazing performance in today's games, especially if your using less that 3 monitors.

I switched from Nvidia to AMD when I built this rig, and generally things seem fine. As of late, their drivers have been launched with more bugs than I'm comfortable with though.


As said above, the Hard drive is the weak point of that rig. Almost laughably so. I'd take the money saved on RAM and put it toward a a solid state drive. The effect will be drastically reduced loading times, and programs will open faster.

Finally, I'd consider building a rig through Digital Storm (http://www.digitalstormonline.com/). With Ailenware, your probably paying a hefty "branding" tax, just to get their logo on the front of your tower. Digital storm has a great community reputation; if I weren't self-building, I'd use them without question.

Why would you cram all that power into a box and limit the system by using SATA 3GB/sec Storage?


Tips:

-Drop the Ram to 12GB (2x6GB)
(Running all 4 slots is not usually reccemended, especially since your dropping in a monster power sucking Dual GPU GFX Card.)

-Drop the 6990
(Get Two 6950 2GB and Run those in XFire, 2 Separate Units will cause less heat build up in one location of the system. also should be about $250 Cheaper. You wont notice the difference between clocks and shaders at that level.)

I have opened another post,

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3395832/Non_techie_looking_for_advice_.html#Post3395832

please forward infor there if you can....

thanks