alienware is shit.they rip you off like shit for components that you can buy cheaper by half.

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Originally posted by DaMaul Well I can *highly* recommend the Ferrari 3000 series laptops. I have a 3400 and use it as my main PC. It's damn powerful. If you get sick of making music on it you can play Halflife 2 / Doom 3 etc. on it! You will need to get some kind of USB / Firewire sound card for it in order to get into any serious music making though, but that's pretty much standard for all laptops.

Thanks for the info people.

Can anyone recommend and decent/cheapish external soundcards as mostly only the internal ones get covered on the forums.
Also what would be the difference in performance on the USB to the Firewire?

Apparently USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 are roughly the same in terms of raw speed, however, overall system performance is better with firewire as for some reason firewire causes less CPU overhead. There is also a new firewire standard called firewire 800 I believe which is bound to be even better, but I don't think there's any external soundcards which currently use it.

Having said that, I use a Novation X-Station with my laptop which only uses USB 1! As far as I know USB 1 is easily fast enough to cope with a stereo audio stream.

Hope thats accurate and helpful!

Hi there,

If anyones interested, ive just decided and bought this, i went for alienware in the end..

Alienware area51m 5620DS 3.06GHz Hyperthreading laptop:

* INTEL PENTIUM 4 3.06GHZ 512K L2 CACHE 533MHZ FSB

* 1024MB RAM(512MB DDR PC2100 SO-DIMM MEMORY X2)

*ATI RADEON 9000 (128MB) RUNNING ON CATALYST 5.6 DRIVER

* NOTEBOOK 60GB 5400RPM HD

* 24X DVD CD-RW COMBO

* 5620 3.5 3-MODE FLOPPY DISK DRIVE

*NERO EXPRESS WITH NERO VISION EXPRESS SOFTWARE BUNDLE

*WIRELESS MINI-PCI 802.11 A+B MODULE

Should be with me in the next few days, im still undecided on an external sound card. Going to start having a proper look around now..

Last edited by davidjames on Jul-26-2005 at 20:41

Alienware is overpriced, but they have very, very good support. Good job avoiding Acer, that brand is utter shit.

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