If you really sit down and think about it, do you NEED rent money, a car, and food? Would you even miss those things if you had the new Alienware Area-51 ALX CFX (starting at $5,149)?
If you’ve got that much money to burn, you’ll get an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor that’s been overclocked to 4.0GHz and liquid cooled, 2GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory running at 1333MHz, a standard dual ATI Radeon HD 3870 Crossfire setup, 20x dual-layer DVD burner, 8-channel audio, two gigabit Ethernet ports.
Most everything can be upgraded, too. You can opt for a dual ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 setup in CrossFireX Mode, 4GB of RAM, up to 4-terabytes of storage (160GB drive standard), Blu-ray drive (read-only or read/write), and a bunch of other stuff.
Area-51 ALX CFX [Alienware.com]
If I were to be spending anything remotely close to $5,000 on a computer, I’d expect it to start with at least 8+GB of RAM instead of 2, 4TB HDD, Blu-Ray R/W, and all that bunch of other stuff you didn’t mention…because that’s just ri-damn-diculous.
Agreed. I remember maybe ten years ago, I had some money saved up to build a computer and had put one together by Alienware. It was going to take about a month to get to me (which seemed a little long) and during that time, I was able to cobble something comparable together for a lot less from a no-name company.
Alienware called me a few times throughout the process and assigned a representative to my system and all that good stuff and they were really cool about me canceling my order, so I think most of the expense for the computers goes towards marketing, customer service, and the brand’s reputation. Still pretty steep, though.