To really give our Alien a workout, we had to go beyond what our comparison system could ever handle: run every CS2 Adobe Production Suite program with CPU-intensive operations at once.

We started each program that would routinely require render processes cooking in the background with lengthy files. This included Premiere Pro, Encore, After Effects and Audition. We wrote a quick Photoshop action that applied nine complex filters to four 24MB stills and had Bridge convert 100 RAW stills to DNG via FireWire to an external drive. While these processed in the background, we alternated using Illustrator and ImageReady files to gauge system responsiveness.

The results were impressive, not only because it worked without a hiccup, but also we still could work with files in our two non-rendering programs. Yes, we experienced reduced responsiveness, but we could still get some real work done. All eight cores ran nearly equally, and the overall load never exceeded 91 percent. In fact, had there been more than 2GB of RAM and another hard drive, we may not have experienced any slowdown.

We were pretty sure that, given the above performance, the 8550 would have no trouble handling HDV editing, but we checked anyway. We were right. After importing a few HDV clips, we could tell no difference in system performance between editing SD and HD.

Finally, one of the best aspects of owning any Alienware system is having 24/7 tech support. To check, we called it up. Zipping through a short phone tree, we talked to a real person in just a little more than a minute.

There are plenty of other features we haven't looked into, like built-in RAID, networking and server capacities, but we wanted to play with the tools we thought you'd most likely be using.

So, is it fast enough...or too fast?

OS: Microsoft Windows XP Pro
CPUs: 2 quad-core 2.66 Xeon X5355s with 8MB L2 cache (8 cores)
Chipset: Intel 5000X
RAM: 2GB (eight fully-buffered 533/667MHz DIMM slots, for up 32GB total)
Hard Drives: (1) 250GB Barracuda 7200RPM SATA, (2) Fujitsu 147GB MAX3073RC 15k RPM SAS
Optical Drives: Lightscribe 48xCD/16xDVD writer
Video: NVIDIA Quadro FX 560 with 128MB
Multiple Monitor Connections: Yes
Audio: Creative SB X-fi
Motherboard: Intel S5000XVN
Motherboard I/O: 1 x PCI Express x16, 2 x PCI Express x4 (x8 connectors), 1 x PCI-X 100/133MHz, 1 x PCI-X 100MHz, 6 x SATA 3GB/s ports (optional 4-port SAS)

• Excellent capacity to run multiple processes without bogging down

• Hard drives a little noisy when accessed

A high-performance workstation that easily handles the demands of working professionals and serious enthusiasts moving into the world of high definition.

Contributing editor Brian Peterson is a video production consultant, trainer and lecturer.

Alienware Corporation
14591 SW 120th St.
Miami, FL 33186
www.alienware.com
$6,732