Okay, so I'm thinking of getting an Alienware Alpha to cover most of my gaming needs (since they're fairly modest really), and it does seem to be getting favourable reviews in general. The main complaint however is with the speed of the hard-drive, as even the higher end models have 5,400rpm drives in them, just with a larger capacity.
This has helped me to decide I'll just get the entry level model, as the RAM upgrade should be easy to do myself (as I believe the entry level model only has one stick of 4gb of RAM, so it's just a case of installing a matching one to push for 8gb which should be plenty I think).
However, this leaves the hard-drive; of course I don't know yet whether it will be too slow for my needs (some games will be more sensitive than others), but I want to investigate it now as it will affect the total cost of the system compared to other options out there.
What I'm wondering though is, considering it takes a 2.5" SATA drive, is it better to get one of the few 7,200rpm alternatives out there, or to get an SSHD (hybrid HDD with NAND caching)? Unfortunately a pure SSD isn't an option as I'd still need reasonable capacity, and a 500gb SSD costs nearly half the system itself.
This is with a view to gaming specifically; I know that SSHDs can be great for media centres etc. because the OS will get cached the most so makes a big difference on boot-times, but once it's up and running with the SSHD make much difference to games, or will it just be like having a 5,400rpm drive anyway?
This has helped me to decide I'll just get the entry level model, as the RAM upgrade should be easy to do myself (as I believe the entry level model only has one stick of 4gb of RAM, so it's just a case of installing a matching one to push for 8gb which should be plenty I think).
However, this leaves the hard-drive; of course I don't know yet whether it will be too slow for my needs (some games will be more sensitive than others), but I want to investigate it now as it will affect the total cost of the system compared to other options out there.
What I'm wondering though is, considering it takes a 2.5" SATA drive, is it better to get one of the few 7,200rpm alternatives out there, or to get an SSHD (hybrid HDD with NAND caching)? Unfortunately a pure SSD isn't an option as I'd still need reasonable capacity, and a 500gb SSD costs nearly half the system itself.
This is with a view to gaming specifically; I know that SSHDs can be great for media centres etc. because the OS will get cached the most so makes a big difference on boot-times, but once it's up and running with the SSHD make much difference to games, or will it just be like having a 5,400rpm drive anyway?
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