re: My son bought a new graphics card for his alienware..now his computer won't boot

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holy crap the Aurora only $1100 3 years ago and it came with an i7.

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Bad comparison, though. Just because the CPU dominates the bill of materials doesn't mean it should. It would be extremely easy for me to shift around $100 in that part list to get the much-beloved hyperthreading feature, but the 6600K would still be better for his applications/games than the 2600, and ultimately the 2600 is still fine performance-wise anyway. That's one of my biggest gripes about prebuilt "gaming" PCs. Alienware knows that gaming performance scales more with a GPU, but consumers are more enamored with CPU. Separate the market...put an i7 in the <$1000 build, but pair it with a minecraft GPU. That way the cheaper PCs always look attractive, and the $2,000 cash cows always perform noticeably better.