Case Study: Club Alienware

Renowned Miami disc jockey Greg Chin, a.k.a. Stryke, kicked off an extensive European tour, taking his unique brand of dance music to clubs in several cities across the continent throughout February and March 2005. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Stryke began his music career at an early age - he began playing classical piano at the age of four. When he was 10, Stryke moved to Miami - he resides in the city still today - where he became heavily involved in early electronic pop. His love for Beethoven and Chopin was quickly joined by his new love for Depeche Mode and New Order.

The Problem: Getting a club and a recording studio into a 17-inch box

Today, Stryke is considered to be one of the top DJs, and his globetrotting schedule and growing legions of fans are proof positive of his ability to command dance floors worldwide. In addition, Stryke has had Billboard chart success with his Ad Finem project and has collaborated with artists such as Christian Smith, MURK and John Beltran, with releases on labels such as Ovum, Circle, Monoid, Hooj Choons, Guidance, Platform and Twisted.

As a rising producer, DJ and singer, Stryke travels all over the United States and Europe. When he started traveling more, he realized that he needed to have the power of desktop in a rugged and portable notebook that he could take on the road. The notebook would need to be able to support three turntables, live effects processing and several hard drive-gobbling applications like Native Instruments Traktor and M-Audio’s Torq. Moreover, since traveling and performing takes so much time, Stryke was looking for a system that would shave some time off of the lengthy editing and mastering process. And it wouldn’t hurt if he could play his games on it too.

The Solution: Alienware lets you get your freak on

Stryke knew he’d need a high-performance PC in order to support the turntables, programs and sound quality. So the producer/DJ chose the Alienware MJ-12 m7700 mobile workstation. With the power of the Intel 3.4 Pent IV processor the MJ-12 m7700 enabled a desktop-class performance everywhere Stryke happened to be spinning. The workstation also came with 2 gigs of RAM and a 100 Gigabyte RAID hard drive, providing Stryke with the processing power, RAM and hard drive space he needed to create his music.

The Results: There’s a party in my PC, and you’re invited

The Alienware MJ-12 m7700 has enabled the burgeoning artist to take his music to the next level by allowing the DJ to explore new creative ideas with the digital technology. The processing power has also significantly reduced post-production work. Special editing can take days on an older tape machine. With the Alienware workstation, Stryke can finish the work in minutes, giving him the time to work on new music and continue creating.

“Computers are the heart of both my recording studio and my DJ setup,” Stryke said. “This machine has been an absolute dream to work with, and let me tell you, I’m putting it through its paces. On the road, I’m running Final scratch 2 while I am DJing on my MJ-12 m7700 on stage, and I’m hammering it with a lot of other work - extremely low latency, high-quality audio output, full-screen visuals, the works - and the CPU meter doesn’t even budge. This machine just laughs at me, whatever I throw at it. It’s been great to see fans at the shows ask me more about my Alienware machine than anything else. It’s a beautiful machine, and I've even been using it in the recording studio. Already two audio engineers that saw what it can do are thinking of switching from Mac to Alienware in the studio.

“In my recording studio at home, a great deal of processing power, RAM and hard drive space is needed to run my main hard disk/sequencing program. I’ve fallen so in love with the performance of the workstation on the road, that I’ll be replacing my current studio computer with a dual-processor Alienware MJ-12 7750 desktop when I get home.”