Crazy Bad $5000 Alienware Gaming PC: R13 Aurora Tear-Down

my god we're back with another alienware pre-built gaming pc to review this one we spent five thousand dollars on it hurt to do so if you're wondering what five thousand dollars gets you in a prebuilt gaming pc it's not custom water cooling at least not in this one it's an i9 12 900 kf and an rtx 30 90. also 64 gigabytes of ddr5 4400 memory so that's good anyway uh we also paid an extra 30 to get the lunar light version of the chassis alienware made a bunch of fanfare a couple months ago about how it had improved its design and issued a new version of the alienware aurora series cases and builds and that's what this is supposed to be so we're going to give them another chance we're going to look at this uh quick spoiler our intent was to do one combined review with all the benchmarking and the teardown in one video like we normally do but there was a lot going on here so it's two videos it's not for a good reason this video is brought to you by us we bought this five thousand dollar trash heap with our own money so that we could provide you with a real consumer review and experience for two days only you can use code failureware to get 10 off anything on the gn store this directly supports our ability to buy products for review and also gets you a great deal on high quality products like our heat resistant durable volt mod mats for pc building the mod mats are almost out of stock again so if you want one order asap these include pc wiring diagrams screw tracking grids they're great for use with heat guns and tube bending and more we also have our 3d coaster packs in stock and shipping now and they've been flying off the shelves this is a unique item that you can use every day and it includes pc components on it for some creative flair for the hobby head over to store.gamersaccess.net to support our work and hopefully we'll find a good computer to review one day so part one here is going to be focusing on the completely vexing mechanics of trying to repurpose what appears to be functionally a 1990s case into modern parts with a 12 900 kf which pulls upwards of 240 watts uh and a 30 90 which is also very power hungry cramming all that into this small box with a 120 millimeter closed loop liquid cooler that's mounted to a chassis that's built for 80 millimeter fans we're gonna get to all of that we also will have a part two though and that one's going to talk about the benchmarks and the thermal performance because um it deserves its own video uh separately in the second video we're going to be talking about how dell is back to its slimy tactics if you're lucky you might even get a computer with the warranty that they force upon you at checkout yes that program is back 9.99 a month included by defaults but not for the first month that way you don't notice the charge on your card and it just starts pinning you forever after that for the cost we spent about forty six forty seven hundred dollars on this before taxes and other small fees ended up being about five thousand dollars u.s for the entire build it's the most expensive pre-built we have ever purchased so please help us out by visiting store.camerasnexus.net seriously if you want us to continue reviewing pre-builts of any value at this point because this one was expensive okay let's get started with the tear down and see how it does as a reminder this is how this works i buy it anonymously patrick does the whole review process before we ever open it and this is actually my first time really looking at it i haven't looked into the panel until now we do this so that you can see the real reaction that i have to it and we can all experience this atrocity together so when i looked in here as i said 30 90 i was like oh this is gonna be bad this is gonna be this is gonna be real bad a nice uh maybe five millimeters for the 30-90 to breathe through so that'll be fun to look at externally a couple things to look at so really nice attention to detail here where alienware you might be able to tell alienware has wrapped its plastic with plastic so the plastic protects the 30 year old metal chassis that's underneath it we wouldn't want that to change by accident or intentionally and then the plastic protects the plastic that protects the three year old chassis underneath it so good that's good the back of this thing check this out i really like this feature this is the first thing i noticed right before we started filming see that that set of holes for a fan to be mounted on the back where you can see the four holes for a fan you can see the slight mesh for it to breathe and what i really like is that the radiator here has a custom mount to socket into the back of the chassis because dell couldn't be bothered to retool its ancient already piece of chassis to fit anything look at this what is an 80 mil fan hole spacing yes that's for an 80 mil so because dell couldn't be bothered to update its chassis to fit beyond an 80 millimeter fan and because they had to put a 120 ml clc in there uh or at least some kind of better cooling because it's a 12th gen cpu inside of a completely choked off box that basically represents a furnace dell then put itself in a position where i had to custom make the world's most contrived imbecilic mount for a radiator that i've ever seen because there's nothing else i could do other than make a quality product but that costs money so not gonna do that and then on the front this is the new part are you ready so here's the new part uh the difference between this one and the old one is that this is the high airflow design can you tell where the airflow is i'm glad we have this camera out today because we're gonna need a real tight zoom to show it the airflow is over here and there's a little bit of airflow here sorry a lot of airflow here there's nowhere for anything to breathe and they're all really hot parts and dell is so shoved in the sand or up its own ass i'm not sure which it's head is somewhere that it thinks that a 120 ml clc is enough to correct for what is ultimately uh an an outdated outmoded design instead of just like putting it there are other cases they could just rebrand one so this is it just it actually pisses me off here's the cooler looks to me like an ace attack solution we'll look closer in a second i hesitate a little bit on that but uh very short tube so it's a custom cooler in a sense it's a joke that this is thought of as anything good because so 120 ml clcs are bad the we've reviewed these in the past liquid coolers are exceptionally good at the high end you can't get the same level of performance out of an air cooler even if it's a really good air cooler we have charts for this in our cpu cooler reviews maybe we'll put one on the screen but your liquid coolers have a place they're very competitive you can get better noise levels for a given temperature than an air cooler but 120 that doesn't happen 120 is just not enough to to deal with it and you're still dealing with all the noise you're dealing with weird fitment so anyway i'm not too happy about that so it's about 14 or so millimeters of space right there so that's not great for the gpu and the gpu is air cooled it's one fan two fan video card that card if it's the same dell 30 90 as we saw before is actually not completely terrible but um it's not going to do well where they've shoved it so that's not great do you hear the noise well something's pre-broken that wasn't my fault so we got a piece of the um plastic clips came off you know there's a solution to this don't make the entire case out of plastic no more breaking plastic clips i like the rf and emi shield as if that's gonna save this oh also i didn't mention this earlier this was new this was like a big deal in their marketing they're like it has a sick window you can see stuff through um i had a case with a window here's the back side i had a case of the window that looked exactly like this in 2004 in the original antec lan boy i don't know if it's called the air or not it's the original land boy though uh acrylic window bolted to metal it's like the oldest way to do it there's standard parts just use them the board is black though they painted the pcb this time okay i need to start actually taking this apart so a couple things there's an abc fan on the front looks like a 120 mil and that is just doing a front to back airflow path two sticks of green ram in the black pcb so we haven't improved our attention to detail that much of red alienware uh for five grand this is something i actually care about normally normally we don't but this is a lot of money the bottom here the instructions say warning light bar is not a handle it's talking about the sure acts like a handle power supply disassembly is explained here in many pictures that are progressively smaller there's actually another fan down here with this big plastic vent that's supposed to direct the air straight over the video card the only reason you would need that much velocity that high of an lpm for the air is because the car is so smashed up against the power splash shroud that it can't breathe without it being force-fed down into the card i'm a little overwhelmed on how to disassemble this okay time to figure out how to unbuild a computer because dell can't do it the way everyone else does we are going to be working on our modmat so this is the pc building anti-static modmat that you can grab on store.camerasnexus.net highly ruggedized material it is heat resistant for things like tube bending and also has a lot of very useful and convenient wiring diagrams memory module layouts things like that okay and that also directly funds us buying more of these types of things oh wow why is there there's so much mechanical in this it's like just a bunch of parlor tricks i feel like um stuff that doesn't need to exist anyway that's the gpu bracket let's be fair if it's sagged it's not like it has very far to sag so okay all right video cards coming out oh no it's not just kidding there's more gpu support over here this that thing right there that's gp support also what is this this is i feel like i'm solving a puzzle and uh like an indiana jones movie except the prize is not something i want oh okay look at that like all this stuff this is it's so much mechanical engineering that doesn't need to be done that doesn't make it better so now this is free so this thing is screwed into the video card but was not actually screwed into this it was just seated in it which is fine i suppose um that is a lot of gpu support that doesn't need to be there one of those would have been more than enough okay there's the video card uh dell green pcb that's fine honestly i think we've tested this card yeah there's actually a heat pipe in the back plate right here so it's got memory on the back side right there this doesn't cover the whole module but it's not bad there's a heat pipe in here and this is a card we've already benchmarked and looked at actually if it is the same as the other one we looked at not terrible so there is that it's it's um one of the few things that is not like engineered into back in a circle back into being a useless part it's actually another fan i hadn't noticed before there it is so multiple different types of fans here you can see the tachometer sticker where this tells me either it didn't have attack readout or patrick didn't trust it uh either one is telling when he was testing it he's added attack readout and then we've got this fan with also a different blade count and design on the back so the motherboard you can see extends out to the front panel io that's out there somewhere so that's where our front i o comes from it's going to be these right here instead of coming from a daughter board on the case or attach the frame it comes off the motherboard which we've already talked about in dial computers as being a proprietary way to design obsolescence into your computers so that nobody can ever replace it with a normal part at least not if they want all the functionality and you can't really take this board out of this case and put it into any other normal case or any competing manufacturer's case because it is specially designed by dell so it achieves the maximum value i guess of being unusable anywhere else so they can extract more money from you when you need to just buy another computer later this is not standard it looks like this is another instance of probably dell has repurposed a server power supply i'm guessing the power supply is actually pretty good last time we looked at it dell power supply was despite despite its looks it was a pretty good power supply it came from serverland though that's why anyway this is a non-standard uh layout on the motherboard for power and non-standard connections really short cables too you're not really going to be able to use these anywhere else not quite atx 12vo even though it looks like it so it's a 10 pin uh but this is not an atx 12vo power supply so that's how it mounts there's one screw that goes in and then it sockets uh man you know everywhere i look though on this computer i'm seeing bloat just bloated uh construction costs loaded design bloated engineering costs uploaded hours of work because you're doing all this to do something that in every other computer on earth four screws can do and you still have to put four screws in by the way so it's not bypassing the existing problem it's just making a new problem fit onto an old problem which is the 80 ml mounting although i do kind of wonder if they could have just put the i guess they would have had to retool the chassis a little bit to fit it so anyway that's silly for power we've got a standard four pin uh pwm fan header we have a non-standard seven pin thing pump fan one so that was plugged into fan underscore pump and then that has its own seven pin header too no wait that's more than seven pins what is that look at this why is there a spring up there oh that's for the uh side panel all of this wow man look at that that's all for the side panel there's so many ways to do that that don't involve all of this i'd be impressed if what a terrible computer this would be to have to build multiple of every day i feel bad for the team on the assembly line this is awful this is like this skill doesn't transfer to any other company i know how to build alienware computers although to be fair if you can build this you could probably build anything because they've actually made it a lot more complicated oh all right nice perfect so we've done the two worst possible things so dell didn't want to put a separate board in this panel and have wires running into the case so they put all the usb and front panel stuff on the motherboard and ran it through the front panel and then they still ran a wire to the front panel anyway for leds good let's get this nope that's not a handle 4 8 16 good old good old 20-pin led cable look at this vrm what a joke it's a 12-900 kf it's a k-sku and this is our vrm heatsink if the vrm is small enough to fit under this like do you have problems or you will at some point unless these are running at a really high rpm which we'll talk about later guess there's a top fan that's honestly that's probably why that fan is there it's probably largely to pull air across the vrm this this is the one i'm okay with all right that that's not bad i like that mechanical design that's very simple and it's not pointless like you really it's kind of hard to get a screwdriver in there so that one i'm okay with do we have a load load-bearing cpu cooler i think we do can't forget to take the front panel i o thin off this this is so mechanically complex this is crazy what a horrendous waste of money is that why that moves for this like okay the cb cooler is load bearing just to answer that question from earlier so the cooler mounts into the chassis there's the back of the board there's a nice touch here too look at all this look at all that flux and just run off from the smt lines there i am oh that's not a handle look at that that motherboard shape what i was talking about earlier with the front i o attached to the board yeah it's not shocking at this point we've done this we've looked at this it's just just feels bad when it's on a computer this expensive this like this for five grand this is your motherboard this is what you get like what is this six layers maybe eight you can hear the quality in the same way that you can hear the quality in a 1990s mcdonald's happy meal toy can you hear the ronald mcdonald in the motherboard i shouldn't unscrew this without supporting it it's kind of like digging straight down in minecraft but it's just not useful anywhere outside of this computer okay oh my gosh this is exhausting so this is 80 plus platinum as stated before well claimed 80 plus platinum i don't suspect that would be fudging numbers there though they seem very unlikely to do that uh see 12 volts 27 amps on 12 volts oh no okay so for 12 volt 12 volt a can do 36 amps 12 volt b can do 27 12 he can do 36 amps so hopefully they've split those for the gpu and the cpu for the higher ones can we get let's start over here this this is my graveyard of unnecessary bits and pieces for the case also the motherboard and then this this is the coffin that they were in and this is some more unnecessary parts and some fans so concluding just the tear down then hopefully you can see now why we decided to just run this as its own video because normally we cut tear downs down to about 10 minutes there was so much going on with this case every screw i pulled out revealed another really abnormal thing that they did and the oddest part of this is it is actually pretty good engineering it's just applied in a really stupid way so it's it's engineering for the sake of trying to circumvent designing a proper computer which is sad because you're taking engineers who clearly have some skill at least mechanically the people who did all the trying to figure out how to get brackets to fit things where there aren't screw holes because the chassis is freaking ancient and it won't fit anything modern uh you're taking these engineers and telling them to fix a problem that could be fixed by just making a new chassis and it's not that hard much smaller companies than dell do this they don't even have to make it they can just oem it from someone else slap their logo on it it's not like dell is a foreigner to this concept and call it a day and it'd be better dell just while we're talking here even ignoring the fact that for a consumer this is a terrible product and you're doing them a disservice and you should feel bad for that let's just pretend none of that matters and all that matters is money this is really expensive to make this case is unbelievably expensive it's asinine the approach that was taken to get all this to fit together cram all these springs in there try to make it work within a form factor that was clearly not built to support a cpu that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 240 watts it's throttling by the way we'll get to that in the next video and a gpu which is also dropping clocks because it's a 3090 crammed into this piece of case if your solution is we need liquid cooling make a case that fits it to me the the reason i'm i'm actually kind of upset with this one is because it's just insulting it's sad first of all that people who don't know a lot about gaming pcs especially people who are prone to take the approach of if i just spend more money then i won't have any headaches to deal with and everything will be fine now these people are getting basically scammed and conned out of their money for something that's trash you can get a way better computer from other system integrators or even other oems like probably hp we'll be looking at one of well we'll be looking at one of their soon maybe wait on buying those for a minute so the engineering here it's it's only brilliant in the same way that brian from bps customs and i cutting a metal side panel apart to create a fixture to mount a reservoir to a 180 millimeter radiator is brilliant it's brilliant in the same way which is to say it's sort of [Music] scrappy it's sort of scrappy it's innovative uh but not for any good reasons that's it not today in the work brian and i did it's very good cut brian anyway this is it's just crazy so just honestly dell and alienware have completely overlooked the basics this to me screams executives were shown this project uh someone said how do we not do new tooling for a case tooling's expensive and someone else said well we can engineer around that and they did and they showed all the individual pieces to executives who said this is amazing you're so smart let's do it and no one stopped to think or ask the extremely basic question which is what makes a good computer dell that's that's all you have to ask yourselves when you're planning these it's what makes a good high-end computer what makes a good chassis not how do we take our existing stuff and drag it along until it's decrepit and falling apart and we have to bolt things onto it to make it continue to function that's not the right approach anyway enough of that one for now uh check back make sure you subscribe to catch the review with the benchmarks and the thermals it's bad but it'll be entertaining at least and hopefully a lesson for dell uh well it's competitors to learn from but anyway that's it for this one thanks for watching as always you can go to store.gamersaccess.net if you would like to support us in our efforts to continue buying computers of different well any price point at this point because this sort of blew out the budget or patreon.com gamersnexus for bonus videos thanks for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 983,743

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, alienware, alienware r13 review, alienware r13 benchmarks, alienware r13 tear-down, alienware r13 worth it, aliewnare r13 vs r10, alienware r13 rtx 3090, alienware r13 test, alienware 2022

Id: DY1dlVPzUVo

Length: 26min 48sec (1608 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 24 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/UGMadness]

Holy shit that's a lot of plastic enveloping that early 2000s OEM steel chassis.

[u/DJ_Marxman]

I'd love to hear the story of why Dell MacGyvers this ancient case with so much custom engineering instead of just, y'know, rebranding a good case with an Alienware logo.

Like they must be spending $30+ per case just on custom brackets, clips, springs, etc. It's such an odd approach.

[u/Mannekino]

When you delid your CPU and more comes off

[u/7GreenOrbs]

It's almost as if Dell went like "last year we put some lipstick on a pig but you complained it is still a pig but this year we added a ball gown, diamond ring, and tiara so it's a princess now right?"

[u/Stalked_Like_Corn]

What I didn't see mentioned here or in the video is that, the top fan is partially blocked by the back fan. So it's an 80mm fan with like 20% of the fan blocked. Also, if the bottom front fan is pushing air across the 3090, where the fuck is that air going? There needs to be an exhaust and there's no fan below the 3090 that I saw unless there is an intake to the PSU at the bottom and the point of the intake fan of the PSU is to not bring in hot air. This is the stupidest case design that I've seen in a long long time.

[u/gAt0]

20:50 "Can you hear the Ronald McDonald in the motherboard?" — Steve Burke

[u/evDev84]

He did an excellent job with the tear down actually. It's obvious to me that Dell has overcomplicated their build so that they can increase the price and exploit the ignorance of those who think spending more gets more. The very fact that the CPU and the GPU both have to throttle themselves because of the heat is just utterly insane.

[u/danny_b87]

Oof this is giving me flashbacks to being a young dumb college kid and blowing most of my high school savings on a $6,000 Alienware :-/.

It did serve as a heater for my dorm room in the winter though so theres that....

edit: specs from an old comment for those curious

[u/mabhatter]

Did he pull a 3.5" HARD DRIVE out of a $4600 computer?