"Fixing" the Alienware R13 Dumpster Fire

[Music] okay today we're gonna take the trash out of the trash and try to i should not be holding this this way although it's not worth anything we're gonna try and save this alienware r13 computer that we recently reviewed we said it was the worst pre-built gaming pc we've ever worked on uh and actually it got even worse after we filmed that video and we started inspecting it further for how can we save this computer is there a way we can lightly modify this and make it better we found out it gets worse so uh our goal today is going to be changing as few things as possible and pretending we're dell so we want to maintain this aesthetic such that it exists because that's alienware's brand but at least to make it cool properly and run at the right power limit let's get started before that this video is brought to you by be quiet and the silent base 802 case the silent base 802 got high accolades in our review for its high build quality and its versatility in both size focused and airflow focused built the 802 comes with swappable mesh panels or noise damped panels so you have options for either approach the silent base 802 case is able to fit larger builds as well without being overbearing and it stands out for its mechanics quality and assembly quality learn more about be quiet's new case at the link in the description below so this was a highly requested content piece from our patreon backers the patreon discord and also in the comment section where people were saying that was a pleasant sound people were saying is there a way you can save this computer and the problem with it very quick recap is everything but the the smaller piece is that the 12 900 kf equals the 12 700 kf and that's because dell has put exhibit cooler in it exhibit c right here very small coil 120 ml short tubes and it's a high power cpu that they're dropping from 240 watts down to 160 watts so you lose a lot of the performance that's the key problem there are other issues with this i'm not gonna go through it all again today like proprietary uh motherboard power supply everything else but what we're gonna try and do is set some some rules i have to make this a fun challenge so the rule here is going to be it has to be as close to dell's original vision such that it exists as possible and we think that if we pretend we're part of dell's design team here uh probably they're saying no the look has to stay that's the alienware look it needs to look like this so we're not going to change the case the the easy answer to can you save this is yes you buy a new motherboard in the case and then you build a computer that doesn't really count though it's not as fun so we're going to see what we can do with as few mods as possible and then we're going to get a little more creative as we go through it and add some more modifications to it from the perspective of the cooler i think my options are going to be the best would be put a 240 in here i'm trying to do as few changes as possible so that if someone is misfortunate enough to have bought this this is maybe a path they can take to get it up and running without investing too much in it so 240 maybe if it can fit would be the quickest fix another option i thought this would be really fun is a tower cooler here with this as intake and this is intake and these as exhaust so the reason for doing it that way would be that the cooler would have immediate access to cool external room ambient temperature air right here and right here unfortunately the top of the case is extremely blocked off here not great as intake but it's less blocked off here and here than on the front of the case and pushing all the warmed air out the front is going to be an easier lower resistance path for flow than the opposite way that they've got it now that's one option i don't think a 120 mil tower cooler is going to be enough for 12 900k to sustain 240 watts really stretching so we're going to try out the 240 first another option is maybe cutting a hole in the side panel that might be altering too much but it would give us the biggest increase in performance for the least amount of changes beyond cutting a hole in the side panel so that's an option as well our ac is broken and this is my solution to the server room it's only broken on the server room though so all the people are fine air coolers here liquid coolers some of them are here so i want a 240. i'm not gonna be too picky about it this one's pretty nice let's see i think that h100i elite is very new this is gonna be kind of an expensive solution um you're mostly just paying for the the reason it's expensive is because you can do this with the pump cap so as far as performance it's the same as a significantly cheaper one but you can't you can't make a significantly cheaper one do can we just make sure they they saw it at home this but i do think that that particular image is perfect nice for the alienware computer okay time to see what will actually fit i don't think the 120 tower is gonna be enough so the 240 is our best bet one other thing we can modify this has got like the double honeycomb mesh going on where you know it's it's plexi it's not even glass blocking airflow obviously air comes in around there and then it's this honeycomb plastic behind it maybe you can show better this way and then behind that is this metal honeycomb so you know double filtering is always a great way to block a ton of airflow and really hurt the performance so a mod maybe mike could do would be to cut a big giant hole in all this and see if it improves things so just as a reminder we have a full review on the channel already and a tear down you should definitely go check those out if you haven't because that will explain a lot of context i'm not going to explain today like the insanity of how this is all assembled so the best of my memory i'm going to disassemble this now so can we fit a 240 radiator okay this is gonna be so stupid if a 240 can fit the dells really could have no excuse like if they can do this it's just that's just ace attack they make 240s i'm a little worried about the cooler mount because the mount so those we didn't talk about this too much before that screws into the case that's special i don't know that that really is going to exist elsewhere i could get another acetate cooler that that would allow me to reuse the screws here and the standoffs i might have to do an aesthetic 240. we're going to try this though corsair has since moved on from asa tech um only for small reasons like you know lawsuits and litigation but we're not going to use ace attack with corsair that is so stupid that that's gonna fit will it fit with the video card in it's actually gonna work wow okay it'll still have gpu support too so remember it's got that's gp support helps in shipping they could also just package it with some foam around it but that's gpu support that's gpu support and this is gpu support we don't need all of them so we're gonna stick with just one i'm gonna disconnect this one i just i just like this stack of plastic plastic appendages little known fact this table lowers all the way into hell which is where it's how it stopped or it's already here time to take this back out can't forget to disconnect the standard 7-pin rgb cable i think it'll work okay cool the height's not going to be correct with this um that's unfortunate oh maybe we'll get lucky maybe we can thread these into dell's proprietary case and just happen to have it work well it's kind of hard to center it exactly but pretty close well hopefully this is making contact oh okay all right that explains that makes okay all right cool it's better this is gonna be a lot of fun nice okay there is enough clearance wow that looks pretty damn good man if we can fix this thing with just a 240 millimeter cooler dell's gonna go and implement it and be like look we fixed it and we're gonna be like no that was just like that was us trying to spend less than an hour fixing it so i hope i hope if dell is like hey we should implement that then they'll be happy i just wanted to be clear that i will not be happy i will still be upset so just the same everyone the time now i require assistance does the assistance involve any tools nope okay and by assistance i mean i don't want to do it okay it's worked out shockingly well mostly shocking because dell didn't do this i thought it can't possibly just fit right yeah it would be two separate 120 amounts and that it wouldn't did you oh okay it's even got the holes like for radiators yeah it really i was not expecting that at all it's completely upfitted for it because they didn't even attach the did they attach both of the front fans directly to the case or did they have like um they were attached no they were clipped okay with the spring so they're not even using these no okay so um i think that and this is the best this is the best cooler that is on their website so i don't know we're assuming that they reuse this for other stuff yeah i'm going to let patrick take over the cabling if we do further modifications it will become a mic job where it might be cutting holes and things but for now this is like kind of a boring solution but it also fulfills the criteria of do and spend as little as possible so if you're a real end user who bought this thing then doing a 240 might be it i'm actually i'm gonna take the power supply shroud off because i can it might be in the way [Music] this just holds the cables it looks like these plug into the power supply but you take this off and these this is just to hold loose cables these don't go into the power supply did okay um well let me put a couple screws back in so i don't lose them it looks like there is some sata power down here that we can unearth um that would be intended for drive down here i just need to decide if we're going to put this fan and rgb controller in the case now do you think there will be any normal usb headers on this board if you have a cable like this something has gone wrong great connector works works perfectly there's nowhere to put cables they all have to stay on this side of the case this is where all the cables go so that i don't have to think about them anymore i'll never bother anyone again it's not the worst cable management job in the world it's not the best but it's not the worst you've got a big exclamation point on this cooler i think it probably means that it's not plugged in via usb because it's not it also has this gigantic like i don't know it's like uh 20 24 pins something like that it's got this big cable coming off this has a usb connection coming out of it and then that goes into the hub at the other end this usb connection here is going to nothing because there are no connections on the board and then the sata connection coming out of the hub we can plug that in to power it um but there's also another usb connection coming out of the hub that we can't plug into anything because there's no usb headers all of that is very confusing and over complicated the summary is that these fans are connected to the hub for rgb but the hub has no way to be controlled because we can't connect the usb so without control it looks like these fans don't light up sometimes you'll run into rgb systems where if you're not controlling it they'll have like a default rainbow lighting pattern um corsair has defaulted just having all the leds off so potentially we could plug this into a different system and then change settings if it's safe to firmware and then plug it back in here but it's not worth it that would tempt me to just take out the hub entirely since we're mostly just using it for rgb which isn't working but we need the hub to be there because that's what the pump plugs into and is powered by which is very annoying because it means we're using this entire hub that's the size of a bar of soap and has wires coming out of it everywhere just to run a pump because corsair and because rgb and because dell they're all coming together um i think i might put this cpu fan back in the back here just to try and improve thermals a little more and prevent one of the many errors that will pop up when we try and turn this on um but i'm gonna go ahead and move this into the thermal testing room and we can get started with that in a moment so with the fix done it's time to test this thing again our goal is to turn the 12 900 kf that dell puts in here back into a 12 900 k not at 12 700 k that it's become and for this process we needed this an external power supply in addition to the internal power supply and a fan controller because alienware stock software and bios doesn't allow any fan control or even monitoring of the fans beyond the predefined thermal profiles that was the first roadblock we ran into of many this means that it's difficult to just simply drop in a new cooler and plot an improvement our compromise was to keep all the original bios and performance settings but tune the fans in our new config to roughly match the stock noise level under sustained load or about 46 db for long workloads to noise normalized like this that meant locking the front radiator fans to 1500 rpm and the remaining stock fans in the rear of the case to 1600 rpm but we had to use an external controller and that's dangling out of the back of the case because dell can't be bothered to ship a complete bios with basic ass functions like controlling the fan speed now to our credit it's not like this looks much worse so we've done okay there we used afterburner to lock the gpu fan speeds we had to do this because alienware software was incapable of doing that either and this is where we discovered a new problem which is the power supply so the power supply sufficient though it is it is actually a reasonably built power supply it comes from the server division so go figure uh it is still problematic which is that it has two tiny fans that start screaming as soon as you take away the really high flow of the bottom intake fan so without that strong positive airflow from the front of the case they're bad here take a listen so with no way to directly control those fans we were forced to ignore power supply noise as a factor as much as we could for a more permanent mod we might cut a vent for the power supply in the bottom of the case and reposition its fans but at that point we're now replacing a cooler we should probably replace the motherboard for a better bios and we'd definitely be modifying the case and if you replace the motherboard you also have to replace the power supply because this power supply has proprietary connectors that will not socket into a normal motherboard anyway let's forge ahead with what we got here's an always normalized result as plotted against an auto fan result from the original test cpu temperatures were instantly improved by the new cooler there was a chance that thermal performance at the beginning of the test pass would be worse since the stock configuration fans were free to spin up and scream at 50 dba for 56 seconds here we'll drop that in again but even during the initial 241 pl2 period the new cooler performed better with peak core temperatures of 86 degrees celsius that's down from 96. so we were nearly at tj maxx with alienware's stock configuration and the original test and now we're actually reasonable just as in the original test there's a sharp drop in cb temperature with a move to pl1 followed by a linear decrease as pl1 dropped steadily to its minimum the 240 millimeter clc at noise normalized settings ran at 70 degrees celsius steady down from our sustained 88 degree results of the stock test so that's 16 degrees cooler for doing less than an hour of work if you count patrick's rgb cabling that's like half of that anyway so dell has no excuse here we didn't have to modify the case it had the holes for 240 millimeter radiators they're just not using it this was a 5 000 computer it was the max spec we didn't choose the 120 millimeter liquid cooler that was their best one that's the crazy part so actually nothing really had to be done to just get the cpu thermals under control it's still not fixed there are a lot of problems we're going to get to in a moment but shoving a 240 cooler in the front you could buy an ace attack unbranded cooler stick the alien head on it and it'd probably be pretty cheap not much more than the 120 that asotec is already making with the custom radiator size certainly the custom tube length and it'd be it'd be halfway fixed except for the motherboard the power supply in the case but that part would be fixed on to frequency the fixed r13 plots its frequency at about 4800 megahertz during the initial boosting window holding at 4500 to 4600 through the decay period and landing at 43.50 megahertz for steady state its e core performance ran at 3 400 megahertz dead for the entire test showing a flat line thanks to thermal compliance the original system decayed much faster for frequency with a sharp fall off as we hit 96 degrees celsius in the initial window it fell to 4300 to 400 megahertz so that's consistently 200 megahertz lower during that decay window and the clock ultimately settled about 100 megahertz lower than the p cores in our updated version of testing and that's with the turbo limit still in place e core performance on the original test was far worse bouncing around erratically and unpredictably this was resolved with the cooler upgrade gpu thermals are next during the original stock test the gpu fans rose to a maximum of 69 duty cycle and for the most part it remained there for our 46 db noise normalized test we manually locked the gpu fans to that speed from the beginning however we had the powerful and loud stock intake fans in the case replaced with the radiator and fan combo it makes sense then that temperatures were slightly higher in the new configuration for the gpu leveling out at 75 degrees for the gpu instead of the original 72 degrees celsius unfortunately the proximity of the gpu to the power supply and we did remove the shroud because it was just creating obstructions means that there's not much room for us to get creative and improve the airflow fortunately however three degrees here doesn't hurt performance and the gpu was the best cooled part in the system anyway the 16 degrees of the cpu is worth a lot more than the three degrees of the gpu so all that force didn't take at the bottom of the case including the duct that directed it although yes it benefited the gpu a bit the frequencies haven't moved much on the gpu core just if you're wondering a lot of that was designed for the power supply is what we've gathered because the power supply fans they start screaming with the removal of all that guided intake so it was less gpu and more power supply with that done we could then increase the power limits to match the proper stock behavior of a 12 900 kf as soon as we tried though we ran into problems first the overclocking menu completely disappeared from bios we plugged some fans back in and it came back we unplugged the same fans again and it stayed we still don't know what specifically made the menu disappear but it encompasses almost all cpu and memory settings including xmp so losing it was a major problem dell has tied its bios menus to the fan headers which seems actually insane and reinforces that a true fix would involve a new motherboard this likely ties in with the underspec vrm they probably know it's under spec and know it'll blow up if it's not protected in bios once in the menu we found that we weren't allowed to increase power limits above 241 watts for pl2 or 210 watts for pl1 which are the original limits that the system shipped with and below intel guidelines for the 12 900 kf which is infinite turbo tau or the time limit could not be altered at all in dell's bios to be clear these settings don't technically break any intel rules they just suck they're not good and intel itself has now moved on to infinite turbo at high power limits the rest of the oc menu was irrelevant to our purposes but we couldn't help but notice that the options were pathetically threadbare with two oc profiles defined only as level one and level two with no way to work with e-cores and peak course separately we're having to rely actually on keegan's old b-roll footage from the original review because that menu has since disappeared once again we gave up the bios as a lost cause and we moved on to applications the particular piece of bloatware we started with was alienware command center the command center offers a choice of three thermal profiles with zero explanation or the option to create a mysterious custom profile with no settings maybe that's because we disconnected the stock cooler or maybe that feature was always broken we don't know cpu overclocking offers one slider each for cpu frequency voltage and voltage offset ignoring the fact that voltage isn't just a thing there are multiple voltages those are literally though the only options there's no power limit controls there's no tau which is what we needed there's no advanced controls so in order to get the child safety lock off of the bios and get the grown-up controls we had to download intel's xtu xtu allowed us to freely adjust all of the missing settings including pl1 pl2 and tau unfortunately however we found that pl1 would always drop below 210 watts under sustained load anyway regardless of what we configured so for anyone stuck with an r13 xtu is the most reasonable option for cpu tweaking it will still perform like 12700 even with thermal performance improvements at least in things that are entirely cpu bound like in chromium and blender and anything that's cpu workload you're getting a worse cpu even though you're paying for the good one and dell has made it impossible to resolve that from anything short of a motherboard replacement and just to be clear what we're doing all the stuff we're talking about it's not overclocking dell will pretend like it's overclocking and they are going to sit there and watch this video and think about how we're so unreasonable because we're enthusiasts who want to overclock it that's not what we're doing we're just trying to get it back to the expected clocks which happen to be over the clocks that dell ships with that is not however overclocking it's just increasing the clocks to stock and i know this is what they're thinking because we've worked with a lot of companies like this the fix then if we wanted to go a step further and we talked about this it would basically be to get something like a micro atx motherboard like this one this is amd though and put it in there the problem you run into is because this this is the biggest possible case they could make with the smallest possible size for a motherboard you'll probably have to use micro atx and you might have to use creative use of a dremel to get it to fit and then you're going to lose your front i o so you'll need to buy something to shove up there or if you're able to do electrical wiring on your own you can probably reroute the well no you can't because they're attached to the motherboard i for a second i forgot that uh they attached that to the board and i thought it was just a weird non-standard cable but it is in fact never mind you can't use the front io so you need a new case also if we're being reasonable here unless you really want the look of the alienware one in which case okay i guess but you have to buy something to shove up in the front for front i o so again we keep coming back to you're basically harvesting the cpu and the gpu and you're building a new computer around those if it's a steep enough discount then okay but if not you should just avoid this we've seen some of these sold on ebay sans gpu for a lot cheaper the only real value there is the cpu unless you're willing to have a severely underperforming system because of things like the motherboard and the vrm is also under spec which we think is why they're limiting this so hard because as we've seen from photos sent by our viewers in the past some of these alienware motherboards the vrm blows up with a high-end cpu in it honestly any further modification beyond all this just isn't worth the time uh we tried pretty hard to get further but even if you do manage to circumvent the firmware limits that are in place the hardware just isn't up to the task of one actual overclocking or two stock clocking apparently so and most of this is proprietary junk that can't really be rehoused or replaced in another system so that's the end of it for those of you who ask can you fix it the answer is it's too far gone the closed loop liquid cooler change helps we could brute force this and hack our way through it but you start looking at what's reasonable and once you get to a new motherboard a new power supply a new case a new cooler it is no longer reasonable and the ram is not good either so that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.gamersaccess.net and grab some of our coasters mod mats for pc building and modification like we worked on this video or tool kits to help us out directly as we buy more systems like this and try to find good ones or go to patreon.com gamerzex for bonus videos thanks for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 818,266

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, alienware r13, alienware r13 review, alienware r13 benchmarks, fixing alienware r13, alienware r13 upgrade, alienware r13 worth it, best prebuilt gaming pcs, how to build a gaming pc

Id: ZtnBr-v2ufs

Length: 29min 55sec (1795 seconds)

Published: Sat May 21 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/TheRealTofuey]

It really blows my mind how OEM pc builders still make such garbage products for such a premium price.

[u/a12223344556677]

The default configuration makes so much sense now. The cooling capability of the 120mm AIO perfectly matches what the underpowered and poorly cooled VRM can provide to the CPU!

[u/1AMA-CAT-AMA]

To get round the lack of a usb header, I wonder if using something like this and then routing everything back into the case from an external header would work

https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-designed-motherboard-external-connector/dp/B000V6WD8A/ref=sr_1_25?keywords=4+pin+usb+to+usb+2.0+type+a&qid=1571224804&sr=8-25

With a usb header, fan control is no longer an issue either

[u/[deleted]]

I got mine at Best Buy for cheaper than the graphics card was going for… so…. At least I didn’t get ripped off.

[u/fandingo]

I have to say that I'm slightly disappointed that they didn't do some crazy mechanical engineering to make the rad swivel or the fans cableless slot ins. Just to keep the Dell ethos.

[u/SkillYourself]

What gets me most about this Alienware is that the front panel is fused to the motherboard.

I understand the low spec VRM heatsink, the 120mm radiator, and the slow memory as generic prebuilt corner cutting you'd expect to see, but the fused front panel increases PCB costs and installation time. All I can think of it is as some wacky way to further discourage re-use of the chassis with a standard motherboard, not that it would be practical with the custom PSU and whatnot.

[u/wutqq]

Yeah… say no to Dell desktop computers lmao

[u/NewRedditIsVeryUgly]

Holy shit this is almost unsalvageable. You need a new case (or power tools), a new motherboard and a new cooler, probably a new PSU.

But to be honest the people buying this won't even notice. The people buying Alienware will probably only be gaming and not notice the slight decrease in performance from the potential of the hardware. It might cook the hardware to a premature grave though.

[u/WellReadBread34]

Kind of a tangent but whenever I think of issues with Dell PCs I think of Super Eyepatch Wolf's dramatized account of buying one.

"Buying a PC with Dell: My Journey Into Hell."

https://youtu.be/MR25BVBsuS0