Hilariously Bad Alienware R10 Ryzen PC: $1800 Pre-Built Review

this is absolutely insane and all this money that goes into whatever the hell this is this is this is lazy and cheap this is crazy why would you do all of this aliens this tiny cpu cooler was eighteen hundred dollars that came with that computer it's an alienware r10 ryzen edition aurora this is one thousand eight hundred dollars with an r seven fifty eight hundred non x cpu it's got a 3060 ti in it and it marks the most expensive pre-built that we've purchased yet for this series and also the first pre-built in our recent reviews that has a ryzen cpu of course ryzen's got a lot of our recommendations for diy recently but now we're looking at it in a dell made alienware pre-built and this is going to be a tough one to get through before that this video is brought to you by corsair and their 5000d airflow the corsair 5000d airflow is an atx tower with high material build quality and a focus on cooling performance with attention paid to small details the case has a unique look with deeply indented cooling pathways on the sides of the front and top panels and has carefully matched colors across the case available in both white and black learn more at the link in the description below so as we get into this one we have a playlist with pre-built reviews that'll be linked in the description below if you want to see all of them so far we are buying all of these with our own money so if you'd like to support us in buying these especially as they get increasingly expensive you can head over to store.camerasnexus.net you'll get something high quality in return like one of our wireframe mouse mats that are desk sized with a keyboard and mouse you can also pick up one of our brand new explosion and repair posters which is until the 31st of july benefiting the eff and fight to repair we're sending 33 of our profits split between those two organizations for right to repair or something else from the store to help support our endeavors here and thank you so as a reminder for what we look for in prevails we have very high standards we test basically everything we'll go through thermals acoustics we even go through the ramp time for the fans look at the hysteresis of the fan curve and we go through things like build quality assembly all that stuff occasionally we throw in secret tests for them on support processes or warranties dell failed this is the one that a couple months ago kicked off our whole series because dell was basically it had hidden charges more or less in the invoice where you were paying something like 68 unknowingly for a warranty which was not wanted in some cases so anyway that's what started all this now we're looking at the eighteen hundred dollar machine that we bought back then and this follows up the abs challenger it's about a thousand thousand fifty dollars that was the best received one we've had so far it still had problems it was attached to newegg new egg has some of the worst customer support we've yet tested or looked at but the system itself was actually very good overall it was built well it was competitive and it had the best value compared to the other pre-built we had looked at so the abs challenger got a general recommendation from us as long as you never needed help from nueck the dell g5500 was easily among the worst but then then i buy power shipped us a computer without any packing material and we received this so whose is worse the warranty with e-waste attached to it or what i by powership does it's hard to say but we have very high standards because we want the computer to work when we open it out of the box and this is a very difficult thing to achieve apparently a reviews process for pre-built involves looking for something which is pre-configured requires very little user input and resembles something that will be a true customer experience so we're buying it without the manufacturer knowing we use various aliases alias shipping addresses all this stuff the system on the bench today again it's 5800 it's got two sticks of ram that's a good start the value is for sure on the brutal side even given the current market eighteen hundred dollars after taxes and everything depending on where you live but where we are comes out to about two grand and that amount of money for a 30-60 ti and a 5800 it doesn't feel good let's get into the teardown we'll look through extensive thermals noise gaming performance all that stuff as usual and then we'll talk about if it's worth it or not i'm a little scared of it i don't see any screws really on the backside that are maybe holding the panels in so we're going to figure this out as we go a couple things that we noticed just with the x here we always like to go over the exterior first and it is very stout so uh there's a grill i guess for kind of air except it's like 50 plastic and not that much hole and also it's not particularly high quality plastic [Music] you probably play you could probably play music on that so this this is very uninspiring and not promising at all for the quality of the case um i haven't seen a plastic grill that moves quite that degree before but the good news is if you wanted to let some air in there it would be pretty easy to snap each of the plastic things out and just make it a hole so there's an upside and so now it's probably time to try and figure out how to open this one what do i do how does this work normally i swear i've taken a computer apart before presumably this comes off now there's all right okay we're making progress wow look at that look at that it's like the classic oem garbage tier chassis from the late 90s or early 2000s right here with a giant piece of plastic strapped to it that's about as alienware as you could possibly get alienware they've been around a long time and they've had a reputation for doing this like plastic edgelord appeal to the grandparents of the kids crowd thing for decades and they're still doing it so this is how we make a computer case now you take you take the cheapest possible oem case and then you strap a giant piece of plastic to it the the top of this one so they've got this spring-loaded mechanism for the side panel i guess to eliminate screws except for the one that you still have to take out there's a big pivot right there and that looks like it's gonna swing something like that judging by this photo this image and then step three is to remove whatever that is and then for heatsink and then there's a picture of a fan it isn't it is from alienworks look it's it has hieroglyphs they built you know i i knew they built the pyramids it's got the same hieroglyphs that they use on the pyramids right here on this case okay let's pull this latch oh there's a lot of movement in the back here so i pulled the lock up near the video card oh okay you have to play if you apply an uncomfortable amount of force to it then it opens what the f where's the water cooling i thought there's i thought there's gonna be water cooling on this hang on all right work with me i water drop is there a plus sign there yes water drop plus cpu with a snowflake on it not that kind of snowflake uh i'm assuming means water cooled unless we've gotten the marketing to the point where an evaporative heat pipe with a condenser on it counts as water cooling because there's literally one drop of water in it from a syringe uh i'm not sure where the water cooling is this is the dell g55000 cpu cooler either one from the 900 computer not the one that's literally two times its price so it's the dell g55000 cooler straps to wait what this is an amd system right looking at the box and seeing the water cooling icon i thought it made sense because i knew there wasn't much clearance in here and you can definitely fit a pump block in where this is like that's one of the best use cases for liquid coin is a really crammed environment this doesn't have to be crammed they decided to make it this isn't small form factor the chassis itself is significantly smaller than the actual case with the plastic but you know one of the few really really good use cases for a smaller size liquid cooler where it normally wouldn't be great is in something like this where you can only fit the pump block in the housing and then put the radiator somewhere else deal with the cooling i thought that's what we would see but apparently dell is lying in its marketing i think is the technical word for it um it's not like they've done that before it's it's not like there's currently a class action lawsuit brought against dell for mark marketing in a misleading way that would be weird as a coincidence but uh it's happening again so there's no water cooling the the cooler is like basically an intel stock cooler with a fan strap to it looks like it came out of cooler masters factory really cheap on an 1800 computer it's a complete insult that alienware intel would install something that cheap on something so expensive it's insulting and all this money that goes into whatever the hell this is uh like what are we doing this is obstructing any access to air the okay the air gap the the air gap between the power supply and it's starting to break or the hinge is unhappy between the power supply and the cooler is this wide let's see how wide that is 17 millimeters of breathing room dell what the are you doing what is that that it would actually make sense to use a 120 ml clc which we almost never recommend as opposed to that i really like how the vrm doesn't have a heat sink and it's jammed under a power supply and has no access to air even though there's a downdraft cooler that just that seems like that vrm i think is not long for this world and considering by some of the viewer emails we've gotten of people who have aurora systems i'm i'm assuming if we start running a load cycle on this uh for the next couple months it'll probably blow up but that's a different topic wow one and a half amps potentially very high power high rpm fan here a lot of fan headers can only take one amp on boards of this type of quality i'm not sure if they've engineered theirs to do more one and a half amps puts us at 18 watts nearly a 20 watt fan is like 10 percent of the power of this whole computer when it's doing uh blender workload or something in in that fan that's like 10 of if it were at 100 speed so i'm not sure that fan header can take it so 80 plus gold sticker right there missed that last time we did one of these so 550 watt power supply they do have a thousand watt version it forces you to upgrade to a thousand watts with a 3080 which by the way is completely overkill 550 watts so this like the light on one from the g5 this can only do about 216 watts on any one 12-volt rail which is a bit limiting okay we're gonna stop there for the power supply as stated this is probably one of the few things that was built properly you'll see if i pull on this header it actually starts to come out of the board see that starting to come out of the board so i'm going to push it back down so i don't have to resolder it and then what i'm going to do is shove a flat head in there to hold it down while i pull the cable out let's take a look at this the fan here was exhaust where the air goes nobody knows some of it exits through the top here when it can get through all the plastic and then the intake is right there that's your intake let's get this over with okay ready let's everybody be oh wait oh wait good job dell uh the cooler's actually not screwed into the chassis there's nothing weird or extravagant about this case at all this one is screwed in here we're using an intel mount and intel holes and an intel cooler on an amd board okay prepare for something very strange okay check that out look at that look at that big hockey puck they shoved in there that's a hell of a slug i don't know if that's an aluminum slug i hope it's made out of metal i'm not gonna get my hopes up too much when you make a coil you try to make it directly contact the thin that it is cooling what dell's doing is dell is giving amd the second class provider treatment where they said hey uh we make these intel coolers why should we have to make a new one for a cpu with a different ihs thermal density and z height when instead we can strap a hockey puck to the cooler that that is like the most protruding it's not even a good contact this is so lazy this is this is lazy and cheap on an 1800 computer it's unbelievable how how profoundly i don't i hope it's lazy it's either lazy or it's malicious i don't know we're still making a new cooler in effect i can see where they attached the puck uh so it's still new i don't know why you wouldn't just commit and make like an actually properly sized amd cooler but it was it intel who in the lawsuit said dell is the best friend that money can buy i'm pretty sure that was intel we'll put we'll put the uh the quote on the screen and it looks like things haven't changed much okay i'm tired of this computer let's get into the benchmarks all right time to get into the benchmarking we'll start with thermals this this should be fun or terrifying in a combined torture workload alienware instantly fails the test it gets a super f just like the g5 5000 you can now move on and confidently not buy this computer just like cyberpower system we tested alienware sets out to let customers know right out of the gate that they aren't worth getting the full value of the parts that they've purchased t-die on the 5800 was 92 degrees celsius in a 21 degree celsius ambient environment this is well into the throttling territory for amd partly thanks to precision boost 2 and partly thanks to being so close to tj maxx gpu thermals were in the 70s and 80s depending on what was tested we didn't test memory for this one but frankly it really doesn't matter because the cpu is already getting a failing grade so you shouldn't be buying this computer the temperature sensors numbered one through six are from dell and are placed around the board temperature five is clearly the cpu and some of these other ones are associated with vrm components or are nearby to the vrm components this result for tdy is so bad that it's impressive it's the rest of the video it doesn't matter this computer shouldn't be purchased on these grounds alone just like the cyberpower one except the cyberpower one you can fix by replacing the cooler this one is so crammed and it's basically custom so you'd be hard-pressed to replace it proving the point patrick rigged up an assisted solution where the alienware box was run wide open and with additional cooling externally the cpu temperature dropped at nearly 20 degrees from this alone and that was from just opening the box and feeding it air we didn't change the cooler itself the gpu temperature dropped a little as well as expected some of the vrm component temperatures marginally increased here since the cpu cooler was now shedding its heat more efficiently and down onto the components nearby so this is expected time for gaming benchmarks a few reminders the cpu and the gpu are primarily responsible for constructing the performance figures that we see the system builder doesn't make the cpu or the gpu even if they brand the video card so what we're mostly looking at is the oems to make sure they didn't make any major missteps and using otherwise good components that someone else made an example would be the system's losing out on frame time consistency in some titles by shoving a single stick of slow ram into the motherboard alienware won't get much credit for a 3060 ti outperforming a 1660 super that's just a fact of life the value of its total assembly against its cost including the design and build quality is what really dictates our recommendation or lack thereof in cyberpunk 2077 the alienware r10 landed unsurprisingly at the top of the chart it's nearly 800 more than the next best systems with the abs challenger being still the reigning best for value and build quality to normalize against the hardware change look at it this way the r10 at 114 fps average outperforms the abs challenger at 66 fps average by about 73 in exchange for 81 percent more money also a lot more heat on the cpu apparently considering the 3060 ti class performance is something that can be found in cheaper pre-built machines or even in laptops for cheaper the value proposition here is just not balanced remember 6 siege at 1080p had the r10 at 342 fps average which is good in a purely objective sense when ignoring value propositions but it's also the minimum we'd expect of a 5800 and a 360 ti the lowest finally do reasonably here with the only previous strong performance frame time consistency being the abs challenger the r10 was 72 ahead of the abs challenger's hardware combination similar to before there are no glaring experience ruining issues in these numbers for alienware assuming you enjoy the experience of being gouched for a 400 video card a 400 cpu and then running at least one of them at nearly 100 degrees celsius if that's the experience you like it has not been ruined by these numbers gpus are becoming more available now so scarcity isn't as strong of a volume mover and even if we allow some room to breathe for gpu pricing remember that oems like dell are buying these gpus from nvidia and partners directly they're not getting gouged on those prices it's not like dell buys gpus from ebay they're just opportunistically up charging you and then spitting on you by running the system as hot as they are at 1440p and with our intensive gpu settings the r10 ended up at 233 fps average with lows reasonably behind at 178 167. the lead here scales to 83 percent over the abs challenger thanks to the increased reliance on the gpu and the 30 series uptick in the higher resolution performance performance would continue to scale in favor of the 360 ti at 4k with disproportionate gains over the lower end cards than seen at 1080p we really want to make sure everyone knows this isn't because alienware did something phenomenal but again it's because the system has better parts that were purchased from nvidia and amd if you are considering other systems with similar specs or similar prices they will land around here as well provided reasonable memory configurations and hopefully run cooler hitman 3 is an important test in our pre-built reviews because it's both memory dependent and bloatware dependent as we tested the r10 aurora ended up at 120 fps average about 76 ahead of the abs challenger with lows actually reasonably well spaced so well done alienware you put a second stick in there red dead 2 runs gpu constrained and most of our testing for pre-built here the same results apply as the previous games with the r10 running ahead thanks to the extra 800 and so it lands at the top of the chart the real question will be how the other 1800 systems perform once we get them up here or more importantly how they compare an assembly noise levels are next we measure these using standardized methodology testing is conducted at a 20 inch distance from the front of the case in an environment with a noise floor of about 26 db the r10 system ran about 52 dba under maximum load which in a word is horrible it's the worst we've seen especially given the nearly 100 degree results on the cpu this is not only among the worst builds we've seen but among the least efficient thermal performers we've tested in the last 14 years out of any product we've reviewed dell is insane for selling this thing we'd assume that they have their heads buried in the sand because otherwise there's no way you'd be able to ignore the screeching that is coming out of the system at the level of performance you get remember too that decibels are logarithmic so going from 40 dba to 52 dba is not a linear increase in noise especially perceived noise to the human ear the ramp time from load begin to steady state noise was 302 seconds on the r10 normally this is a good thing because it's an indicator that the system has proper hysteresis to reduce more human observable changes in noise in this instance unfortunately the ramp time is just longer because the temperature climbs for a longer period of time to a higher number the system gets hotter and it has more runway to hit that maximum speed power consumption at the walls up now we test pre-built at the wall for power since that's how they're used in a blender cpu-only workload the alienware box pulled 125 to 126 watts at the wall this is actually extremely efficient and is thanks to amd's work on ryzen the performance is also superior in terms of rendered time and that's compared to the other systems on this list most of which use i7s in gaming workloads the alienware system puts the 3060 ti to work and clearly pulls more power it's at 320 to 330 watts for the average gaming workload or a 45 increase in power needed over the abs challenger for about 70 to 80 more performance in those games out of the box the alienware system forces you on first boot to walk through the alienware registration there's no way to get through the process without doing this even without internet connected but it will allow you to click next through all the prompts without entering any information so just do that on first boot we're greeted by a large ugly generally useless alienware application namely alienware command center among other things the software contains lighting overclocking and thermal controls and we completely ignored it except we eventually looked at it for this review process with the possible exception of case lighting there should be other better ways to control all of these settings specifically they should be serviced in bios we consider the alienware command center to be bloatware it may make things easier for users short term but there are downsides to it and those users would be better served by using first party software like ryzen master for overclocking instead or learning to interact with bios unfortunately bios options are limited despite having a cpu that's unlocked dell is running a slim bios without any meaningful manual tuning options available for the system the ui is laid out like a normal bios rather than the extremely limited version that we saw in the non-alienware g5 but the only overclocking option provided is enabling or disabling xmp to be clear the 5800 is not a locked cpu and it can be overclocked in this system but it must be done via software there's even an oc toggle in bios that is supposed to expose quote many oc options but xmp is the only one that shows up xmp2 was at least correctly applied out of the box running the memory at 3200 megahertz which is something that other companies have repeatedly either screwed up or consciously avoided out of some fear of accidentally doing something right so credit to dell here for enabling a natively supported speed code things here closing out dell ships this computer in other configurations one of them is a 1 000 watt version so you get either about 550 watt or so power supply or 1000 watts those are the two options they'll force a thousand watts on you with certain configurations it's actually kind of ridiculous because a lot of them aren't anywhere close to a thousand watts power consumption but uh that's the way it ships there is a liquid cooled version of this available clearly that's not the one we got it's not the stock configuration and it probably should be this is bad and this is it's it it's not bad it's completely unacceptable and utterly incompetent of dell to ship this because we could get we could we could understand a stock cooler if the thing wasn't running at basically 100 degrees celsius i can literally cook on this cpu at this point so it's one thing to run a little warm and for us to be snooty about it and be like cooling enthusiasts about oh you should use the whatever cooler but to run at functionally tj maxx and dump your clocks because of precision boost too and the way it behaves thermally and even enter into throttling territory it's totally unacceptable so dell then should be probably forcing a better cooling option not giving the option for a user to pick something which isn't going to work well it'd be like having two skus of a car where you sell one that has a tank only large enough to get you out of the dealer's parking lot and then you have the upgraded model that you can actually use it doesn't make any sense clearly to have the first of the two skus and it's only going to make the seller in this case dell alienware look bad so that should be this this needs to be eliminated from this completely and frankly this entire case is garbage and should be redesigned and dell if you're watching this i apologize for using harsh language but welcome to our channel and you can check out our case reviews for some great ideas so a 120 clc or something could fit in here that doesn't fix the problems but it certainly works around the major one of overheating for gpus the gpu did reasonably well in cooling because it's not super high end it's it is right in front of a little bit of ventilation so that's helpful dell ships however an rtx 3090 version of this we reviewed the 3090 from dell surprisingly good for uh well actually just for 39's in general there's a lot of really bad partner models out there so surprisingly good period for dallas 3090 the company put real effort into that whoever's partner was manufacturing it or designing it did a great job too and the problem is putting that a 3090 in this is a bad idea it's not going to make sense thermally the 30 90 is far too much power consumption to be dealing with this enclosure obviously the answer to should you buy this is no it of course is a chart topper because it has better silicon than anyone else has in the chart so far that doesn't mean though that there aren't cheaper or same priced options that are at least going to match the performance if not outperform it and will be in a total package that is more conscious of quality the whole thing's really kind of just sad or depressing because i remember decades ago where alienware had this stigma attached to it of being overpriced and sort of frivolous or silly in its execution of some of its products only eventually just to try and push that perceived value a little higher to oversell the components that were included in the box and the sad part is seeing that very little has changed for alienware dell has since acquired it but it's not doing a better job at running it evidently so that's a review of the r10 do not buy it uh we'll look at some other boxes and find some in this price range that we can recommend we have a couple others that have arrived we'll be looking at those soon but for this one because of the warranty issues where dell forces or very hard tries to force warranties on you because of that was just a shady scummy sales tactic um because of the the fact that they're even willing to put what is functionally an incompatible cooler in here as soon as you put the system under a full workload full 100 workload and because of the overall value of what you're getting it's a no-go for us don't buy it that's it for this one thanks for watching subscribe more you can check back for additional pre-built reviews and we have a whole series on them now we'll put them in a playlist where you can click that in the link in the description below you can go to store.gamersaccess.net if you'd like to grab one of our brand new posters the explosion and repair poster or you can grab something like a mouse mat or mod mad thanks for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 2,426,890

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, alienware r10 ryzen edition, alienware r10 ryzen review, alienware r10 benchmarks, alienware r10 ryzen worth it, best prebuilt gaming pcs 2021, worst pre built gaming pcs 2021, good prebuilt gaming pc, alienware r10 ryzen overheating, dell gaming pc, dell gaming pc review

Id: 8ulhFi5N2hc

Length: 29min 41sec (1781 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ChemistryAndLanguage]

That stock cooler had me roaring… holy shit that’s bad

[u/Firebird079]

I remember when Alienware's aesthetic was at least visually interesting and over the top. Now they're just like the rest of Dell's garbage with maybe 2 or 3 extra LEDs.

[u/MadLane22]

1800 for that lol, if that's not a scam what is.

[u/Vasault]

Alienware got stuck in the early 2000 for way too many years now, is time for them to disappear

[u/mrfat187]

I'm glad that reviews of this system exist. These companies that sling garbage as "premium" need to be held accountable for this literal e-waste. Fuck dell.

[u/Hieb]

LMAO I just looked at the website. The first two tier models ($1500 and $1800 CAD) only ship with 8 gigs of RAM ??? RAM is pretty much the cheapest its ever been and they're still skimping on that? A 16GB kit is less than $100 CAD, there's no excuse for this garbage.

Dell continues to be hilariously bad

[u/DogmaDodger]

At least for dell nz, the 2 r10 models available only have single channel ram as an option whereas the intel models all have dual channel. Looks like dell is gimping the ryzen models at intel's behest.

[u/bee-song]

aliens: "this is why we don't visit earth."

[u/MaximumEffort433]

I haven't watched yet, but what is the deal with pre-builts being such poor quality?

At the risk of showing my age, I remember the days when one could order a Dell, Gateway, or HP with pretty reasonable confidence. (Not perfect confidence, but reasonable.) I've still got some ten year old Dells that are chugging along like a dream.

When did the flip happen, and why? It seems like more people would buy pre-built systems if they still had the reputation they did when I was a kid.

Edit: Alienware was pretty well respected, too.

Edit 2: Just got around to watching it, I'm less than a minute in, Jay Steve holds up the CPU cooler, which is the typical Intel [Common] quality puck, you know the one I'm talking about, the little one. Then Jay Steve says "This system has an R7 5800 CPU in it." Just to put that into perspective, cooling an R7 5800 CPU with an Intel puck heatsink is a little bit like cooling down a boiling olympic sized swimming pool by throwing no more than three ice cubes into it. It's running a full water-cooling loop with a 140mm radiator. Alienware, you used to be cool.

Edit 3: I'm a fucking idiot, I've known this for years, now you know it too.