Is Alienware's NEW Gaming Pre-Built Less Terrible?

in this box i have the cheapest configuration of the new alienware which should be hilarious because you know it's a dowel product uh actually funnily enough it is a new box which i find a bit of a weird move considering that if anything the box was the best part of the previous generation so i feel like they could have spent their r d efforts elsewhere but before we get into the fancy new box i do need to tell you about how dell has already done me dirty and i haven't even looked at the pc yet now i placed the order for this pc back on november 2nd when i first found it listed for sale on dell's website and i got two order confirmation emails saying that we should expect the system in the beginning of december so i started waiting occasionally checking dell's order update website which just kept saying that the order was about to enter production and this didn't change for a month at which point we were like this this is a bit dodgy so anna reached out to dal's customer support who after a bit of back and forth said oh that order that you paid for and you wanted we cancelled it accidentally and because of our needlessly complicated tracking order system uh we didn't realize so whoops and at this point our only course of action was to replace the order they did say that they'd try and expedite it but they couldn't that didn't really happen so we ended up getting the system a month after we were initially supposed to get it and if we didn't follow up we still wouldn't have it so yeah that's good good job on that one though hopefully the pc makes up for it though so with that let's get into the fancy new box [Music] and here we have our very exciting new box that looks like it was involved in the korean war [Music] i take it back that is better dell really does some good box work you can even like fold this bit down and then you can more easily get the very heavy pc out without destroying your back and then it actually comes without e-waste peripherals as standard and you can inspect them on the website if you want to you do have to pay a bit extra but i think that that's a nice touch because not everybody uses those terrible peripherals so yeah it's pretty good [Music] look at that bulbous ass and there it is um it does still look a little bit like a robot vagina to me but you know this one has some some plastic in the front of the bit uh which doesn't seem super promising for airflow there is a gap around the edge but then you've got a whole bunch of aesthetic plastic back there although you can actually see through the front ventilation into the case which is definitely better than before so i'm curious to see the temperatures in standard alienware fashion it does have a very good front i o you've got three usb 3.2 gen1 ports and a 3.2 gen 2 type c port so that's that's useful it's very good now around the back we've got this mesh honeycomb back here with just a little bit of airflow and then we have these little plastic wings which i guess do look alien-y if you have a really boring idea of what alieny things look like but it does have a similar problem to the previous generation where all of the plastics feel pretty bad and flexible and there's a bunch of panel gaps and stuff everywhere it doesn't seem super well made for something that's advertised as being a very premium product although if you go down to the rear i o it's actually pretty good you've got enough connectivity over here and then we've got the graphics card down here which uh that's a big problem we'll get to that a bit later [Music] there's so much plastic on these systems oh um okay well let's be nice let's start off with the positive changes first off they moved the power supply from this stupid position over here where it was consensually choking out the cpu fan cooler to down here where it's now consensually choking out the graphics card fans but that's definitely a positive improvement and actually while talking about the cooler it does seem like they've started using the chunkier version of the hobo garbage cooler it's the same version that hp uses so that's that's good we should get some better temperatures on that cpu but other than that we have a whole laundry list of generic oem pre-built gaming system problems uh the motherboard and the power supply or all uh proprietary shapes which means despite the fact that you have better access to everything you can't really upgrade much in this system because of that uh you've also got the age old prebuilt cardinal sin which is a single channel ram configuration with a ryzen cpu which is always a great time the cpu under there is a ryzen 5 5600x which is a very good cpu that's had both its kneecaps blown out uh we'll try and fix up this configuration later in this video to see if you can actually spec up a decent alienware system but we'll get to that later we still need to mention the the biggest problem with this system which is the graphics card that we have in here now just to put it into context i paid about a hundred dollars more for this system than i paid for the previous cheapest alienware system i bought about a year ago and that had an rx 5700 in it whereas this system has well it's got an rx 5300 in it which is an oem graphics card that i've never tested before so i am very excited to see what kind of performance we can get out of this system oh yeah and i actually forgot to mention the specs of the power supply under here we have a 460 watt 80 plus bronze rated unit and then you can upgrade to a 760 watt power supply it is a really dumb shape so you're not going to be able to upgrade the power supply yourself after you've bought the system so that's that's pretty irritating and it also uses weird connectors for all of the motherboard power and stuff and around the front we've got an intake fan with what looks like okay reasonable airflow so yeah the temperatures should actually not be that horrendous but with that let's pop the side panel back on fire it up and see what kind of venereal bloatware the system comes with that really is one of dell's specialties so yeah let's check it out ooh it's got windows 11 on it okay so in terms of vd it's also definitely an improvement we do have a bunch of alienware crap on here but other than that it it seems pretty standard we don't even have mcafee on here pre-installed which is kind of mind-blowing to be honest now we're going to start off with gta 5 here because i'm actually not sure how that rx 5300 performs uh so we're running at 1080p low settings or like normal settings um so yeah let's see what happens oh never mind let's bump it all up to high i mean i i guess it's a bit better than i was expecting here with 1080p high settings we're getting a 100 frames per second and it it feels nice and smooth and it looks pretty good it's actually better than i was expecting which does tell you a lot about my expectations for the performance of this system um yeah let's move over to something a bit more demanding next we have do maternal running at 1080p ultra settings which is the settings i usually use to test the game oh there is a lot of input lag here okay not what i'd call an ideal do maternal experience it's borderline unplayable just because of that input lag it feels like you're wading through mcdonald's honey mustard dip next up we're trying out uh battlefield 5 with 1080p high settings which may be a little bit brave now i actually went back and got some benchmarks for the previous cheapest alienware system i looked at and they're actually running pretty similarly which is quite surprising considering the massive discrepancy in gpu power but that's probably because of the heinous war crime of a ram configuration in both of these systems and then in terms of cpu temperatures despite the new system drawing a bit more power it is actually running cooler and quieter which isn't really difficult considering the old system was essentially a jet turbine but with that let's test out another achilles heel of oem gaming prebuilts which is third-party memory support and upgradeability i am genuinely shocked by this result because this alienware is the first oem pre-built i have ever tested that has decent third-party memory support because not only can in some situations it read x and p profiles but when it can't read the x and p profiles on the memory kit you can manually set the frequency to the kit's rating and you can set the timings as well i tested five different kits from four different manufacturers at various speeds and the hyperx kit just by default set to its max speed of 3600 megahertz and it worked which is genuinely shocking with the kits from the other manufacturers they just auto set to the base ddr4 speed which is 2133 or 2400 megahertz however you could manually set the kits to their rated speed and it actually worked if just two weeks ago you came to me and said darvin the first ever oem prebuilt that you're gonna test with decent memory support is an alienware system i would have smacked you across the face and told you to lay off the meth you dumbass because that would never happen but it has and i am shocked and not only that but obviously the better memory configuration makes a big performance difference with battlefield 5 you go from an average of 60 frames per second to an average of 70 frames per second so now that we've fixed the cardinal syn memory configuration the main bottleneck in this system is definitely that sad little rx 5300 so let's drop in a more powerful graphics card to see what happens with the cpu temperatures when it has to keep up with a more reasonable gpu pairing now unfortunately because we have that mis-shaped little 460 watt power supply in here we're not going to be able to go too ham in terms of graphics card upgrades so i'm going to use this rx 6600xt hellhound [Music] with the rx 6600 xt in there we can see the frame rate is obviously way higher because it's much better than that rx 5300 the frame pacing is a little bit dodgy but it is battlefield it can get a bit stuttery and it did feel fine although the graphics card temperatures are also reasonably high but another thing that we can also see is that the cpu temperatures are higher because well it's having to work harder to keep up with that graphics card it has become clear just from the amount of extra noise that the cpu fan is making the dell really wants to keep the cpu under that 70 degrees celsius barrier now i think the next step is definitely to replace that hobo garbage cooler with a hundred and twenty millimeter aio something representative of the aio that you can spec up on dell's website to see what kind of temperatures and noise we get with that and i have just the aio to use [Music] now i'm not entirely sure what the official dell way is to mount the aio on the back here because you have this bracket it doesn't seem like it has space for the actual aio tubing and stuff so i think i'm just going to remove the bracket completely ignore it and then just mount the aio straight to the back of the case [Music] oh that's really irritating they used much smaller mounting holes here so that you can't mount a 120 millimeter aio on the back without some form of bracket so what i'm going to do is i'm gonna use the fan in a pool configuration and then just mount the aio radiator on the front of it like here and then mount it on [Music] okay they actually do just screw on so that's good um i am using the intel mounting here which is pretty weird with an amd cpu but you know if it works it works a few moments later no way what is this lga 1700 spacing it is ah so what dell has done there is they've taken the new intel lga 1700 mounting and they've put it on an amd cpu the only reason why i could think they'd do that is so that they don't have to change the tooling between the intel and the amd case and so that they can use the same cooler on both systems basically what all of this means is that a cooler upgrade is out of the question for this video because i don't have any coolers that'll mount to it now although if you do buy an nzxt aio or pretty much any aio that uses like the standard asetek mounting screws you can mount it to the system if you get the lga 1700 upgrade kit which you can get from some of these companies so bear that in mind the option is there you just need to jump through a bunch of hoops because dell i guess i don't know so after all of that what have we learned about the new alienware uh well it's definitely better than the old alienware which to be fair isn't isn't a very high bar to clear considering that the old alienware was essentially just a bear suffering from leprosy that was role playing as a jet engine whereas this is like a bear suffering from mild leprosy that's no longer role playing as a jet engine this spec this cheapest spec is is pretty dumb and you shouldn't buy it this pc cost a thousand two hundred and fifty dollars which considering what's in there is a lot of money like for an rx 5300 that's a lot and when you start speccing it up to a point that makes sense with like for example an rtx 360 in it and still the 5600 x but like a dual channel 16 gig kit of ram and the aio and a better power supply and stuff you're looking at 2 000 which is a lot for specs that you can get for like 400 less pricing is a really fickle thing to discuss at the moment because it does change all the time but the system is very expensive and it's really difficult to recommend because it still has a whole bunch of standard oem problems because you know i guess oem prebuilt's got a oem prebuilt you know they they do have they do have a bunch of weird issues with them and this one is definitely not an exception although dell does often have things go on sale so in a couple of months the systems will probably be quite a bit cheaper although yeah i don't know you can decide for yourself if you think it's worth it and with that it brings me to the end of another video thank you very much for watching if you liked the video like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one and yeah until the next video thank you for watching bye [Music] you

Channel: Dawid Does Tech Stuff

Views: 688,579

Keywords: dawid, dawid does tech stuff, PC, gaming, intel, AMD, Corsair, Gaming, Game, Computer, Gaming PC, David Does Tech Stuff, DDTS, Tech, Stuff, alienware, dell, 2022, prebuilt, alienware r14, ryzen

Id: 5T3McfYg6Eo

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2022