Alienware? Alien right here. That's right, we're finally doing it. The all Alienware gaming setup. Is it the finest e-sports apparel that money can buy? Or is it such overpriced plasticky junk that you'd be better off with a literal Game Gear? There's only one way to find out, by donning this out of this world exploration cap and visiting the home planet of Alienware. And also visiting the planet of our sponsor. You like gaming? Well, the folks over at Build Redux do too. And their mission is to help you build the gaming rig of your dreams. Just pick your parts and let them take care of the rest. Check out Build Redux at the link below to learn more. Kicking things off, we've got a computer. Yeah, this is a somewhat notorious computer. Oh, oh, Mr. McGregor, why did you do that? All I wanted to do was drink in your bar, notorious. Sorry, the Aurora R15. What's the problem with it? Oh, I see the problem. Where's the air for the GPU? Yeah, I mean, there's one fan here, but like, wow, that's not a good design. Yeah, and also they spent all this time making this massive plastic shroud to angle this case at a diagonal that does nothing for it. That looks cool, but out with the old, in with the new. I'm not actually sure that this is a design improvement. To their credit though, that is an awful lot of ventilation. That's a big improvement on the side. Their big claim is that they were able to reduce the size of the case by 40% without changing the interior. That's how much space they wasted by putting it on an angle. We've also improved the actual front ventilation by allowing for slightly larger gaps in the front. But then they've removed a fan. There's only one intake fan now. Yeah, they did do that. Maybe the issue is just that we're configured with a lower end GPU and we don't need the second fan. To their credit though, this is something that Dell Alienware and some of the other big OEMs do a lot better than custom builders. This GPU is not frigging going anywhere no matter what happens to this thing in shipping. Just curious. Will this just go on here? You know what? I think it might if it wasn't for this top piece here. It's got the same funky motherboard. Oh, I get it. All the front IO is just right on the board. So there's no internal wiring. Okay, that's actually pretty cool. And while it might not have the same out of this world looks as the older chassis, it's a lot more practical and it's got it where it counts. It's got a 13700F 16 core processor, eight performance, eight efficiency cores, and a 4070TI meaning we should be able to get some pretty good gaming performance out of this thing. As long as the thermal design doesn't suffocate our hardware like the old one had a tendency to do. I think I'll put you here. This configuration will cost 1899. Okay. Considering the specs, that's not bad. But will the peripherals be reasonable too? Do we really need this many? I brought you choices. No offense to Alienware, but why do they even need all these different peripherals when people can just buy ones from Logitech? Wow. Well, no, I've just, it's a legitimate question. You're gonna make Dell cry. Well, we got everything in both colors and all of the different types. So there's a lot of different things here. Hey, these look like giant ear pods. They kind of do. Sick. First impressions, what? 69, wait, are these wireless? Yes, they are the tri-mode wireless. 119.99. It's a little bit more than that. You're going up. 149.99? 200. Wait, 200. That's what they have it listed on their website. That's a little unfortunate. With the depth of these ear cups and with how padded they are, my ear lobes are already touching against the hard plastic here. You know what though? It feels like they have mics on the inside. Do these have active noise cancellation? They do. They do, wow. That helps justify the price at least. I actually covered their lower end ones, the 720Hs on short circuit. They didn't have that many features. They also kind of sucked. I don't want to be a total hater or anything, but boy, I wouldn't pay $200 for these. They're already uncomfortable and I've been wearing them for about 10 seconds. On my head, I found them to actually be pretty comfortable. The ANC bump, that's what's hitting my ears though. Let me try these ones. Yeah, give it a shot. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, that's right there. The lower end ones are more comfortable, I think. This is way more comfortable and it has a retractable mic rather than a removable one. I guess with this one, their angle was you could wear them out. I mean, you might get bullied, but you could wear them out. I think I'm going to stick with the 720Hs for my all Alienware set up here. Just got to adapt the type C wireless dongle to a type A and then plug that into the PC. Yo dog, I heard you like dongles. I dongled your dongle. Well, why don't we talk keyboards next? Sure. We got the 420K, which we obviously have to choose for the memes. Oh, okay. Hold on a second. They got some cute little dials over here on their full-sized. What is this? It only goes left and right. This is for like when you're trying to escape a stun lock or whatever. So you have a knob and like a rocker. Curiously cheap printing on some of the key caps. Actually it's double shot PBT. Yeah, they're double shot, except where they put stickers on them. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yikes. To their credit though, it's a solid enough feeling board. So if you're into the whole Cherry MX Red, I guess these probably are. Yep. Switch things, then you'll be pretty happy with this. Wait, what? Why do they need this? Okay. You put your 2.4 gigahertz dongle there and then you can have a charging thing and then it can break away. Yeah, so you can have, you have cable that's on your desk and you just have this, like say at the back of your table, you're done, you slide up and you charge. Yeah. Now I feel like I got hosed now that I saw that cool interface on the other one. This is just a USB-C port. I saw the cutout and I thought the cool thing would go in there, but it doesn't. All right. That's fine. I'm still going for the 10 keyless. 79.99. Double it. Oh. This one's not even wireless though. So I'm wondering if maybe the pricing issue is coming from the Dell thing where you always have it on sale, right? How much is it on sale? 120. That's still too much. It's better. It's really hard to justify a lot of the gaming keyboard prices these days when you can get like a Zoom 65 or whatever, a really nice custom keyboard for a very similar price. Okay. Who knows though? Maybe I'm gonna start popping headshots like nobody's business and I'm gonna be like Alienware for life. Now I'm almost afraid to guess at the price of these mice cause I am not getting any better at this. You do have a chance at redemption. The full-size keyboard. What do you think that's priced at? Well, I mean, given what this one would, $300. I don't know. You're close. 289. Oh my gosh. But just 200 on sale. How about this mouse? RGB alien, Type-C interface, 26,000 DPI. It comes with a little Type-C thing with five little contact points here and then a little breakaway Magig that can hold the, there you go, wireless dongle and also, okay, this is actually pretty cool, plug in power so you can just charge like that. Boop, breakaway, breakaway. How are you doing these days, Kelly Clarkson? 99, 99. 150. I hate DPI switch buttons that are on the bottom of the mouse. It's like having a charging port on the bottom of the mouse. Like, what are you, an idiot? It's got 420 hours of battery life. Are they just straight memeing with this thing? Like, I don't get it. Listen, man, aliens. Okay, why don't we have a look at the 620M? Is this a left-handed mouse? Wait, no. It's just an ergo right-handed mouse that I didn't quite understand at first. Everyone who's looked at this in the office has had the exact same thought. It's... Looks like it should be a left-handed mouse, but no, it actually does feel pretty good in the right hand. This should be no more than 79, 99. Oh, you, just think about it for a little bit longer maybe. You know what it's gonna be. What? No, I don't know what it's gonna be. 26,000 DPI, okay, so still high end sensor. 89, 99. It is 99, 99. 79 on sale. Okay. But it is also the Dell thing of estimated value. What does estimated value mean? So Dell on their website, they list the pricing of their products by giving you an estimated value and then giving you the amount that you save. So everything's permanently on sale. I thought that was illegal. Well, they explain it. It's based on industry data. So they're not actually listing it at that price. They're calling it savings by just having a cheaper product than the made up number that they chose. I don't just wanna be a hater here. Give me something good. Oh, desk pad. All right. Oh. I have no idea if this is good. I haven't touched it. Okay. This is, I'm seeing this when you are. Oh, it's very small. Is there anything bigger? They sent us like 10 of them, but I think they're all the same size of box. How much is this mouse pad? If this is more than 19, 99. Mouse pads are 14, 99. Mouse pads are only bundled. Okay. So free. That is fine. It's got a non-slip backing, stitched edge. You know what? As bundled mouse pads go, that's pretty good. No hate Alienware. No hate. Do you know what we can trust to be good from Alienware? What? Displays. Oh yeah. That's probably true actually. Okay. We've got options here. It looks like. Yes. 500 Hertz gaming display. I already know that this thing is absolutely sick. It's not cheap, but it has differentiating features that kinda justify it. Or the QD OLED 34 inch ultra wide. They also send over one of their more mid range monitors. It's a 27 inch, 165 Hertz 1440p panel. Does it have an actual G-Sync module in it? Or is it just G-Sync ready? It's a G-Sync compatible with FreeSync Premium Pro. 349? 399. I mean, you know what? That actually seems like probably a better match for our system anyway. Why don't we go with this? Sure. Why is a laptop part of this? Oh, that's heavy. They sent us a laptop. I don't know, game on the side. Game while you game. Streaming computer. You know, I do kinda like the caboose IO system though. Everything's at the back. Got your Thunderbolt, micro SD. Okay, sure. Not a huge fan of the headphone jack at the back. Type C display port out. Couple type A's. Mini display port out. Actually, pretty good modern IO. Is there no ports on the sides whatsoever? Nope. I don't like ports on the right on a gaming laptop, just cause that's where my mouse is. Don't mind it on the left. Don't mind like if a micro SD was on the front or on the side or something like that. I think I'd probably prefer that. And I love their RGB track pads. It actually looks so cool. So cool. Yeah, it's kitted out with a 13900 and a 4080. Of course it is. Mobile, so depending on the wattage. Based on how much heat sink there is in it, I'd say it probably does all right though. There's no way this is less than like 2,600 US dollars. 2769. Oh wow, okay. Pretty good then. Another thing Dell does well is laptops. Though Alienware has had a rocky history with those. That is a really funky foot. It goes all the way around. And it makes sure that it's gonna be able to get some intake no matter what you put it on. Kind of smart. Holy crud, there's a lot of fans in here. One, two, three, four that I can count. We should get something running on it. I wanna hear it scream. Oh. They sent a webcam. Yeah, there's some essentials that Alienware doesn't have. Like a webcam. So we got the Dell version of it. Cool. We also got a dual charge dock for your desk, for your peripherals. This actually looks. That was not my fault. Is this a little tiny soundbar? Yeah, it's a little Dell soundbar. It's compatible with some of their monitors. It just magnetically clips on the bottom of it. Sick, perfect. What's this charge dock for Adam? Just nice to have at your setup. It's got a wireless charger on the front. You got a USB extension, you got ethernet. For what? Charging stuff. This just seems like it. It felt like we were a little sparse for stuff from Alienware and I wanted to add a little something. Listen, sometimes the gamer got to get work done too. Okay, the dock is powered, but it unfortunately uses a permanently attached type C cable. Meaning that it has to be exactly this distance from whatever it's docking with. Does it at least charge this thing? It does USB power delivery. But does this laptop do USB power delivery? The answer is no. Wait, yes. The answer is yes. Okay, good. Show me that RGB. Let's go. Hey, not bad. It occurs to me though, we haven't talked about the chair I'm sitting in. I know that gaming chairs typically start in the 350 to 400 range. Whether they should or not is a whole other topic of discussion. We're not gonna get into that today. This seems pretty mid as far as gaming chairs go. Little bit of left to right adjustment. A little bit of forward back adjustment, no removable arm rests or anything. It does go all the way back. Okay, so that's good. But my chair does do this. I'm gonna say with Alienware tax, they want like 500 bucks for this. It's actually just 429. Okay, it's priced like any other gaming chair. It's actually, you know what? That foam is not bad. It's deep and it's firm. So you shouldn't have as much butt asleep effect as you would on some gaming chairs where you're basically just 10 minutes in sitting on a piece of plywood. Yeah, your butt's never gonna be asleep when it's deep and firm. It's not so secretly a Vertagear chair. Really? All of the marketing on their website links to Vertagear videos. Interesting, the last time I looked at anything from Vertagear, it was awful. Yeah, this is actually not too bad. They've improved. Good job, Vertagear. Good job, Alienware. Let's try out that soundbar. It's USB only. I suspect it doesn't sound very good. I can confirm, Adam, the speakers do come out the front here. What was the price of this? You know what? It's a business solution. I'm gonna guess it's like $100. Actually, you're spot on. Really? Yeah, it's 100 bucks. Wow, that sucks. These have a pretty okay sound stage. Yeah. When that loading screen hit, I actually thought the sound was coming out of some speakers next to the monitor. They also support Dolby Atmos. It's not the most contrasting monitor, but it does look fine. Yeah, the lights are not doing any favors. It's pretty good. I would game on this all day, no problem. I mean, I would try anyway. I'm not promising to be any good. Ooh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I died. Cool. Hey, you know what though? Credit to our computer for being pretty darn quiet. But are the thermals any good? Oh, how are our thermals? I mean, our GPU is sitting at 70 degrees. We're relaunching the game because we wanna see the monitor running in HDR mode. It's display HDR 600 certified, which means you're not gonna get that dazzling effect that you would from something that can do a thousand it's peak brightness or more, but it should be at least a little better than something that's display HDR 400. You can see a little better. Yeah, you actually can see a little better. So that's good. Everything's on Epic and it's actually still pretty good. I mean, you can fault the 40 series for its value, but you can't really fault the 40 series for its performance. We're getting near 100 FPS pretty consistently in here. And over here, you've been just playing with this laptop trying to get the fans to rip, hey? Yeah. These are very crunchy key switches. Yeah, they're mechanical. Interesting. These have an extremely high actuation force at the very, very top of the keystroke. And then they just give way. I am not a huge fan to be perfectly honest with you. No, you like a little travel before your... I think they made the right call not going with a massive track pad. I've seen some gaming laptops go with like obscenely large track pads for something that I don't really want. I'm on a gaming laptop. I have a mouse. High performance mode enabled. Let's go. Oh, here we go. You can smell the heat. Yeah, we've got a couple more FPS there too. Look at that. Okay. That's a little less tolerable. Hold on, hold on. But what if I had headphones on? Closed back headphones. The solution to all our problems. In conclusion, not a ton of huge surprises here. Dell's core competencies remain what they were before. Monitors, laptops, and as long as you don't mind the trip to proprietary-ville and a little bit of a price premium, desktop computers. As for the rest, I'd say the peripherals are suitably adequate if not the best priced options on the market. Like this mouse in particular is fine. But when you compare against other trendier products that are, for example, super light or have extras like side-scrolling, it's not really gonna stand up, at least for the price. With that said, if you've got yourself a whole Alienware gaming setup, I don't think you have any excuse for losing either. And that's really all you can ask for at a certain point if you're just, you know, rich grandma trying to set up your grandson with a sick gaming setup. You know what else rich grandma could check out? 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