Was Alienware REALLY Better Before Dell?

in 1996 childhood friends Nelson Gonzalez  and Alex Aguia established Saikai of Miami   soon to be renamed Alienware and apparently in  the early days the mere sight of an Alienware   system was enough to get any PC gaming Enthusiast  slipperier than a greas up pig but then in 2002   Dell started eyeing them up from across the  dingy Subway and finally pulling the trigger   into 2006 and as The Story Goes Dell hooked  Alienware up to the corporate milking machine   slowly bleeding them of all their life resulting  in the dried up husk that is Alienware today but   was Alienware actually that good predel or  were we all just stupider back then well to   find out I've bought what I can only assume to  be a very used old Alienware but first today's   video is sponsored by corsair's new IQ link  McGuffin being able to daisy chain all of your   RGB and fans together with a single cable run  makes life so much easier I recently swapped a   bunch of IQ link fans into a test system and  had a great frustration free time magneting   everything together and because of all the  heartache I saved dealing with RGB clutter   I didn't blow an artery struggling with a  corrupt Windows install so if you want a   greatl looking easy to ous premium RGB solution  check out IQ link using the link in the video description ooh I don't know I feel like this  is how I blow out my rectum but let's cool it smells like single dude house  uh but aside from that it is huge and kind of   magnificent and I'm sure it doubles as a male  chasti belt we've got this really cool looking   ventilation on the front with some front I/O and  then above that we have look at that door I mean   the mechanism does feel pretty worn out but  that's quite a mechanism now in terms of the   acid green paint you can see that it was once very  high quality although it's kind of had its teeth   kicked in at this point I really would liked to  see a new and box one because that is some high   quality looking paint now the exact model is  an Alienware Area 51 7500 which was launched   in 2007 which is after Dell bought Alienware  but despite that as far as I understand it's   one of the last Alienware alien Wares the Handover  was gradual and the first Dell Alienware branded   system was the m17x laptop launched in 2009 so  this potentially counts as Peak Alienware the   next step is to remove that voloptuous side panel  to see if the guts stand up to the hype and what   state the internals of this 16-year-old  system from eBay is in um oh oh there we go wa oh it smells so much like dude in here who look at how neat and clean it is in  here and aside from some mismatched Ram it looks   exactly like pictures from back in the day which  makes me think this is a completely unmolested   example of one which I can imagine is quite rare  considering that it's older than some mountains in   the Himalayas now aside from this basically being  a time capsule the next thing you'll notice is the   quality of the components this is just high-end  components from the period the system came out   in there is no proprietary crap to be seen aside  from this little RGB fanhub daughter board thing   in the basement which makes sense RGB was rare  back then and it even has these little contact   pins for the fan and Lighting in the side panel  which is something that even modern cases brag   about component wise at least in regards to the  CPU I'm not 100% sure what we have in here some   core to Duo but I do recognize the graphics  got and it's got my internal baby doid giddy   with excitement this is an 8800 GTX a legendary  graphics card from 2006 really excited to get to   play with one of these the motherboard was also  real snazzy back in the day and should allow us   to overclock the crap out of the mystery core  to duo in here and considering the case layout   the cable Management's also causing some adult  feelings to happen look at that IDE cable and   how they've routed all of this stuff like it looks  amazing in terms of the power supply I think this   is still the stock one which makes it a th000 wat  power supply with no 80 plus rating I don't know   if it's a very good power supply but let me know  in the comments section down below if you know   more about it in the front here you can see we  don't have any hard drives this is how the eBay   seller sold it so we are going to have to add our  own storage but it's cool that the hdds had their   own little fan to cool them speaking of airflow  we've got this 120 mil in the front with the   cavernous space behind the alien head providing it  with ample room to breathe very undel physically   especially taking its age into account this system  is what nerd boners are made of and not that weird   hate boner caused by Dell Alienware systems I  really think their reputation is welld deserved   so now it's time to drop a hard drive in here or  more realistically an SSD so that I don't spend   my whole life waiting for Windows to install  and then we can see how it handles games in 2023 and then I'm just going to very heavy my God okay well now we get to  see if if it works uh it was listed four parts   but that could be because it didn't have  a hard drive in it no way the alien head   is the power button okay this is the best PC  ever oh that's a lot of sound the alien head   actually lights up as well oh the alien head on  the side also turns on okay it is not posting wa   it sounds like something terrible is happening  in here let's see okay it sounds like it's this   that's shouting like that now luckily because  this motherboard is very fancy it does have   post codes so let's Google what that means  apparently it means waiting for user so do I   just like press space let's restart it hey hey  we've got an e6400 in here which I think means   I guessed correctly in the previous video and  it's very close to to the CPU I had in my first   gaming system the Intel core2 Duo e6400 was  a $2 200ish dual core CPU that really brought   the fight to AMD and it has quite the trick  up its sleeve that we'll explore a bit later   on wow now that it's on it is making a lot of  smells after that very useful observation I ran   ddu wipe and installed the final Legacy  drivers from 200 years ago for the 8800 GTX ooh it runs halflife 2 pretty well which you'd  hope it's got an 8800 GTX in it this game is from   2004 and this is a flagship GPU from 2006 yeah  I'm glad it runs it well this is a 1080p High   settings although once you get outside things are  a lot less convincing seemingly entirely because   of the little cor 2 Duo oh no that's quite the  bottleneck next I want to give Bioshock a try   which was visually a revolutionary game for  like like 2 months until crisis came out see   here it's got dx10 texture options and the 8800  GTX was the first dx10 GPU so I'm curious to see   how it runs it unfortunately for some reason MSI  after burner's overlay wasn't working so all we   get is the little fraps counter in the top very  informative oh yeah look at the water physics I   remember how excited the developers were about it  they're all like H the water is so real ooh fire   makes it struggle a little but we're still very  very comfortably over oh never mind I was going   to say comfortably over 60 frames per second  there but it does dip below that although in   fness to the 8800 GTX in 2007 1080p was considered  a high resolution so it's kind of hopeful trying   GTA 5 uh it launched but now it's just been  loading for the last 15 minutes I'll give it   some more time but it it's not seeming likely  oh yes some fun GTA a 5 render struggles okay   outside it seems to have stabilized with about 20  frames per second at 1080p this is like low-end   Modern igpu Performance although to be fair with a  low-end modern igpu things start disappearing way   later let's try drop it to 720p uhoh and it's  crashed oh no that's a disaster does that mean   I have to wait 20 minutes for it to load in again  okay it's been a very long time but we're back in   and the performance is basically the same because  of the CPU bottleneck I've been so desensitized   to terrible GTA 5 performances that like like  I'm not even surprised when I see this kind of   crap anymore although this is particularly bad I I  think there's meant to be like buildings over here   oh yeah there they are oh damn optimal settings  does not trust the power of this PC very much now   before we reveal the cor to Duo's secret weapon  obviously we need to try the Widow Maker yo that's   crazy even the mighty alien wear is just giving us  like 40 frames per second at medium settings hello   granted it is a 1080p oh damn yeah here with the  sunrise we've got just over 30 frames per second   crisis was such a beast I am willing to bet though  that the CPU is at least partially responsible for   what's happening here oh it seems like weirdly  mismatched Hardware configurations are a bit of   a theme with Alienware systems although I mean  these systems were highly configurable so it's   more this configuration's fault having said  that the amazing thing about $ 200ish core to   Duos from this generation was that all you had  to do was get a decent motherboard with them   overclock them a bit and you'd get basically the  same performance as a $500 cor to Duo so let's do   that and see if it alleviates the dumpster fire  that is the CPU bottlenecking situation in this system yeah okay that should be fine I think  this motherboard does support 1333 MHz FSB   speed so that may be it let's save and see if it  explodes a few moments later I mean hopefully it   makes windows run better as well I this system  very much isn't equipped for running Windows 10   yes there we go look at that 2.7 is GHz wa half  lifee 2 is running way better and in this tunnel   at least we're almost getting 100% GPU utilization  although the moment we got outside the little cor   to Duo's life started flashing in front of its  eyes again but despite that the Improvement   was massive so the moral of the story kids is  overclock your core 2 Duos lest you suffer the stutters let's overclock it some more whoa we actually had a brief second there  of the CPU not being pegged to 100% which gave us   another healthy performance jump and with pretty  much no extra effort it was just running at 3.2   GHz like it wasn't a big deal I didn't think it  was going to just go to 3.2 GHz but I'm glad it   did because now at least while we're in the tunnel  the GPU is the bottleneck but unfortunately this   was about as much performance as I could ring out  of the Alienware 3.4 was stable but gave basically   the same result which left me no choice so now  that we've gotten the CPU to not be the bottleneck   depending on where you look the only logical  thing left to do is replace that geriatric 8800   GTX with its great great great great great  great great great great great great great grandson the RTX 4090 okay now predictably this terrible idea has  already run into a problem with the 40 series   Nvidia introduced this stupid arson connector  which obviously the 16-year-old power supply   in here doesn't have one of those now I could  potentially use one of these uh this is a dual   8 Pin to arson adapter which should be fine cuz  this is a th000 w power supply but this th000 W   power supply is very specifically wired for the  8800 GTX in here and it means that it's just got   two six spin pcie power which won't work with  this adapter so from my perspective I think the   best way for me to Power this 4090 in this old  Alienware system is by using an external power supply well I actually remember when the 8800 GTX  came out people were losing their minds over how   huge it was but compared to the 490 it's looking  pretty small and it weighs so much less I guess   performance-wise comparing these two graphics  cards is like pitting Hussein bolt against   Biden in 1,500 M Sprint although in the context  of running in the old Alienware it's more like   bolt with both his kneecap shattered and recently  waterboarded I also had a really good idea so that   we can still have the side panel on I'm just going  to kind of feed the connector through one of the   open PCI slot covers on the back this is like the  hardest part of interacting with this system is I   was going to say putting on the side panel but I  got lost in the struggle but after an embarrassing   amount of time the side panel finally gave in okay  now all you need to do is not go to the right side   of the system then you'll never know that it's  being powered in a way that'll will definitely   invalidate your House's fire insurance after a  very successful second boot all I had to do was   install some drivers and we were ready for some  Carnage and after dropping our state-ofthe-art   GPU into the system we've gained no performance  very exciting and that's even in the cave bit   where we didn't have a CPU bottleneck before yeah  it's running exactly the same as before okay so I   I don't think the overclocking did overcome  our CPU bottleneck now I I was lying when I   said that it didn't make a difference because  with the 490 we do have actual HDMI ports which   means I'm able to run the monitor at its native  240 HZ so I can feel the stutters a lot more   clearly which is good if anything GTA 5 took even  longer to load like at what point do I just give up oh it's finally happened but it is still  running the same as it was running with the pre oh no yeah this seems like very reasonable  4090 performance but before we finish off the   video there is one more game we need to  try reasonable stuff happening here this   is basically the exact same performance as  with the 8800 GTX and I think the only reason   it's even a little different is cuz of the CPU  overlog so with that what did we learn in today   video well if you do terrible enough things to  Hussein Bolt's legs even Biden will be able to   outrun him which brings me to the end of the  video if you want more valuable life lessons   like that subscribe to the channel and until the  next video bye-bye oh and the PC's crashed very good oh

Channel: Dawid Does Tech Stuff

Views: 719,114

Keywords: dawid, dawid does tech stuff, PC, gaming, intel, AMD, Corsair, Gaming, Game, Computer, Gaming PC, David Does Tech Stuff, DDTS, Tech, Stuff, David, Linus, Linus Tech Tips, Windows, Microsoft, CoolerMaster, DeepCool, bequiet!, Technology, cloud gaming, streaming, xbox, playstation, sony, Windows OS, GPU, Nvidia, gaming laptop, laptop, gaming computer monitor, monitor, Nvidia GeForce RTX

Id: l5AC9n2h430

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2023