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I really want to watch an interview with the engineers behind these pre builds. Too bad Dell will probably never allow that. Imagine going over the various weird things in the case and the engineers explain why it is done like that. Would be hilariously entertaining and educational.
So I was somewhat involved in developing this system (can’t say specifically for reasons) and want to clear something up. Everyone, and I mean everyone designing the r13 wanted a new chassis. It was a constant point of contention among the engineers and designers, led to a small loss of staff and proved to be a major hurdle. Management refused to listen and doubled down, it was either make it work or get out. For many of us, the r13 was meant to be an industry redemption story, a system worth every penny. While management refused new chassis designs, they simultaneously demanded we shove as much tech (mechanically and otherwise) into it. As GN said, all the fancy shmancy additions were implemented to fit a ridiculous number of high-performance components into a chassis designed for Office workers of yesteryear. It wasn’t necessary, but at the same time, it was. “Bloat” is an understatement, half the development cycle was spent on making this work. Management gave us a reason, we were told that our chassis were over-produced in previous quarters and that all previous stock needed to be sold off before building in others. We were incredibly disappointed with the company, we felt as if we failed our fans and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. Our lead quit after the r13 shipped, an incredibly talented individual that fought with management for years over stuff this channel regularly points out. My main point in all of this is, please don’t blame the engineers and designers at Dell. we’re definitely not idiots, rather, we’re chained to Dell’s inherent greed and backwards managerial style. We don’t have any say, and if we did, things would be a hell of a lot different. Sorry everyone, just about every colleague of mine watches this channel, hoping to get more of a voice in upcoming products. If you have a minute, contact Dell and encourage them to “listen to the engineers!”, maybe that’ll make a difference!
It usually ends up being this way, guys actually doing the work on the ground telling management that their ideas are bad and there's an obvious better option. I feel like it happens so often it's becoming a truism.
This thing is like a German sports car with the amount of engineering it took to over complicate design. Everything might be somewhat forgiven if the thing performed well.
And for the airlow, let me guess. They insisted on the glass on the front because "it looks cool" and/or "it was like that last time". And didn't even allow the compromise of gaps or holes around the sides to at least give _some_ breathing room
This whole project is a beautiful piece of engineering art. Be proud of that at least. As GN said, it's like a computer themed puzzle box. It's just a shitty computer, and as you explain, it's not any of your faults.
picturing that scene from the movie Waiting where each person in the kitchen takes a turn messing with a bad customers lunch, just this case its dell employees ruining steves day with a pre built.
@@hamzabajwa1960 I feel like if you have 5000 and have no clue what you're doing, you would pay a PC nerd 200 bucks to go shop and build it for you in front of you. That's what I would do.
I bought a faulty gaming laptop from them. After six failed repairs they tried to get me to sign a note on the repair slip that "it was not their fault" and told me it meant they wore a mask.... I started recording audio of my conversations with them after the 3rd repair and they gave me a full refund when I threatened to sue them for attempting to coerce me into signing a statement under false pretenses.
For something that is not a handle it sure looked like every other handle I've ever seen in my life. So I'm glad they put that text on it. I mean on my own I'd have never figured out that was in fact not the handle it looked like.
But that's exactly the point here. We are looking at this problem from a wrong point of view - technology know-how instead of sales. Dell didn't make this for you or me or Steve. They know enthusiasts will build their own rig and never buy this piece of crap. They are selling a brand here for people with lots of cash on the hip, who just want the most expensive stuff. They don't get really what's inside, but it looks like a lot of engineering that supports the price tag.
@Hazard I remember reading somewhere years ago that HP, Asus and a few other brands use two thermal paste suppliers from Taiwan and Japan that dries out at exactly 2 years after applying. Sounds about right for your case lolol
half the case is just the robot-vagina knock-off console looking plastic exterior. the inside is the same chassis as a low-end dell office PC from 2005.
I’m not a gamer so I’ve avoided this channel thinking it wasn’t for me. However, I really enjoy watching people who stick up for the little guy. I have to applaud the degree and detail in which this channel does that. Well done.
You'll end up finding this place to become your go-to channel for all things hardware related, followed closely by Hardware Unboxed. 👍 If Steve (GN) and Steve (HUB) haven't already given approval, I don't wanna know, and DON'T listen to that shill Linus. 😎
It sure is. All non standard parts just suck. If anything is wrong you can't do nothing with it. Non standard parts should be banned. Imagine paying 5k for something you can't fix without motherboard and case needing each other. Dead motherboard, replace the case. Problem with the case, can't use the motherboard. I really hate non-standard parts.
My previous motherboard was like this, Acer Predator Orion 3000..(got a pre-built 9700 w/2070S for 400 cad 2 years ago almost - normally wouldnever touch a pre-built) .. super disappointed seeing that after upgrading my cooler and having it be too tall for the case and then not being able to do sfa about it. Then I saw 2 9g boards at my local recyclers and grabbed them not knowing they were being sold DoA and getting disappointed more finding a busted socket on one..however the other actually worked fine and just had a weird ram configuration that threw me for a loop too also thinking it was dead until I read the manual (if using 1 or 2 of 4 slots, the insertion is reversed from almost every non-server motherboard I've seen, so very likely this is how they figured it was dead).. throw that with the 9700 and the 2070S+3060 now w/new 970pro (pb came with sn512) in a Fractal Meshify C and now I have something that doesn't shut off when it goes over 100w cpu for more than 10s.... ..and also, a pile of e-waste (stupid proprietary motherboard and case).. such a dumb motherboard format
I used to work for Dell, i was on the Alienware support team. support was separated for desktops laptops and alienware had its own set of people. we had all the tech "papers" for them. the components used were of the lowest grade possible. we had to upsell and at least give the customer a sales pitch, at least once in every conversation with customers. OMG the pricing on the parts Dell had us selling, i would personally would never even consider any of the parts of any quality. but dell wanted, even the support team, to believe that the parts were of top quality as to be more convincing to the customer. our test lab had a bunch of "burnt out" parts. if you knew what the margin of profit items were , you would flipping flip. many of the parts were salvaged of older "dead units". the margin on some items were over 500% profit for Dell. We could see the prices and the margin for Dell. The tool we used\ showed us the pricing and the profit margin. some agents main purpose for doing support on Dell was to earn more for selling. yes dell did have an incentive program for agents that sold and sell they did. Not a bad extra amount earned in the month.
This does not surprise me at all. Just opening a dell computer and having a look inside even over 20 years ago you knew it was bad. It's just surprising to see nothing has changed but hey, if the scam works and people are buying the garbage what can you do? I've never been a fan of prebuilt computers in general but people need to be aware of companies like dell that they're really bad and something that should be avoided at all cost.
@@huldu i left due to conflicting approaches to how the teams were managed. and because the winning mentality was to sell more than support i didnt want to have anything to do with dell anymore. literally if you combed the support team, from the 30 ish people on the whole team you would find maybe only 1/3 that had a good knowledge of tech , which these people carried the main "tech" support, from ticket to lab testing to customer solution. 1/3 had basic pc skills and 1/3 that did constant "training" to learn the basics. lol. now whether or not you consider ,me not wanting to sell anything and leaving the dell ecosystem a moral choice or not is totally on you and anyone else curious. i was and still am, not a sales rep just a PC/Server tech guy. and trying to sell to a customer that called for help isnt my thing. nor should any tech persons requirements while doing their jobs
..and I bet even if it was something he normally did (which I'd doubt anyway) that this is so bad he'd feel like an a$$ for reselling it to recoup even half.
It blows my mind. This PC is like a Kit-Car. You get a Ferrari engine, brakes, suspension, wheels/tyres. Then go to your garage and stuff it into an MR2 and expect the good results.
@@TheMadYetti EXACTLY! I mean it must take more effort to get all these top end bits of hardware and cram them into a tiny but also massive box with no airflow. The mind boggles
@@tbrowniscool I would bet that it's not the mechanical engineering of the parts in the case itself that's extremely expensive, so much as the engineering behind manufacturing and assembling them in a cost effective manner. Which, based on what I'm seeing here, certainly has been a failure (nobody would call this product "affordable" in ANY way)
This case is bordering on the Rube Goldberg-level of design. Can't wait for the R-rating of thermals to show how badly the heat is kept trapped within!
Just waiting for them to add some sort of 'Ball Bearing Slide' where i have to rotate my case in different directions in order to take out my Hard Drive.
Badly. Built a lot of relatively powerful computers into small cases and I would bet a lot of money on the GPU basically frying itself pretty soon, you simply can't cram 3090 wattage with two fans into that space and expect the heat to really go anywhere. It's mind-blowing that this is actually designed at all, you get similar thermal results just not giving af and cramming the components into a small case. Pay half the price for components, have the neighbor's kid do it, and you get the same thing. Except if the neighbor's kid knows anything about computers, then you're going to get way better results :D
Rube Goldberg is a perfect analogy. He would have been envious. And probably would have purchased one of these simply for the joy of taking it apart to see how it all fit together. I'm currently running a 6-year--old Alienware Aurora R5 that, while also over-engineered a bit, is nothing like this new one, and it's been absolutely solid and stable all these years with zero issues. And so now that I'm looking to replace my R5 with a new one, I naturally was thinking of just getting another Aurora. Glad I watched this video before I did so. I guess I'll have to keep watching this channel until Steve finds something he likes.
You figure that some marketing douche would have come up with some garbage about a "thermal stealth system" by now. You know. Like how some Sci-Fi ships use a system that keeps all the heat inside for a while to reduce their thermal signature. This must be kind-of like that. The Sci-Fi systems have to turn off after [TIME] to let the heat out, or they will kill the crew. This system needs to turn off before the built-up heat melts the solder joints.
Bevor it whas owned by dell it whas a bunch of geeks and gamers making them and they had qualitq for the price but since dell it became a cash grab sadly
I bought two Alienwares and bricked the last one with a botched Dell bios update. I went with meta pc for my replacement. I will never buy Alienware again.
I remember being a Kid and wanting Alienware all the time. I imagine their branding is mainly focused on spoiled rich kids and apparently Surfer dudes that enjoy tech. BUILD Forever.
Dell feels like the General Motors of the PC world. They have some genuinely fantastic engineers that can build around a problem, but are choked back by weird or just inane bean counter cost cutting decisions.
the cost cutting is probably a result of the over engineering stupid little shit...personally id rather have top tier ram and an actual cooling solution worthy of a 3090 and 12th gen cpu rather than a fancy little clip for a $5000 computer
Can confirm. I work for Dell. Love my position there. But sometimes these decisions are asinine. I've told my boss that for enterprise they are great but I wouldn't recommend them for home use with a 10 ft pole
@@KingZeus96 As someone who uses some of Dells low end enterprise products, I do like them. Unfortunately, even there things like weird Amphenol SAS connectors mean Dell is going their own way. Plus having to mod a SAS card's PCI ID or the server won't even boot with it in the internal slot is just asinine. The products are good, but Enterprise users are aware of these caveats and purchase appropriately.
By the time Alienware hit the scene I was already building my own. Before that I wanted a Falcon Northwest so bad. They were pretty much the only company that had cool-ish looking cases. They were still the off white cases of old but they were custom and looked cool. I cant believe AW put green sticks of ram in that for $5000. Awful.
The Alienware laptops from pre-2015 were overpriced, but they looked and felt premium, laptops were the only good part of Alienware. But Dell then and now has the worst quality control right up there with Newegg, and its annoying hard to figure out shit like not enough thermal paste.
Most likely to make it impossible to go anywhere else to get it fixed. I don't think I've ever seen a motherboard with that shape before. They are counting on those that don't know a lot about computers that just need something to work to likely buy them. This seems like it was purposely made to fail.
@@cael_1303 in their defence the warranty is rock solid. Dell usually comes in clutch and will even replace your laptop with a newer brand if something fails. Still a crap desktop tho
Style over function. The kind of person who buys this computer wants a computer with high-TDP desktop parts but which is as compact as possible. Hence the need for the complex air-flow design. You know the old car salesman mantra "there is a butt for every seat", right? Well, there is a user for every computer, I guess. Someone out there is willing to pay thousands more for a slightly more compact and more stylish tower. As long as it's not the only choice out there (which is the situation Apple users were subjected to with the cylindrical Mac Pro), I am OK with it. Because that's the power of the PC ecosystem: diversity.
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The CEOs kid designed the case and picked the components, and then a team of 50 engineers were put work trying to make it not burst into flames by installing ducting and high speed fans.
Literally the only thing you can reasonably reuse of this whole computer is the CPU, GPU and maybe the fans and HDD/SSD, tho the two latter are probably really bad. The AiO has way too short tubes, the PSU way too short cables, the case is proprietaty BS, the MB is proprietary BS. This is insane. I am a mechanical engineer myself and completly agree with Steve, the engineering is good. Just applied completly wrong. It's way to expensiv and solves no problems, for this application. This is outstandingly bad, omg
Imagine getting an engineering degree and getting a job at Dell, only to spend your time over engineering something unnecessary. Plus it's not easy getting an engineering degree
I was so close to buying a 4k version of this computer because i was scared to build my own, i ended up building my own and im so glad. I truly did dodge a bullet, this is sad that motherboard is so sad to look at considering 5k went into it, im glad gamers nexus has the balls to call them out on their shit. Great video!
Why would a company that (presumably) has very smart engineers working for it spend so much effort on making something good (ATX computers) into crap? Like, you have to actually try pretty hard to get it offensively wrong nowadays, and yet Dell still...
That's the craziest part! Excellent question that Dell needs to ask itself. This is a LOT of engineering work to unnecessarily reinvent the wheel into a square.
Well you have mechanical and electrical engineers might need to let the mechanical have a go at being electrical engineers surely couldn't be any worse
Exactly. And just for a thought, you buy high end parts to perform worse than they could. They intentionally crippled down the performance by making this a toaster. Just sad and unbelievable what damage to prebuild industry this does.
uh yeah pretty sure a spring release a decade later is still gonna sound like a spring release. dell does change but yall so sucked into these shit ass reviewers that YOU not dell YOU keep the same biased opinion.
I remember waaaaay back when Alienware was being advertised in 3DMark 2003 and thinking, "hmm, I wonder how their systems stack up against DIY builds?" I worked as a bench tech back then and the first time one finally came across my bench I had my answer. They've only gotten worse since then. GN had a great line about Alienware in another video; "Dell is designing to appeal to what grandparents think their grandkids want"
Lets not even mention the fact that the prices are a rip off. Even mainline dell is made for dumb parents who don't know other companies are cheaper. My campus sold exclusively dell that was bumped up almost 40% over HP and Asus products down the road at best buy. Not saying best buys better, but its better than Dells garbage.
yeah I remember when I first saw one of their systems advertised. I thought hmm that expensive but maybe it's worth it. A couple of minutes of looking at the specs and checking against component prices and I was shocked at just how much of a rip off it was.
When you think Steve has reached his peak and there is no way he can roast big tech more then he already have done so... then he brings out the falienware code
This reminds me of the proprietary designs of everything when I worked on an IBM PC assembly line. One odd-ball one was the PC 300PL that was their attempt at a toolless mount for the motherboard. It slid into a slot in the case and seated into a riser card mounted to the case and secured with a locking lever. Only it never stayed securely seated.
Look how well it turned out for IBM.... The Think brand was sold to Lenovo, who seems to be teaming up with Dell to make the most disposable e-waste machines ever.
Sunk cost fallacy. Management was probably like "we want to sell this or old stock" and got the engineers to work the problem and ended up costing a lot but "works already done, let's not spend more even though it would result in a cheap but more quality product"
@@duke605 It must be hell working as an engineer for Dell, having to devote so much time & effort & money to making a bad solution almost (but not quite) work, all because your bosses are stupid and insist on that over a better solution that's cheaper.
This build is probably 0.1% of their sales, but they're able to offer it _because_ it's the same form factor as all their other machines. Having it actually perform well, which would benefit the customer, is a distant second to cutting costs which benefits the shareholders.
You can "upgrade" to the 3090 Ti, get it for its MSRP of $2000, and still have $3000 left to build something way better than this POS. Probably have money left over in the end. What a friggin joke.
I had a pit in my stomach watching this knowing that there are actual suckers out there who ignorantly bought this POS. This feels like an absolute scam of a prebuilt and more people need to be more informed so that no one will buy this and Dell will quit this asinine charade.
@@GamersNexus shame is an understatement. I can tell you guys were frustrated about this and I would be absolutely livid. Though this vid gives me strong emotions, I cant wait for part 2! Thank you for exposing the horrors of buying from System Integrators, I use your vids to help people better understand and get a better value for their money.
The blame is 100% on Dell and on us as a society to let them continue as a business. We let them get away with things that should be crimes like their manufacturing of e-waste or ACTUAL crimes like their warranty scams.
doesnt surprise me that they sucker people into this garbage. My local radio station has an advert running for dell saying to call dell so dell can help them pick out the perfect pc just for them. Im absolutely sure junk like this is going to be sold to the old lady down the street who called trusting that dell would be honest and help them.
@@nickllama5296 As the video explains the builders are employing great skill to tackle the issues of an ancient chassis, but to no good effect. Someone in charge is takethemoneyandrun.
@@GamersNexus my local radio station keeps playing advertisements for Dell's call center that's supposed to help customers pick out a PC. I think its that same call center that rips off its customers by adding items to the bill that the customer specifically said they did not want.
What amazes me the most is just how similar some of those parts inside resembled the ones from my 1998 era Dell PC. I swear that back fan grille is the exact same design. It makes me wonder if it actually IS the same basic case just with a fancy plastic shell.
It's not even just plastics , it's unnecessary mechanical parts used and proprietary parts used that cannot be reused and very hard to repair And these companies will be first one to complain about pollution on twitter
its not the pc its him lmao hes smirking at that beauty the whole time. trust me he didnt mean 85% of what he said. everyone got the same biased opinion but never had the equipment to talk.
I think you can get a similarly built PC to this for under $5000. I have a pretty much loaded up liquid cooled R12 with a RTX 3080, intel i9, etc for just over $3k Canadian on sale. That was 18 months ago. I did some cooling mods but still nobody was building a PC with those specs for that price with the Covid availability issues. This PC has been issue free so far and is only used for flight sim gaming.
Any suggestion for flight sim equipment? I haven't flied in over a year so I turned to flight simulation and I've been looking for yokes and throttles for the best combination
@@GuilhermeGuidugli I’m really happy with my Honeycomb gear. Yolk, throttle quadrant and right now i have Logitech pedals. Not the most high end setup but definitely gives a decent feel.
People think that because a) they're fucking morons, objectively speaking, and b) companies are ran by complete fucking morons who pay actually competent people to try to engineer around the unbelievable stupidity, cheapness, greediness, and overall sleaze demanded of them by the uppers, complete with said uppers locking everything down. Tech is literally why I stopped believing in Capitalism. Tech and vidya especially the 2019-2022 period showed me it's flat out as terrible, incompetent, and inefficient as the fucking Soviet Union, where a handful of companies like Dell-Packard, Apple-vidia, etc. are going to own literally everything and Jensen will charge people a "low bargain price" of $200 a month to stream games through some nVidiaTM ServerfarmTM. When I was a kid it wasn't fucking hard to learn about computers. If you could sneak or find an old one you could open it up, take a look around, actually do neat things in Windows 95. Today it's not programs, executables, applications, no it's all "apps" by these ugly skintight jean wearing hipster retards renting out broom closets in SIlicon Valley chasing the drago--I mean the dream, ran by moronic boomers who know nothing, saying all engineers need to turn everything including operating systems into locked down mobile horseshit including even desktop OS's (remember win8? yeah that was greaaaat). Like it's made by design to be something you can't tinker or poke around with, and hacker culture of the 90s died completely with pocket snitch aka touch computer/internet ready phone culture, also arising during the Twitter/FB era being pushed by basically the spooks who themselves were pushed by the same utterly moronic executive tiers in politics who wanted something to replace CARNIVORE/ECHELON with a full on blanket surveillance system that's opt-in. This was in turn demanded of the few intelligent people like engineers (or intelligence assets) by the same moronic boomers who wanted to engineer around a problem that's the direct result of their policy failures, like say terrorist attacks by the very same people said exec board/boomers just told us all to train and fund, so now we need to overengineer blanket surveillance like an Information Awareness Office. This is because the executive board is every single bit as corrupt, senile, and geriatric as the late 1980s Politburo and this is true throughout all sectors of our society. Dell is merely one small symptomatic outrcropping of this by MBA major apparatchik partymen, in one small industry like tech. It's not complicated; it's easy af to learn and understand. It's deliberately made to be as locked down as possible to where you feel liek you need to fucking change microcode because they're locking shit down at the firmware level, and deliberately engineering things to be e-waste, fueled by the tears of Chinese slave children and the discarded souls of once noble engineers.
But Steve, if they ditched the old shitty case and re-branded a regular ATX spec case, then they wouldn't be able to use their proprietary motherboard and PSU formats that only fit their specific cases, which would subvert their actual overall goal of producing e-waste.
If anyone was on the fence, I bought the mod mat and screw driver set and love them. Of the many brands of screwdrivers I own for working on PCs, I always gravitate towards the GN screwdrivers because of the grip and magnetic bit. Having said that, I love the vids!
This feels like "Spend a dollar to save a penny" in terms of trying to avoid designing and implementing a new chassis. At least this makes the system seem oddly nostalgic
So many large companies do this. I've sat in on hour+ long meetings on how to get reimbursed for a $20 part. No one on that call makes less than $20/hr!
Honestly, its more like spend 99 cents to save a dollar. To them, its literally a cost comparison, and this seems to have won, by seemingly a small margin.
@@samiraperi467 A normal Dell, you won't pay 5K for. You need that special premium Alienware badge for that special type of ripoff from the Dell company. 😉 Also, the "Better than Dell" is a running theme in my comments from this series so do keep up sweetie. 🤦
I bought an Alienware m17x in 2012 when I was in school for visual effects. The computer never ran consecutive for 30 days. It was constantly needing repaired. 3k for what amounts to a paperweight. They can’t cool themselves properly and they mark up everything insanely high
Alienware has a place in my heart still, once upon a time I unboxed a big ass red alienware 17 inch laptop, with sexy metal body, pre DELL days, downloaded and maxed out Crisis for the first time in my life and was blown away, using the laptop on my lap burnt my legs, but the pain was worth it, gone are the good ol days.
This pre built is obviously terrible, but not sure what you mean by gone are the good ol days. Alienware laptops are still really good for what they are, and their reach into other brands has always been a mixed bag from the start. At least, Alienware can brag about having the best gaming monitor in the world at the moment - The Alienware AW3423DW - For also the best price being half or less than significantly worse monitors.
It's crazy just how expensive this is for Dell. If they just built a normal ATX computer it would be easier and cheaper for them, and perform much better. Instead they cling to an ancient design and build a bad product in the most expensive way possible
The only explanation i can think of is that Dell has warehouses full of old cases from the mid-2000s and for some reason they can't just throw them away. Maybe they went over their 5 year e-waste quota or pledged to use old inventory before stockpiling anything new? Or some out of touch executive thought they could save money by re-purposing obsolete crap and their customers wouldn't notice or care.
@@Macto5 The first explanation seems unlikely. Steel isnt scarce so a huge stockpile of cases would be stupid, especially because storage costs money. It's probably the latter, saving 5$ by using some ancient tooling while spending 100$ for all the extra engineering.
@@Macto5 Probably saying it's to stop global cooling, err global warming, err climate change. No need to stop polluting the rivers and oceans though, as those problems can be blamed on the average person instead of the corrupt corporations and the average idiot will say give the corporations more money and power to stop those "evil" average people from breathing and hurting the trees with their carbon dioxide. It's "sCiEnCe" after all! 🙃
My initial thought was NOS as well but that doesn't make sense. The only thing I've come up with is them having signed a contract for x number of units with that tooling and no way to get out of it... But that doesn't really make sense either
Ya know for around half of what they want for that monstrosity you could have built the same computer (or had someone build it for ya) and it would have lasted a whole lot longer. Alienware is synonymous with bad investments.
@@Just_Some_Dude_Geez You are on a channel that caters around people that purchase their own computer components, which is worthy of almost 2 million subs and millions of views per video
17:15 I love that cut. "There's so many ways to do that, that don't involve all this! I'd be impressed if." Cut to him mumbling about how terrible it must be to build in.
Engineers: "we need a bigger case to put liquid cooling in and have better airflow" Bean counters: "you need to use the same case for all computers of this size so engineer around what we give you" Engineers: "we cant make it run cooler so lets make some cool brackets that make us seem like cool engineers"
There’s nothing more entertaining than putting together builds in PCPartPicker for the same price Dell sells their crippled trash for. Even with a 12900KF and 3090, I have to pimp my configuration out to a ridiculous extent to get it to $5600 CAD (the price the top Alienware sells for here). Maximus boards, PCIe 4.0 drives, the whole deal.
At 5000usd it also needs to survive shipping. the weird GPU bracket and all the other GPU support start making much more sense in that light. As modern GPU's are so heavy that they can split the PCI-e socket in shipping and in general flex, get dislodged and then play pinball with the insides of the case. And break the tempered glass window while doing it. So it legit needs to survive shipping people throwing the box around and dropping it multiple times.
So you paid around 600USD depending on retailer markup on a single machine that most likely still works in 2022? The computer you are using most likely will not last for 28 years while ommadore 64s have with minimal maintenance.
I work part time as a repair agent at GeekSquad as a way to make more money, in my free time, in line with my main career. This video reminds me of those times people bring OEM "custom" builds in. I have to figure out how to work on it and, depending on the issue, it can be a real pain in the ass. I do find myself enjoying the process because the amount of over engineering is insane. It's almost like they needed to over engineer everything to justify something on the accounting end. I don't like prebuilds because, as your videos have found, 90% of the time they are not worth the price. TLDR: Your comments while tearing this down is exactly what happens when I'm working on something I haven't before or a prebuild. I hate the proprietary mobos with a passion as well. As always another quality video from GN!
Feels like 'competently overengineered into irrelevance' is a good summary of this system. At least it's clear where at least half of the price tag comes from. All that engineering time and custom brackets and widgets can't be cheap.
I feel like the look of the case even shows that. So overdone trying to look "cool", to the point of angling the damn thing. Meanwhile all it ends up looking like is the bastard child of a Dyson fan and a hand dryer
@@snoboreddotcom Indeed, instead of taking away a few parts and trying a different solution, it feels like they just kept adding parts and bits and widgets and frilly bits until it was time to ship it. Even early 2000s 'gamer' cases had more self-respect than this.
It's really something seeing how stuck in their ways Dell has gotten. Insistence on proprietary hardware, over-designed case and mountings, clear cost savings in all the parts that actually matter. It feels like the kind of problem Dell couldn't fix without looking at their approach from the ground up which they'll never do.
Companies get to a point we're they can't improve or change anything without massive involvement of every department. This is a prime example. R&D, quality, procurement, assembly, advertising, accounting, every level has to be involved. It would probably be easier to just start a new company.
@@xxtovarichxx A new department which would design things from the ground up would work. Reports directly to the CTO, CTO cracks the whip at all these departments playing office politics. Still hard to pull off if you can't convince pretty much the entirety of top management.
I think they design them this way so anyone from a contracted service company can show up and fix it without screwing it up. I used to repair dells for a large multi building office and any fool could service the "click and slide" parts in a minute. The only thing that took brains was swapping the motherboard or the PSU since they didn't click into place and you had to route wires.
I can't believe how low Alienware fell . As stated before AW had some of the coolest looking desktops in the early 2000's. Looking at this now , I feel bad for the people who buy the new Laptops and pay a ridiculous price for something that isn't worth it.
@@dnatech4477 I know you're aiming for a pithy comment here but they werent crap back in the early 2000's. You can say pricey/overpriced but definitely not laughable.
I had a desire to (politely) argue in the TH-cam comments here, and I am going to (politely) decline to do so. I wish everyone a lovely day instead. Good tidings!
Not trying to diminish anybody, but I stopped admiring Alienware after I built my first PC at the age of 18. This was the early 2000s - I had to actually sit down and educate myself on the components and talk to the weird dudes in the smoky, cluttered back rooms for the first time, rather than fawning over a glossy picture in an industry magazine or (god forbid) talking to one of the idiots at Circuit City. A little bit of adult education slays a LOT of teenage magazine heroes, let's put it that way. Alienware was, is and remains a catchy brand to sell garbage to children (and childlike adults).
Dell and HP gAmEr machines share the same problem: the companies making them are geared and tooled entirely for mass producing enterprise stuff, and everything that makes them great at doing that makes them SUCK COMPLETE SHIT in this segment.
the only HP I'd recommend is their bottom end Pavillion TW-2107-M, which is all of $500, and is okay as a disposable, entry level gaming PC (r3-5300G, RX 5500, 8 GB Ram and a 256GB SSD). maybe the extra $40 for a 512 SSD instead ort $100 for a5600G, but as is, it'll do e-sports games just fine. Its no better in quality than any of the others, but its at leasr appropriately cheap
I actually bought an HP Omen when the price of the rig was cheaper than the parts individually and its been amazing, besides the restrictive motherboard and lacking airflow.
@@Yodalemos Got one for my sisters birthday a year back, decent config, terrible airflow. slapped in a cheapo coolermaster 120mm aio and zip tied a 120mm fan to the bottom as intake. Runs 'ok'.
As someone that as a kid was really so enamored with the Alienware cases back in 2011, I saved up and bought an Aurora R3, then spent $200 on an ALX cas on eBay and switchd cases, so I essentially had an Alienware Aurora ALX. It was beautiful. Now, I would never, ever buy any of the Alienware PC's since they changed the form factor. They all look ugly as heck. Nope, if I were to buy a prebuilt PC, I'm going elsewhere, like CyberPower or Skytech.
If you want the original Alienware quality go to Origin Pc. They are the actual people who started Alienware until Dell wrecked the whole brand into the ground.
would have loved to see the VRM on this one. just a quick look under the VRM heatsink and maybe a close up of the components as a bonus. 4 phase + 12900KF in a 5000$ computer would have been amazing in all the wrong ways
Fancy seeing you here Soyo but glad it wasn't just me hoping for that. They really should bring back BZ for a special roasting of that VRM. I mean I'd love to hear you rant on it too if there are pictures of that VRM floating around.
15 years ago I walked into a computers plus with one of my best friends looking for some thermal paste. There was a computer being built that had about a thousand dollars worth of parts. So we inquired what it would cost to have a similar system built. They quoted us 10,000$ us. Both of us laughed together as we walked out the door. Haven't been to a computers plus since then. They closed not long after that.
@@InvntdXNEWROMAN, better yet - No Dell or any other OEM "computers" containing proprietary components. I just "upgraded" an older Lenovo pre-built for a friend and e-wasted everything, but the cpu, ram and hdd.
I own 3 locations in the midwest and every Alienware since the R3 looks identical to this one as far as the chassis go. They've been shit for decades at this point. When people try to sell or trade an Alienware They get pissed when I offer the going rate for the cpu, gpu, and ram for it. They are virtually unusable for parts and I refuse to sell trash in my stores.
@@InvntdXNEWROMAN dont mind them at all, get to charge "apple tax" on the labor rate. anyone who spends $5k on that POS has no problem paying $600 for a power supply and install.
the r15 is maxed out at $4,704, the r16 maxed at $6,036 the r14 doesnt even peak 3k no more but just pricing alone he was off. dont even make me go into everything else. i could wright a book on this guy
I love how they put so much effort into these mechanisms in the case, seemingly with the intent to make maintenance easier and tool-less, except it actually makes maintenance confusing and difficult and also the most important components are proprietary so you can't replace them anyway...
@@Doyouevenliftjpg Meanwhile, Dell is apparently paying people to troll the forum, either that or there is someone posting on one of the other threads on here that has a serious case of stockholm syndrome.
So, instead of just designing a case or using someone else's, Dell has dedicated teams of engineers to reverse engineer and design thing so they can keep using 30 year old case tooling. Dell is the April Fools of PC building.
30 years?! The hyperbole just never ends. For a clue, Dell seems to have introduced this sort of mo/bo formfactor in the Haswell era. So try 8ish instead. No, this is probably their biggest (or least small) remaining off-the-shelf chassis for an office / small workstation box, and since originally it wasn't nearly designed for the insane thermal loads of this system, they desperately tried to make it work. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig. They would have been way better off with a BTX chassis from the P4/C2D era, but I guess those are long gone now, plus they wouldn't be spinning a new board for such a relatively low-volume market anyway. To a company like Dell, this is small potatoes. BTW, 30 years ago you would have gotten an AT formfactor system with a Baby AT board. Your CPU might have had a small passive heatsink at the time, graphics cards generally none, and the noisy fixed-speed power supply fan would be responsible for pulling air through the system. Different times indeed.
You don't get it, Steve. Working at the Alienware assembly line is actually part of a special training programme for astronauts. It's an excellent arrangement. NASA gets highly qualified engineers who can work with one of a kind, decades old hardware, and Dell doesn't have to retool their chassis. Everybody wins.
My first "gaming pc" was an Alienware X51 for almost $2,000, which back in that time was a lot of money for a Rig but it was an Alienware yO!. It had a i7 3770 and a GT 545. 8GB RAM. Proprietary PSU meant no way to upgrade it other than barely having enough power to run a GTX 1050ti. It worked ok but I knew after having it a while that I'd never again buy a pre-built. After building an 8086K /GTX 1080ti build a few years ago, I decided to scavange some of the parts from the old X51 to build a simple rig for my ex at the time. I found an Asus B75M Micro ATX board on ebay that would fit the i7 3770 and GTX 1050ti SC. Upgraded the RAM to Gskill Ripjaws 16GB DDR3 1333 CL9 memory, a Corsair RM550x PSU, Cheap Corsair case and cheap SSD. For about 300$ I brought new life back into the parts and chucked all that proprietary Alienware shit in the trash. That PC still runs strong to this day. Alienware is a joke. Don't know who or why anyone still buys that crap. Smh. They are still proprietary junk.
I would love to see you rebuild the parts from this PC into a standard PC case and compare test results. Buddy of mine had an Alienware R10 and we went through rebuilding and upgrade headaches CONSTANTLY. Love the content, keep it up!
Engineers: "we need a bigger case to put liquid cooling in and have better airflow" Bean counters: "you need to use the same case for all computers of this size so engineer around what we give you" Engineers: "we cant make it run cooler so lets make some cool brackets that make us seem like cool engineers"
Repurposing of old inventory should be an end user thing, for fun. Companies need to get rid of these parts by selling them for cheap or at a loss and get them out of their warehouses and shops, and focus on engineering new hardware along with the times instead of spending that money and effort into engineering ways to repurpose these old parts. It's baffling that they do bundles and this kind of shit to get rid of these things.
My father was able to get the Ryzen R10 version down to $1500 and I got a Ryzen 7 5800x, 3060ti, and HyperX 3200Mhz ram. And I even got watercooling? How is this really matching up to be $5000? Does he just not do price matching or anything to make it cheaper
hey, what do you want for 5 grand? more than one pcie slot? more than one m.2 slot? wifi antennas? to be able to use either of the half size pci-e? what are you nuts? you cant expect any of those things for a measly 5 grand
@@ge2719 totally agree with you, just wanted to add that it looks like there is a Wi-Fi card on it, or something that looks like that, if you look at 17:55 left side of the ram slots next to this monstrosity of a motherboard's battery.
@@vaggelisaggelidis170 yeah these the to have cheap internal wi-fi/Bluetooth cards with a poxy little antenna. Rather than the full external ones with an extension antenna your expect from a high end motherboard.
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...Failienware?🤔 Had me lost in translation for a second. Then you opened the case ..🤣..🤧..😅
@@trexdel no man... noo..
when its that kind of monies i dont mind watching 3-10 videos about it since thats a mighty large shitsandwich to eat
That name is so perfect it must be fate
I really want to watch an interview with the engineers behind these pre builds. Too bad Dell will probably never allow that. Imagine going over the various weird things in the case and the engineers explain why it is done like that. Would be hilariously entertaining and educational.
So I was somewhat involved in developing this system (can’t say specifically for reasons) and want to clear something up. Everyone, and I mean everyone designing the r13 wanted a new chassis. It was a constant point of contention among the engineers and designers, led to a small loss of staff and proved to be a major hurdle.
Management refused to listen and doubled down, it was either make it work or get out. For many of us, the r13 was meant to be an industry redemption story, a system worth every penny. While management refused new chassis designs, they simultaneously demanded we shove as much tech (mechanically and otherwise) into it.
As GN said, all the fancy shmancy additions were implemented to fit a ridiculous number of high-performance components into a chassis designed for Office workers of yesteryear. It wasn’t necessary, but at the same time, it was.
“Bloat” is an understatement, half the development cycle was spent on making this work. Management gave us a reason, we were told that our chassis were over-produced in previous quarters and that all previous stock needed to be sold off before building in others.
We were incredibly disappointed with the company, we felt as if we failed our fans and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. Our lead quit after the r13 shipped, an incredibly talented individual that fought with management for years over stuff this channel regularly points out.
My main point in all of this is, please don’t blame the engineers and designers at Dell. we’re definitely not idiots, rather, we’re chained to Dell’s inherent greed and backwards managerial style. We don’t have any say, and if we did, things would be a hell of a lot different.
Sorry everyone, just about every colleague of mine watches this channel, hoping to get more of a voice in upcoming products.
If you have a minute, contact Dell and encourage them to “listen to the engineers!”, maybe that’ll make a difference!
It usually ends up being this way, guys actually doing the work on the ground telling management that their ideas are bad and there's an obvious better option. I feel like it happens so often it's becoming a truism.
This thing is like a German sports car with the amount of engineering it took to over complicate design. Everything might be somewhat forgiven if the thing performed well.
And for the airlow, let me guess. They insisted on the glass on the front because "it looks cool" and/or "it was like that last time". And didn't even allow the compromise of gaps or holes around the sides to at least give _some_ breathing room
@@blovio The even shittier side to that is.. when there is a massive success story... who gets the credit? Department heads and managers.
This whole project is a beautiful piece of engineering art. Be proud of that at least. As GN said, it's like a computer themed puzzle box.
It's just a shitty computer, and as you explain, it's not any of your faults.
It's like Dell knows that Steve hates terrible pre-builts and they cook them extra spicy so you'll be surprised at just how low they can go!
picturing that scene from the movie Waiting where each person in the kitchen takes a turn messing with a bad customers lunch, just this case its dell employees ruining steves day with a pre built.
Steve has said many times that he doesn't hate pre-builds. He hates bad products through and through.
@@I_Am_Hateful fromunda cheese!!
@@ejkk9513 no one said this, he said... "Steve hates TERRIBLE prebuilds"... the word terrible is there for a reason
@@ejkk9513 He said "Steve hates TERRIBLE prebuilts", not "Steve hates prebuilts".
Props to Alienware for always managing to make their products worse.
Well to be technical its Dell thats why its shit. Alianware is just their shitty gaming branding.
If you drop 5000 on a DELL / Alienware prebuilt at this point, you deserve to be ripped off.
Tbh kudos to them for making a multipurpose puzzle board
@@hamzabajwa1960 I feel like if you have 5000 and have no clue what you're doing, you would pay a PC nerd 200 bucks to go shop and build it for you in front of you. That's what I would do.
Achievement unlocked:
Out of this world experience®
I bought a faulty gaming laptop from them. After six failed repairs they tried to get me to sign a note on the repair slip that "it was not their fault" and told me it meant they wore a mask.... I started recording audio of my conversations with them after the 3rd repair and they gave me a full refund when I threatened to sue them for attempting to coerce me into signing a statement under false pretenses.
Very nice of you, fuck thouse guys 😼
Wow my friend is like a Dell fanboy I should show him these comments lmao
I'm not sure why but he is for some reason
@@pricklycatsss he needs to wake up
You should've sued anyway for the attempt alone. Or at least report it
I truly believe that if the McLaren F1 team ditched their Dell sponsorship their cars would run 30% cooler and 200 extra hp due to lack of bloatware.
They need to get rid of it. They are Eating plenty of ass. Hell, they are getting beaten by Haas.
And less porpoising!!
Still wouldn't help the honey badger
laughed so hard reading this 😆
I know this is a joke, but Norris had one hell of a drive in Imola last weekend. He had no business being 3rd in that car, but he did it anyways.
I loved how the “this is not a handle” warning just low key redeemed itself
the "handle" parts had me absolutely dying
For something that is not a handle it sure looked like every other handle I've ever seen in my life. So I'm glad they put that text on it. I mean on my own I'd have never figured out that was in fact not the handle it looked like.
You're not paying for just a computer Steve, you're paying for even MORE of the Dell experience!
*Out of this world experience™
First I thought you said "Dull Experience!" It might as well be that from the video.
But that's exactly the point here. We are looking at this problem from a wrong point of view - technology know-how instead of sales. Dell didn't make this for you or me or Steve. They know enthusiasts will build their own rig and never buy this piece of crap. They are selling a brand here for people with lots of cash on the hip, who just want the most expensive stuff. They don't get really what's inside, but it looks like a lot of engineering that supports the price tag.
@Hazard I remember reading somewhere years ago that HP, Asus and a few other brands use two thermal paste suppliers from Taiwan and Japan that dries out at exactly 2 years after applying. Sounds about right for your case lolol
Ah yes. The sweet Dell logo that we can stamp on Steve's forehead.
Good on them for exposing manufacturers' shameless tactics like this.
Yeah but the problem is they'll always be idiots to buy it and this shit will still exist cuz people are fucking dumb
Seriously, the motherboard IO thing is just dirty
@@GlorifiedGremlin Not to mention a 120MM AIO in a 5000 dollar build
@@GlorifiedGremlin Right?
It's impressive how Alienware continually makes the biggest, most unwieldy cases ever, and yet they still manage to have barely any space inside
They just slap a corvet body kit on a golf cart.
Yeah, like they wanted as many unused corners as possible to smuggle cocaine over the border.
half the case is just the robot-vagina knock-off console looking plastic exterior. the inside is the same chassis as a low-end dell office PC from 2005.
you know, for a brand called alien ware, they sure don't know their way around space very well
That has to be 20-30% bigger than an ATX mid tower, while being matx.
I bet it's larger than the matx Torrent.
I’m not a gamer so I’ve avoided this channel thinking it wasn’t for me. However, I really enjoy watching people who stick up for the little guy. I have to applaud the degree and detail in which this channel does that. Well done.
They should almost be called hardware nexus haha.
You'll end up finding this place to become your go-to channel for all things hardware related, followed closely by Hardware Unboxed. 👍 If Steve (GN) and Steve (HUB) haven't already given approval, I don't wanna know, and DON'T listen to that shill Linus. 😎
@@MafiaboysWorld I watch GamersNexus for facts and performance. I watch LTT for entertainment. I also watch Jay. They are all good.
@@MafiaboysWorld Exactly. And worse yet, Linus injects politics into his videos when he finds it convenient. Good way to alienate (no pun) viewers.
@@poitiers2853 yeah I don't think Linus cares, considering his channel's size.
That motherboard has to be the undisputed king of the "instant e-waste" category.
nahhh, its just "E-atx" XD
my front usb died, guess i'll have to send my 5k pc for a $1000 motherboard replacement that lasts 3 months
It sure is. All non standard parts just suck. If anything is wrong you can't do nothing with it. Non standard parts should be banned. Imagine paying 5k for something you can't fix without motherboard and case needing each other. Dead motherboard, replace the case. Problem with the case, can't use the motherboard. I really hate non-standard parts.
20:45 Hey for 5000$ it can make noise while bending 🤣🤣🤣
My previous motherboard was like this, Acer Predator Orion 3000..(got a pre-built 9700 w/2070S for 400 cad 2 years ago almost - normally wouldnever touch a pre-built) .. super disappointed seeing that after upgrading my cooler and having it be too tall for the case and then not being able to do sfa about it. Then I saw 2 9g boards at my local recyclers and grabbed them not knowing they were being sold DoA and getting disappointed more finding a busted socket on one..however the other actually worked fine and just had a weird ram configuration that threw me for a loop too also thinking it was dead until I read the manual (if using 1 or 2 of 4 slots, the insertion is reversed from almost every non-server motherboard I've seen, so very likely this is how they figured it was dead).. throw that with the 9700 and the 2070S+3060 now w/new 970pro (pb came with sn512) in a Fractal Meshify C and now I have something that doesn't shut off when it goes over 100w cpu for more than 10s....
..and also, a pile of e-waste (stupid proprietary motherboard and case).. such a dumb motherboard format
I used to work for Dell, i was on the Alienware support team. support was separated for desktops laptops and alienware had its own set of people. we had all the tech "papers" for them. the components used were of the lowest grade possible. we had to upsell and at least give the customer a sales pitch, at least once in every conversation with customers. OMG the pricing on the parts Dell had us selling, i would personally would never even consider any of the parts of any quality. but dell wanted, even the support team, to believe that the parts were of top quality as to be more convincing to the customer. our test lab had a bunch of "burnt out" parts. if you knew what the margin of profit items were , you would flipping flip. many of the parts were salvaged of older "dead units". the margin on some items were over 500% profit for Dell. We could see the prices and the margin for Dell. The tool we used\ showed us the pricing and the profit margin. some agents main purpose for doing support on Dell was to earn more for selling. yes dell did have an incentive program for agents that sold and sell they did. Not a bad extra amount earned in the month.
This does not surprise me at all. Just opening a dell computer and having a look inside even over 20 years ago you knew it was bad. It's just surprising to see nothing has changed but hey, if the scam works and people are buying the garbage what can you do? I've never been a fan of prebuilt computers in general but people need to be aware of companies like dell that they're really bad and something that should be avoided at all cost.
@@huldu I was just about to get a Dell PC but ended up changing my mind lol and I didn't even know all this stuff so thank god.
You used to work for Dell. Tell me you quit because of your morality.
@@huldu i left due to conflicting approaches to how the teams were managed. and because the winning mentality was to sell more than support i didnt want to have anything to do with dell anymore. literally if you combed the support team, from the 30 ish people on the whole team you would find maybe only 1/3 that had a good knowledge of tech , which these people carried the main "tech" support, from ticket to lab testing to customer solution. 1/3 had basic pc skills and 1/3 that did constant "training" to learn the basics. lol. now whether or not you consider ,me not wanting to sell anything and leaving the dell ecosystem a moral choice or not is totally on you and anyone else curious. i was and still am, not a sales rep just a PC/Server tech guy. and trying to sell to a customer that called for help isnt my thing. nor should any tech persons requirements while doing their jobs
i used to fix these at the depot. man it was glitchy bios dog sh...
"We bought this 5000$ thrashheap with our own money!" had me chuckle. Keep the blade keen, GN!
Its for a good Start for sure. lol
Almost spat my coffee out when he said that, such a good line!
@Ivan Zhao If this product was modestly priced, you might have a point. But it's not.
..and I bet even if it was something he normally did (which I'd doubt anyway) that this is so bad he'd feel like an a$$ for reselling it to recoup even half.
That line reminded me of the Firefly pilot when Mal shows Zoe the ship for the first time, and she asks him "You paid money for this? On purpose?"
Dell saved $40 by repurposing an old PC chassis...then spend thousands engineering and making parts to fit the old case.
It blows my mind. This PC is like a Kit-Car. You get a Ferrari engine, brakes, suspension, wheels/tyres. Then go to your garage and stuff it into an MR2 and expect the good results.
@@tbrowniscool and the most tragic thing is - leave MR2 alone and you will have a decent car, not mutiled piece of junk with some "good" parts
@@TheMadYetti EXACTLY! I mean it must take more effort to get all these top end bits of hardware and cram them into a tiny but also massive box with no airflow. The mind boggles
@@tbrowniscool I would bet that it's not the mechanical engineering of the parts in the case itself that's extremely expensive, so much as the engineering behind manufacturing and assembling them in a cost effective manner. Which, based on what I'm seeing here, certainly has been a failure (nobody would call this product "affordable" in ANY way)
@@tbrowniscool a donk with an electric supercar engine
Oh that gap at the front isn't for airflow. That's likely just a build tolerance issue
😂 their manufacturing is dogsh*t
I thought it was a crush zone so when you drop that awful case it absorbs the shock
Tesla gap! XD
5k and they still have a regular HD in there. Wow.
And where is the DVD drive?
@@louistournas120 dvd drive? Who has those anymore! Lol
Lmao an HDD paired with a 3090, totally makes sense. Surely that HDD will be able to stream 4k textures at blazing speeds.
Seriously they could have put a sata ssd or better U.2 connection and put in a nice 15mm enterprise ssd.
@@xmateinc me but I have bluray RW
The only thing impressive about Alienware is how long they have stayed in business.
only reaosn they can stay alive is because dell
No shit most people don't know any better and think Dell is a great brand...
@@prizrak-br3332 XPS13s are pretty good for work purposes
@@prizrak-br3332 dell makes some good products just not when it comes to gaming. they make good lap tops, good monitors
@@imwithyou38 Laptop is debatable even. Even Acer can beat Dell many times.
This case is bordering on the Rube Goldberg-level of design. Can't wait for the R-rating of thermals to show how badly the heat is kept trapped within!
Just waiting for them to add some sort of 'Ball Bearing Slide' where i have to rotate my case in different directions in order to take out my Hard Drive.
Badly. Built a lot of relatively powerful computers into small cases and I would bet a lot of money on the GPU basically frying itself pretty soon, you simply can't cram 3090 wattage with two fans into that space and expect the heat to really go anywhere. It's mind-blowing that this is actually designed at all, you get similar thermal results just not giving af and cramming the components into a small case. Pay half the price for components, have the neighbor's kid do it, and you get the same thing. Except if the neighbor's kid knows anything about computers, then you're going to get way better results :D
Rube Goldberg is a perfect analogy. He would have been envious. And probably would have purchased one of these simply for the joy of taking it apart to see how it all fit together. I'm currently running a 6-year--old Alienware Aurora R5 that, while also over-engineered a bit, is nothing like this new one, and it's been absolutely solid and stable all these years with zero issues. And so now that I'm looking to replace my R5 with a new one, I naturally was thinking of just getting another Aurora. Glad I watched this video before I did so. I guess I'll have to keep watching this channel until Steve finds something he likes.
You figure that some marketing douche would have come up with some garbage about a "thermal stealth system" by now.
You know. Like how some Sci-Fi ships use a system that keeps all the heat inside for a while to reduce their thermal signature.
This must be kind-of like that.
The Sci-Fi systems have to turn off after [TIME] to let the heat out, or they will kill the crew.
This system needs to turn off before the built-up heat melts the solder joints.
You don't understand the design at all. Your suppose to use the gpu card to cook your Hot Pockets.
I give props to whomever designed that 30 year old chassis and the person who marketed it to Dell and HP. That was money in the bank for them
Probably just got shafted like the dude that made DOS.
I can’t believe I used to buy Alienware , thanks to channels like yours I now build and never looked back
Before I got my own pc, I use to always want an alien bet never settled with one, and I'm glad I didn't
''I'm nngh.... I'm uuurgh.... I'm b-bUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUULDING!!!!''
Bevor it whas owned by dell it whas a bunch of geeks and gamers making them and they had qualitq for the price but since dell it became a cash grab sadly
Pre Dell Alienware was fantastic
I bought two Alienwares and bricked the last one with a botched Dell bios update. I went with meta pc for my replacement. I will never buy Alienware again.
Alienware's approach to problem solving: Making three lefts to turn right.
Well at least it fits the name...
More like 31 left turns to make a right
I have the X17 R2 laptop and it's really really good, but this is scary
More like 63 lefts to make a right
I remember being a Kid and wanting Alienware all the time. I imagine their branding is mainly focused on spoiled rich kids and apparently Surfer dudes that enjoy tech. BUILD Forever.
They used to be good back in the day.
I don't remember when but at some point it was worth the cost.
@@enriquecabrera2137 Yeah I’d say if you got them in the prime gaming days they were pretty worth it and weren’t a ton of money.
@@enriquecabrera2137 when DELL bought them, everything went down the shitter.
@@enriquecabrera2137 I would guess 2011-2013 ish
When we were kids, they were a small shop in Florida that hand built bad ass computers. They sold to Dell sometime om 2006. Which was the downfall.
Dell feels like the General Motors of the PC world. They have some genuinely fantastic engineers that can build around a problem, but are choked back by weird or just inane bean counter cost cutting decisions.
the cost cutting is probably a result of the over engineering stupid little shit...personally id rather have top tier ram and an actual cooling solution worthy of a 3090 and 12th gen cpu rather than a fancy little clip for a $5000 computer
Can confirm. I work for Dell. Love my position there. But sometimes these decisions are asinine. I've told my boss that for enterprise they are great but I wouldn't recommend them for home use with a 10 ft pole
but the cheap version of General Motors 🤣
It's like it was trying to be a toolless workstation or server chassis...but didn't quite make it.
@@KingZeus96 As someone who uses some of Dells low end enterprise products, I do like them. Unfortunately, even there things like weird Amphenol SAS connectors mean Dell is going their own way. Plus having to mod a SAS card's PCI ID or the server won't even boot with it in the internal slot is just asinine.
The products are good, but Enterprise users are aware of these caveats and purchase appropriately.
If I had to put these together M-F 9-5 I'd go insane.
i remember always wanting an alienware as a kid so bad. it's so disappointing to see what dell has done to the alienware brand :(
By the time Alienware hit the scene I was already building my own. Before that I wanted a Falcon Northwest so bad. They were pretty much the only company that had cool-ish looking cases. They were still the off white cases of old but they were custom and looked cool.
I cant believe AW put green sticks of ram in that for $5000. Awful.
The first year or two of Alienware were some really nice case paint jobs and reasonable parts inside them, it is a real shame what Dell did to that.
The Alienware laptops from pre-2015 were overpriced, but they looked and felt premium, laptops were the only good part of Alienware. But Dell then and now has the worst quality control right up there with Newegg, and its annoying hard to figure out shit like not enough thermal paste.
@@RJT80 I still think custom painting is pretty cool
they were overpricedd proprietry junk even before dell got into the picture, nostalgia is clouding your memory
I don't know why Alienware is so hell-bent on taking good hardware and cramming it into a plastic and metal autoclave posing as a PC tower.
Most likely to make it impossible to go anywhere else to get it fixed. I don't think I've ever seen a motherboard with that shape before. They are counting on those that don't know a lot about computers that just need something to work to likely buy them. This seems like it was purposely made to fail.
@@cael_1303 in their defence the warranty is rock solid. Dell usually comes in clutch and will even replace your laptop with a newer brand if something fails. Still a crap desktop tho
@@Sm-rd4wq for the sole fact, as Linus proved, you get conned into an extended warranty even if you wanted it or not.
ItLoOkScOoL
Style over function. The kind of person who buys this computer wants a computer with high-TDP desktop parts but which is as compact as possible. Hence the need for the complex air-flow design. You know the old car salesman mantra "there is a butt for every seat", right? Well, there is a user for every computer, I guess. Someone out there is willing to pay thousands more for a slightly more compact and more stylish tower. As long as it's not the only choice out there (which is the situation Apple users were subjected to with the cylindrical Mac Pro), I am OK with it. Because that's the power of the PC ecosystem: diversity.
The CEOs kid designed the case and picked the components, and then a team of 50 engineers were put work trying to make it not burst into flames by installing ducting and high speed fans.
It looks like it was designed to be nothing but a huge thermal path, but then someone covered up the intake...
It's homers car
Are you serious?
Glad the talented employees left Alienware to start Origin PC.
This kind of review makes me feel so much better about building my own!
Literally the only thing you can reasonably reuse of this whole computer is the CPU, GPU and maybe the fans and HDD/SSD, tho the two latter are probably really bad. The AiO has way too short tubes, the PSU way too short cables, the case is proprietaty BS, the MB is proprietary BS.
This is insane. I am a mechanical engineer myself and completly agree with Steve, the engineering is good. Just applied completly wrong. It's way to expensiv and solves no problems, for this application. This is outstandingly bad, omg
Completely agreed here. Not even the RAM is any good!
@@GamersNexus they managed to make the RAM proprietary? Or is it just so bad that it belongs in the e waste shredder?
@@ZE0XE0 the RAM is just shit for 5 grand
That's the thing though. You can't halfway engineer something well. You have to look at the whole picture, and if it's bad, so is the engineering.
Imagine getting an engineering degree and getting a job at Dell, only to spend your time over engineering something unnecessary.
Plus it's not easy getting an engineering degree
I was so close to buying a 4k version of this computer because i was scared to build my own, i ended up building my own and im so glad. I truly did dodge a bullet, this is sad that motherboard is so sad to look at considering 5k went into it, im glad gamers nexus has the balls to call them out on their shit. Great video!
Even if you don't wanna build yourself, there at least few good companies that will build it for you with your selected parts!
@@wrath1902 and not to mention the entire cost would still come out to be less than Alienware's!
Why would a company that (presumably) has very smart engineers working for it spend so much effort on making something good (ATX computers) into crap? Like, you have to actually try pretty hard to get it offensively wrong nowadays, and yet Dell still...
That's the craziest part! Excellent question that Dell needs to ask itself. This is a LOT of engineering work to unnecessarily reinvent the wheel into a square.
@@GamersNexus Time for GN to rock up to Dell's headquarters and ask some questions:)
Well you have mechanical and electrical engineers might need to let the mechanical have a go at being electrical engineers surely couldn't be any worse
I was just wondering the same. Is it actually cheaper for them to manufacture and create from scratch these horrible components? It has to...
Exactly. And just for a thought, you buy high end parts to perform worse than they could. They intentionally crippled down the performance by making this a toaster. Just sad and unbelievable what damage to prebuild industry this does.
I love that the side panel release sounds exactly like my 14 year old optiplex 755, Dell never changes.
Sounds just like my 9020 too 😂😂
uh yeah pretty sure a spring release a decade later is still gonna sound like a spring release. dell does change but yall so sucked into these shit ass reviewers that YOU not dell YOU keep the same biased opinion.
This video should be titled “Steve slowly losing his sanity for 27 minutes”
what you mean ? 20:45 🤣🤣
You haven't seen anyone fall into insanity yet until you've seen UberDanger's review of Diddy Kong Racing.
Hey!! It's you John!! Love your stuff dude! I miss the livestreams!
"nope that's not a handle"
I remember waaaaay back when Alienware was being advertised in 3DMark 2003 and thinking, "hmm, I wonder how their systems stack up against DIY builds?" I worked as a bench tech back then and the first time one finally came across my bench I had my answer. They've only gotten worse since then. GN had a great line about Alienware in another video; "Dell is designing to appeal to what grandparents think their grandkids want"
Lets not even mention the fact that the prices are a rip off. Even mainline dell is made for dumb parents who don't know other companies are cheaper. My campus sold exclusively dell that was bumped up almost 40% over HP and Asus products down the road at best buy. Not saying best buys better, but its better than Dells garbage.
yeah I remember when I first saw one of their systems advertised. I thought hmm that expensive but maybe it's worth it. A couple of minutes of looking at the specs and checking against component prices and I was shocked at just how much of a rip off it was.
Because Grandparents have money to spend. They don’t care what you want from your computer, they just want money
@@goldenhate6649depends, professionally, the dell support contracts are great, it really is just that dell can't be bothered to deal with consumers
That Alienware sold to Dell who retains the names as basically glorified XPS boxes.
When you think Steve has reached his peak and there is no way he can roast big tech more then he already have done so... then he brings out the falienware code
This reminds me of the proprietary designs of everything when I worked on an IBM PC assembly line. One odd-ball one was the PC 300PL that was their attempt at a toolless mount for the motherboard. It slid into a slot in the case and seated into a riser card mounted to the case and secured with a locking lever. Only it never stayed securely seated.
Look how well it turned out for IBM.... The Think brand was sold to Lenovo, who seems to be teaming up with Dell to make the most disposable e-waste machines ever.
It's incredible that they spend a lot more effort to make a bad case "work" than they would to create a new case. Just mind boggling.
Sunk cost fallacy. Management was probably like "we want to sell this or old stock" and got the engineers to work the problem and ended up costing a lot but "works already done, let's not spend more even though it would result in a cheap but more quality product"
@@duke605 It must be hell working as an engineer for Dell, having to devote so much time & effort & money to making a bad solution almost (but not quite) work, all because your bosses are stupid and insist on that over a better solution that's cheaper.
This build is probably 0.1% of their sales, but they're able to offer it _because_ it's the same form factor as all their other machines. Having it actually perform well, which would benefit the customer, is a distant second to cutting costs which benefits the shareholders.
@@cybisz2883 I'd be happy if Dell was the only company where that happened.
A companion piece with a build showing " this is what you could have bought" would be nice.
A great content while GPU is starting to be affordable as well
You can "upgrade" to the 3090 Ti, get it for its MSRP of $2000, and still have $3000 left to build something way better than this POS. Probably have money left over in the end. What a friggin joke.
Probably a high End Pc with custom watercooling if selfbuilt
Yep. A 12900K, 3090ti and a custom loop.
Where I live, it’s still a better option lol
Bless the 3k cad 3090s
I had a pit in my stomach watching this knowing that there are actual suckers out there who ignorantly bought this POS. This feels like an absolute scam of a prebuilt and more people need to be more informed so that no one will buy this and Dell will quit this asinine charade.
It's such a shame that this is actually a preconfigured build on their website, recommended high up for anyone with money to get duped into.
@@GamersNexus shame is an understatement. I can tell you guys were frustrated about this and I would be absolutely livid. Though this vid gives me strong emotions, I cant wait for part 2! Thank you for exposing the horrors of buying from System Integrators, I use your vids to help people better understand and get a better value for their money.
The blame is 100% on Dell and on us as a society to let them continue as a business. We let them get away with things that should be crimes like their manufacturing of e-waste or ACTUAL crimes like their warranty scams.
doesnt surprise me that they sucker people into this garbage. My local radio station has an advert running for dell saying to call dell so dell can help them pick out the perfect pc just for them. Im absolutely sure junk like this is going to be sold to the old lady down the street who called trusting that dell would be honest and help them.
I keep trying to talk my brother out of buying one, hes dead set on it and won't be reasoned with. Even knowing my 30 years of experience in IT
Alienware PCs are one of the main reason many people think building your own PC is an impossibility.
That's too much money to waste on a Dell Alienware.
Holy sh!t that's no lie. Here where I am that's more than fifty grand (exchange rate)
$1 is too much, to be fair
Too much for most PCs in general
Really? No one takes the opportunity to say "No shit, Sherlock!"? No one?! xD
@@potatoes5829 unless you need it for very heavy workloads, no
Do you think Dell watches these and goes: “Man what a fool, he doesn’t realize we could be doing even worse if we actually tried!”
I'm thinking they're going more like: "He just doesn't understand the incredible forethought and overall genius we put into this design"
I think Dell's builders are so freaking clueless they sit there going "Steve? He's got videos on... wha... TH-cam? What is that?
@@nickllama5296 As the video explains the builders are employing great skill to tackle the issues of an ancient chassis, but to no good effect. Someone in charge is takethemoneyandrun.
that'd be way too much work for Dell.
@@Safetytrousers 100% this. the usage of basically a 90s mid tower chassis being built out to a full size tower is a clear indicator of this.
This pc looks like it was styled in 2001 for 2022, and ironically in 2022 it looks like it came from 2001...A space odessy.
L e l.
it reminds me of early 2000s mac computers
space oddity
yeah, alienware might be a giveaway.
Laugh all you want at Dell, they've clearly got a working time portal.
I miss pre-Dell Alienware. I had one of their laptops, it was incredible.
In Germany, we call this „Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahme“ which means doing something that generates a lot of work, no matter the usefulness
you have a word for anything, don't you?
@@aberinox And the veryawesomelongonestoo. 😉
@Susanna Yes, that is why I put the english ones together...
Haha der war gut
Ehre haha
I think most of the 5000 dollars goes to the intergalactic shipping costs they pay when importing their branded components from Homeworld.
Doing their best to catch up with our advanced technology, but it's outdated before it even arrives. 😅
Damn they’re innovating prebuilt disappointment PCs.
hahaha, we'll be out of a job!
@@GamersNexus my local radio station keeps playing advertisements for Dell's call center that's supposed to help customers pick out a PC. I think its that same call center that rips off its customers by adding items to the bill that the customer specifically said they did not want.
Exactly this. They wanted to bring the competition to GN's home turf.
What amazes me the most is just how similar some of those parts inside resembled the ones from my 1998 era Dell PC. I swear that back fan grille is the exact same design. It makes me wonder if it actually IS the same basic case just with a fancy plastic shell.
thats the neat part, youre correct. Its just a "barely office grade" chassis with "gamery" plastic housing around it
"Can you hear the Ronald McDonald in the motherboard?"
Steve slowly losing his mind at Dell's bullshit, lol.
Flexing the motherboard gave me unsettling anxiety
@@aaz1992 why breaking it would be a service to humanity
"I buy Alienware PC to flex on others.
The motherboard itself is literally the ultimate flex"
~Weird flex from a coping Alienware customer, 2022 AD~
Dell Alienware: "Engineering solutions to engineered problems"
"engineering problems for already engineered solutions"
That's giving them a little too much credit. More like: "self-made solutions for self-made problems".
Worse than Apple this point
By "redesign" they mean a slightly different hunk of plastic on top of the same 2008 chassis.
How many trees had to die for this disaster to happen?
How many Indians that Dell Hire to make this? Probably 15 of them
It probably single-handedly doubled gas prices with that amount of plastic
It's more like a 2000 chassis now
It's not even just plastics , it's unnecessary mechanical parts used and proprietary parts used that cannot be reused and very hard to repair
And these companies will be first one to complain about pollution on twitter
Watching this dude physically struggle to find the words to describe this experience was both enjoyable and hilarious 😆
its not the pc its him lmao hes smirking at that beauty the whole time. trust me he didnt mean 85% of what he said. everyone got the same biased opinion but never had the equipment to talk.
My main issue with this case is it's not even compact. It has every drawback of a custom compact case with no upside.
This is a disservice to aliens. I don't think even aliens would build a computer THIS bad.
Think different!
aliens should probably consider suing dell
@@Chkoupinator "Nah, we're just gonna blow up your planet for this." - Aliens, probably.
justifiable
Ever played destroy all humans? Watch invader zim? Mars attacks? Aliens don't have to be smrt! 👽
Steve just did all the marketing for them. Dell: Amazing Engineering for unnecessary problems. Dell: Innovative, but for not any good reason.
I think you can get a similarly built PC to this for under $5000. I have a pretty much loaded up liquid cooled R12 with a RTX 3080, intel i9, etc for just over $3k Canadian on sale. That was 18 months ago. I did some cooling mods but still nobody was building a PC with those specs for that price with the Covid availability issues. This PC has been issue free so far and is only used for flight sim gaming.
Any suggestion for flight sim equipment? I haven't flied in over a year so I turned to flight simulation and I've been looking for yokes and throttles for the best combination
@@GuilhermeGuidugli I’m really happy with my Honeycomb gear. Yolk, throttle quadrant and right now i have Logitech pedals. Not the most high end setup but definitely gives a decent feel.
i have 13th gen i9, 3080 10gb, 32gb ddr5 6000mhz, z690, 5000d, etc cost me 2500. got it two weeks ago. i thought i did well.
@@sixpathnice rig man
Companies that build computers like this are definitely the reason why a majority of people believe building computers is so complicated.
People think that because a) they're fucking morons, objectively speaking, and b) companies are ran by complete fucking morons who pay actually competent people to try to engineer around the unbelievable stupidity, cheapness, greediness, and overall sleaze demanded of them by the uppers, complete with said uppers locking everything down.
Tech is literally why I stopped believing in Capitalism. Tech and vidya especially the 2019-2022 period showed me it's flat out as terrible, incompetent, and inefficient as the fucking Soviet Union, where a handful of companies like Dell-Packard, Apple-vidia, etc. are going to own literally everything and Jensen will charge people a "low bargain price" of $200 a month to stream games through some nVidiaTM ServerfarmTM.
When I was a kid it wasn't fucking hard to learn about computers. If you could sneak or find an old one you could open it up, take a look around, actually do neat things in Windows 95.
Today it's not programs, executables, applications, no it's all "apps" by these ugly skintight jean wearing hipster retards renting out broom closets in SIlicon Valley chasing the drago--I mean the dream, ran by moronic boomers who know nothing, saying all engineers need to turn everything including operating systems into locked down mobile horseshit including even desktop OS's (remember win8? yeah that was greaaaat).
Like it's made by design to be something you can't tinker or poke around with, and hacker culture of the 90s died completely with pocket snitch aka touch computer/internet ready phone culture, also arising during the Twitter/FB era being pushed by basically the spooks who themselves were pushed by the same utterly moronic executive tiers in politics who wanted something to replace CARNIVORE/ECHELON with a full on blanket surveillance system that's opt-in. This was in turn demanded of the few intelligent people like engineers (or intelligence assets) by the same moronic boomers who wanted to engineer around a problem that's the direct result of their policy failures, like say terrorist attacks by the very same people said exec board/boomers just told us all to train and fund, so now we need to overengineer blanket surveillance like an Information Awareness Office.
This is because the executive board is every single bit as corrupt, senile, and geriatric as the late 1980s Politburo and this is true throughout all sectors of our society. Dell is merely one small symptomatic outrcropping of this by MBA major apparatchik partymen, in one small industry like tech. It's not complicated; it's easy af to learn and understand. It's deliberately made to be as locked down as possible to where you feel liek you need to fucking change microcode because they're locking shit down at the firmware level, and deliberately engineering things to be e-waste, fueled by the tears of Chinese slave children and the discarded souls of once noble engineers.
Truly some alien ware 👀
Maybe we just don't understand this weird technology properly. Their superior genius is thousands of years ahead of us.
Okay so its trash from the future, that explains so much haha.
Those poor desperate aliens
Well I guess we’re safe
They could be thousand of years behind us and still be considered alienware. Would explain a lot🤣
But Steve, if they ditched the old shitty case and re-branded a regular ATX spec case, then they wouldn't be able to use their proprietary motherboard and PSU formats that only fit their specific cases, which would subvert their actual overall goal of producing e-waste.
Huh. Good point! We didn't think of it from the evil corporate perspective, but that was foolish of us!
you’re the goat steve not one channel I’ve enjoyed watching more over these years
If anyone was on the fence, I bought the mod mat and screw driver set and love them. Of the many brands of screwdrivers I own for working on PCs, I always gravitate towards the GN screwdrivers because of the grip and magnetic bit. Having said that, I love the vids!
Thanks so much for trying our stuff out! Glad you like them!
Magnetic bit is beyond clutch.
This feels like "Spend a dollar to save a penny" in terms of trying to avoid designing and implementing a new chassis. At least this makes the system seem oddly nostalgic
So many large companies do this. I've sat in on hour+ long meetings on how to get reimbursed for a $20 part. No one on that call makes less than $20/hr!
Honestly, its more like spend 99 cents to save a dollar.
To them, its literally a cost comparison, and this seems to have won, by seemingly a small margin.
The newest entry to the "Better Than Dell" series. Alienware showing that you could be paying scalper prices for your prebuilt system. 🤦
With scalpers you actually get the product you want though, here you pay too much get a worse product
@@rowan-paul They want it otherwise they wouldn't order it in the first place, they just pay too much for it.
Dude, it's a Dell. It's not "better than Dell" and very likely is worse than the PC we're using as the "standard".
@@samiraperi467 A normal Dell, you won't pay 5K for. You need that special premium Alienware badge for that special type of ripoff from the Dell company. 😉 Also, the "Better than Dell" is a running theme in my comments from this series so do keep up sweetie. 🤦
@@MafiaboysWorld lmao my friend got a worse dell for 5k (x0.75 because Canadian currency) and we begged him to not get it for a few days lmao
I bought an Alienware m17x in 2012 when I was in school for visual effects. The computer never ran consecutive for 30 days. It was constantly needing repaired. 3k for what amounts to a paperweight. They can’t cool themselves properly and they mark up everything insanely high
Alienware has a place in my heart still, once upon a time I unboxed a big ass red alienware 17 inch laptop, with sexy metal body, pre DELL days, downloaded and maxed out Crisis for the first time in my life and was blown away, using the laptop on my lap burnt my legs, but the pain was worth it, gone are the good ol days.
Ahh. I remember those days. Mine was blue. It was around the same time too.. I remember being so pumped to play that game.
This pre built is obviously terrible, but not sure what you mean by gone are the good ol days. Alienware laptops are still really good for what they are, and their reach into other brands has always been a mixed bag from the start. At least, Alienware can brag about having the best gaming monitor in the world at the moment - The Alienware AW3423DW - For also the best price being half or less than significantly worse monitors.
you can fry an egg on gaming laptops.
To much heat might have given your balls cancer lol
blown away by the max speed fans, I suppose
It's crazy just how expensive this is for Dell. If they just built a normal ATX computer it would be easier and cheaper for them, and perform much better. Instead they cling to an ancient design and build a bad product in the most expensive way possible
The only explanation i can think of is that Dell has warehouses full of old cases from the mid-2000s and for some reason they can't just throw them away. Maybe they went over their 5 year e-waste quota or pledged to use old inventory before stockpiling anything new? Or some out of touch executive thought they could save money by re-purposing obsolete crap and their customers wouldn't notice or care.
@@Macto5 The first explanation seems unlikely. Steel isnt scarce so a huge stockpile of cases would be stupid, especially because storage costs money. It's probably the latter, saving 5$ by using some ancient tooling while spending 100$ for all the extra engineering.
@@Macto5 Probably saying it's to stop global cooling, err global warming, err climate change. No need to stop polluting the rivers and oceans though, as those problems can be blamed on the average person instead of the corrupt corporations and the average idiot will say give the corporations more money and power to stop those "evil" average people from breathing and hurting the trees with their carbon dioxide. It's "sCiEnCe" after all! 🙃
My initial thought was NOS as well but that doesn't make sense.
The only thing I've come up with is them having signed a contract for x number of units with that tooling and no way to get out of it... But that doesn't really make sense either
Maybe they're trying too hard to stand out. They achieved that though, in the worst possible way.
the level of stress on steves face during the teardown is giving me the weirdest mix of joy and anxiety and thats why i love this damb channel.
Ya know for around half of what they want for that monstrosity you could have built the same computer (or had someone build it for ya) and it would have lasted a whole lot longer. Alienware is synonymous with bad investments.
And how many consumers know how to build their own computer? This post is catered for all of you computer geeks.
@@Just_Some_Dude_Geez You could spec this build at any given tailored PC builder and still spend half as much.
@@Just_Some_Dude_Geez You are on a channel that caters around people that purchase their own computer components, which is worthy of almost 2 million subs and millions of views per video
17:15 I love that cut. "There's so many ways to do that, that don't involve all this! I'd be impressed if." Cut to him mumbling about how terrible it must be to build in.
hahaha, some of the editing team's brilliance!
The level of over-engineering is almost impressive. Just imagine if they'd put that money elsewhere.
Engineers: "we need a bigger case to put liquid cooling in and have better airflow"
Bean counters: "you need to use the same case for all computers of this size so engineer around what we give you"
Engineers: "we cant make it run cooler so lets make some cool brackets that make us seem like cool engineers"
There’s nothing more entertaining than putting together builds in PCPartPicker for the same price Dell sells their crippled trash for. Even with a 12900KF and 3090, I have to pimp my configuration out to a ridiculous extent to get it to $5600 CAD (the price the top Alienware sells for here). Maximus boards, PCIe 4.0 drives, the whole deal.
At 5000usd it also needs to survive shipping. the weird GPU bracket and all the other GPU support start making much more sense in that light.
As modern GPU's are so heavy that they can split the PCI-e socket in shipping and in general flex, get dislodged and then play pinball with the insides of the case. And break the tempered glass window while doing it.
So it legit needs to survive shipping people throwing the box around and dropping it multiple times.
I just can't imagine paying $5000 for that but the last pre-built computer I owned was a Commadore 64 in the 80's
So you paid around 600USD depending on retailer markup on a single machine that most likely still works in 2022? The computer you are using most likely will not last for 28 years while ommadore 64s have with minimal maintenance.
@@yumri4 I think you're confused? He means that he builds his own now I'm fairly certain.
I work part time as a repair agent at GeekSquad as a way to make more money, in my free time, in line with my main career. This video reminds me of those times people bring OEM "custom" builds in. I have to figure out how to work on it and, depending on the issue, it can be a real pain in the ass. I do find myself enjoying the process because the amount of over engineering is insane. It's almost like they needed to over engineer everything to justify something on the accounting end. I don't like prebuilds because, as your videos have found, 90% of the time they are not worth the price.
TLDR: Your comments while tearing this down is exactly what happens when I'm working on something I haven't before or a prebuild. I hate the proprietary mobos with a passion as well. As always another quality video from GN!
Feels like 'competently overengineered into irrelevance' is a good summary of this system.
At least it's clear where at least half of the price tag comes from. All that engineering time and custom brackets and widgets can't be cheap.
Not to mention all the tooling to make all those plastic parts.
I feel like the look of the case even shows that. So overdone trying to look "cool", to the point of angling the damn thing. Meanwhile all it ends up looking like is the bastard child of a Dyson fan and a hand dryer
@@snoboreddotcom Indeed, instead of taking away a few parts and trying a different solution, it feels like they just kept adding parts and bits and widgets and frilly bits until it was time to ship it.
Even early 2000s 'gamer' cases had more self-respect than this.
@@snoboreddotcom LMAOOO😂😂😂😂😂😂
It's really something seeing how stuck in their ways Dell has gotten. Insistence on proprietary hardware, over-designed case and mountings, clear cost savings in all the parts that actually matter. It feels like the kind of problem Dell couldn't fix without looking at their approach from the ground up which they'll never do.
Companies get to a point we're they can't improve or change anything without massive involvement of every department. This is a prime example. R&D, quality, procurement, assembly, advertising, accounting, every level has to be involved. It would probably be easier to just start a new company.
@@xxtovarichxx A new department which would design things from the ground up would work. Reports directly to the CTO, CTO cracks the whip at all these departments playing office politics. Still hard to pull off if you can't convince pretty much the entirety of top management.
@@xxtovarichxx agreed, maybe not never change it moreso they can't
I think they design them this way so anyone from a contracted service company can show up and fix it without screwing it up.
I used to repair dells for a large multi building office and any fool could service the "click and slide" parts in a minute. The only thing that took brains was swapping the motherboard or the PSU since they didn't click into place and you had to route wires.
I can't believe how low Alienware fell . As stated before AW had some of the coolest looking desktops in the early 2000's. Looking at this now , I feel bad for the people who buy the new Laptops and pay a ridiculous price for something that isn't worth it.
They've always been over-priced and laughable.
@@dnatech4477
I know you're aiming for a pithy comment here but they werent crap back in the early 2000's. You can say pricey/overpriced but definitely not laughable.
I had a desire to (politely) argue in the TH-cam comments here, and I am going to (politely) decline to do so. I wish everyone a lovely day instead. Good tidings!
@@sp0ck1p
Have a good one, matey!
Not trying to diminish anybody, but I stopped admiring Alienware after I built my first PC at the age of 18. This was the early 2000s - I had to actually sit down and educate myself on the components and talk to the weird dudes in the smoky, cluttered back rooms for the first time, rather than fawning over a glossy picture in an industry magazine or (god forbid) talking to one of the idiots at Circuit City.
A little bit of adult education slays a LOT of teenage magazine heroes, let's put it that way. Alienware was, is and remains a catchy brand to sell garbage to children (and childlike adults).
When I was a kid I was desperate for an Alienware rig. Desperate. 😂
When I was 13, Alienware was the coolest brand in the world. LMAO I was so naïve.
Having opened a "high spec" HP desktop, I would say hold your horses, they're pretty much as bad. HP's goal is to compete with dell in every way.
Dell and HP gAmEr machines share the same problem: the companies making them are geared and tooled entirely for mass producing enterprise stuff, and everything that makes them great at doing that makes them SUCK COMPLETE SHIT in this segment.
the only HP I'd recommend is their bottom end Pavillion TW-2107-M, which is all of $500, and is okay as a disposable, entry level gaming PC (r3-5300G, RX 5500, 8 GB Ram and a 256GB SSD). maybe the extra $40 for a 512 SSD instead ort $100 for a5600G, but as is, it'll do e-sports games just fine. Its no better in quality than any of the others, but its at leasr appropriately cheap
I actually bought an HP Omen when the price of the rig was cheaper than the parts individually and its been amazing, besides the restrictive motherboard and lacking airflow.
They know that, they've reviewed HP before, it will have the same issues it did there.
@@Yodalemos Got one for my sisters birthday a year back, decent config, terrible airflow. slapped in a cheapo coolermaster 120mm aio and zip tied a 120mm fan to the bottom as intake. Runs 'ok'.
As someone that as a kid was really so enamored with the Alienware cases back in 2011, I saved up and bought an Aurora R3, then spent $200 on an ALX cas on eBay and switchd cases, so I essentially had an Alienware Aurora ALX. It was beautiful. Now, I would never, ever buy any of the Alienware PC's since they changed the form factor. They all look ugly as heck. Nope, if I were to buy a prebuilt PC, I'm going elsewhere, like CyberPower or Skytech.
If you want the original Alienware quality go to Origin Pc. They are the actual people who started Alienware until Dell wrecked the whole brand into the ground.
Props to gamers nexus for forking out the cash for an honest review and by the look of that view count it paid in dividends!🙏🙏
would have loved to see the VRM on this one. just a quick look under the VRM heatsink and maybe a close up of the components as a bonus. 4 phase + 12900KF in a 5000$ computer would have been amazing in all the wrong ways
Fancy seeing you here Soyo but glad it wasn't just me hoping for that.
They really should bring back BZ for a special roasting of that VRM. I mean I'd love to hear you rant on it too if there are pictures of that VRM floating around.
15 years ago I walked into a computers plus with one of my best friends looking for some thermal paste. There was a computer being built that had about a thousand dollars worth of parts. So we inquired what it would cost to have a similar system built. They quoted us 10,000$ us. Both of us laughed together as we walked out the door. Haven't been to a computers plus since then. They closed not long after that.
Imagine owning a computer repair store and someone brings this thing in.
"You want me to fix....what? This can't be fixed"
I wouldn't be surprised if a computer repair store had a sign that said no Alienware PCs 🤣
@@InvntdXNEWROMAN, better yet - No Dell or any other OEM "computers" containing proprietary components. I just "upgraded" an older Lenovo pre-built for a friend and e-wasted everything, but the cpu, ram and hdd.
I own 3 locations in the midwest and every Alienware since the R3 looks identical to this one as far as the chassis go. They've been shit for decades at this point. When people try to sell or trade an Alienware They get pissed when I offer the going rate for the cpu, gpu, and ram for it. They are virtually unusable for parts and I refuse to sell trash in my stores.
@@InvntdXNEWROMAN dont mind them at all, get to charge "apple tax" on the labor rate.
anyone who spends $5k on that POS has no problem paying $600 for a power supply and install.
Since i build my own Pc and watched a lot of Gamers Nexus Videos they come in Autoplay, i dont regret!! Nice channel, nice content, nice Dude
except he was wrong and misinformed about pretty much everything
the r15 is maxed out at $4,704, the r16 maxed at $6,036 the r14 doesnt even peak 3k no more but just pricing alone he was off. dont even make me go into everything else. i could wright a book on this guy
I love how they put so much effort into these mechanisms in the case, seemingly with the intent to make maintenance easier and tool-less, except it actually makes maintenance confusing and difficult and also the most important components are proprietary so you can't replace them anyway...
It does “look cool” to a PC buyer that doesn’t know any better. If I showed this PC to a buddy at work he’d be freaking out about how awesome it is.
Which is precisely why they do it that way... selling on aesthetics to the unaware.
@@paulsaam8937 Yep, other than the CPU and GPU (and maybe the RAM, though it's bad), everything else in the system is e-waste.
The bit that gets me is that people will buy this with 0 knowledge of how any of it works 😂
@@Doyouevenliftjpg Meanwhile, Dell is apparently paying people to troll the forum, either that or there is someone posting on one of the other threads on here that has a serious case of stockholm syndrome.
So, instead of just designing a case or using someone else's, Dell has dedicated teams of engineers to reverse engineer and design thing so they can keep using 30 year old case tooling. Dell is the April Fools of PC building.
At this point I'm thinking they must have 30 year old stock they're trying to get rid of
@@ArdentMoogle at this point they’re just playing with you because it’s not even worth it to do that to get rid of the stock
30 years?! The hyperbole just never ends. For a clue, Dell seems to have introduced this sort of mo/bo formfactor in the Haswell era. So try 8ish instead. No, this is probably their biggest (or least small) remaining off-the-shelf chassis for an office / small workstation box, and since originally it wasn't nearly designed for the insane thermal loads of this system, they desperately tried to make it work. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.
They would have been way better off with a BTX chassis from the P4/C2D era, but I guess those are long gone now, plus they wouldn't be spinning a new board for such a relatively low-volume market anyway. To a company like Dell, this is small potatoes.
BTW, 30 years ago you would have gotten an AT formfactor system with a Baby AT board. Your CPU might have had a small passive heatsink at the time, graphics cards generally none, and the noisy fixed-speed power supply fan would be responsible for pulling air through the system. Different times indeed.
LoL to reverse engineer their own crap. They have to study the past without knowing how to change the original, so they bolt on.
It’s the Juicero of PC cases
I just had the displeasure of working on this thing for a customer. Wouldn't you know it shit the bed shortly after...THE ONE YEAR WARRANTY. Fuck me.
You don't get it, Steve. Working at the Alienware assembly line is actually part of a special training programme for astronauts. It's an excellent arrangement. NASA gets highly qualified engineers who can work with one of a kind, decades old hardware, and Dell doesn't have to retool their chassis. Everybody wins.
My first "gaming pc" was an Alienware X51 for almost $2,000, which back in that time was a lot of money for a Rig but it was an Alienware yO!. It had a i7 3770 and a GT 545. 8GB RAM. Proprietary PSU meant no way to upgrade it other than barely having enough power to run a GTX 1050ti. It worked ok but I knew after having it a while that I'd never again buy a pre-built. After building an 8086K /GTX 1080ti build a few years ago, I decided to scavange some of the parts from the old X51 to build a simple rig for my ex at the time. I found an Asus B75M Micro ATX board on ebay that would fit the i7 3770 and GTX 1050ti SC. Upgraded the RAM to Gskill Ripjaws 16GB DDR3 1333 CL9 memory, a Corsair RM550x PSU, Cheap Corsair case and cheap SSD. For about 300$ I brought new life back into the parts and chucked all that proprietary Alienware shit in the trash. That PC still runs strong to this day. Alienware is a joke. Don't know who or why anyone still buys that crap. Smh. They are still proprietary junk.
I would love to see you rebuild the parts from this PC into a standard PC case and compare test results. Buddy of mine had an Alienware R10 and we went through rebuilding and upgrade headaches CONSTANTLY.
Love the content, keep it up!
This is why Aliens don't come down to say Hello.
Engineers: "we need a bigger case to put liquid cooling in and have better airflow"
Bean counters: "you need to use the same case for all computers of this size so engineer around what we give you"
Engineers: "we cant make it run cooler so lets make some cool brackets that make us seem like cool engineers"
Thanks for the good laugh, imagining this conversation Hahaha
I can actually envision this occurring. Having worked in manufacturing and dealing with bean counters, this is very much the case for what happened.
Repurposing of old inventory should be an end user thing, for fun. Companies need to get rid of these parts by selling them for cheap or at a loss and get them out of their warehouses and shops, and focus on engineering new hardware along with the times instead of spending that money and effort into engineering ways to repurpose these old parts. It's baffling that they do bundles and this kind of shit to get rid of these things.
They could have just used that for mid tier or low end Dell where nobody would have batted an eye since Dell users are used to this level of crap.
Dell could have repurposed these chassis to regular office computers instead and that way emptied their stock.
It's like paying $5000 to shoulder the cost of Dell overengineering the heck out of this build
like?
its not even over-engineered, its just straight up lazy and shit design... if anything its under-engineered.
@@filippoorologio6777 exactly. Over-engineered would be too much cooling.
@@Dozav7 overengineering includes engineering patchwork used to work around inadequate designs though
It's a widely believed fact that if you look at the word rip-off in the dictionary, next to it is the Alienware logo.
Fax
This PC makes me irrationally angry. How does alienware still exist while selling junk like this for 5k?
IKR? Like they've just got worse and worse for the last 12 years and people still buy them?
They make good monitors , that’s about it
Braaaaaaaaaaaand. Brand. That's it.
There's 0 chance somebody is actually buying these Alienware systems, right? Right?
My father was able to get the Ryzen R10 version down to $1500 and I got a Ryzen 7 5800x, 3060ti, and HyperX 3200Mhz ram. And I even got watercooling? How is this really matching up to be $5000? Does he just not do price matching or anything to make it cheaper
With Alienware machine, it felt like the more you pay, the more you are scammed.
The real winner is landfills of e-waste.
Scamming? Easy as Dell
Honestly what surprised me the most was seeing Steve pull out a hard drive.
hey, what do you want for 5 grand? more than one pcie slot? more than one m.2 slot? wifi antennas? to be able to use either of the half size pci-e? what are you nuts? you cant expect any of those things for a measly 5 grand
@@ge2719 totally agree with you, just wanted to add that it looks like there is a Wi-Fi card on it, or something that looks like that, if you look at 17:55 left side of the ram slots next to this monstrosity of a motherboard's battery.
@@vaggelisaggelidis170 yeah these the to have cheap internal wi-fi/Bluetooth cards with a poxy little antenna. Rather than the full external ones with an extension antenna your expect from a high end motherboard.
@@ge2719 you expect too much from a 5000$ PC
You had me rollin’ with this tear down.