for today's video i got my hands on an amd ryzen based alienware pre-built and let me
tell you by the end of this video i have a real love-hate relationship with that damn
thing now over the last couple of months i've seen some linus tech tips videos where they
had a look at these new alienware prebuilts but they're liners tech tips videos so it's
obviously the highest end special edition oil baron version so i decided to get the
cheapest ryzen based alienware pre-built that you can buy just to see what the other end
of the spectrum is like and this definitely has nothing to do with the fact that i can't
afford a more expensive version [Music] in this box i've got a pre-built alienware gaming
system and i genuinely can't wait to get into it now the first massive disappointment was
the fact that it was just delivered by the postal service and it wasn't beamed into my
consciousness from the mothership and then the other big disappointment was that this
system took nearly a month to get here although i did go on to alienware's website today and
the estimated shipping time for the majority of the configurations at the moment is between
three to five business days so i guess they were just running low on stock but bear in
mind the shipping dates do fluctuate wildly based on when you buy them so with that let's
tear it open and have a look at this at this alienware pre-built oh look at that that's
a that's a real good-looking box it's definitely at least what 200 worth of box you got right
here
and the moment of truth is oh it looks like there's another box in here is it a third
box oh no no it's like a it's like an accessory pouch thing and then underneath that you have
an alienware pc that textured plastic
[Music] that's actually surprisingly challenging to do by yourself but there we go we got an
alienware oh yeah now before we comment uh on its appearance let's just let's just do
this
the first thing that i think when i see it is it does look a lot like a dyson doesn't
it but that's not the worst thing ever because dysons are fans they like make airflow happen
right so that means that this system has to have good airflow there's ventilation on the
top here and then two more ventilated cutouts on the side and then when you move to the
front there's that dyson fan looking vent having a quick look at the rear i o it's actually
surprisingly good you've got 6 usb 2 ports 4 usb 3 ports a usb 3.1 type c port and a
bunch of audio connectors as far as display outputs go you've got three display ports
and one hdmi port it's pretty impressive and then on the front we've got three usb ports
and then a type c port and a microphone headphone jack that is actually a really good front
i o although the build quality isn't amazing it's very plasticky and as you can see here
there is definitely some panel gap action going on but with that let's tear it open
and see what it looks like inside okay so it's like a little lever that you pull and
then that comes off so that's not bad that's a pretty cool implementation and then in there
we've got kind of what looks like the inside of an office pc quite frankly now the first
thing that you'll notice is that you can't actually see a huge amount because like i
mentioned earlier the power supply does block the entire cpu cooler area so that does not
look promising for airflow over here the graphics card is a very interesting oem version of
the rx 5700 hmm that graphics card is a low-key sexy cooler on it yeah i don't know how cooling
is going to work for it does have a fan right there blowing straight onto it so maybe maybe
it'll be okay and then this is actually the boot hard drive so it is about a thousand
dollar system that doesn't have an ssd in it there are a couple of glaring issues with
this peasant spec aside from the fact that it has a pretty decent graphics card in it
but we'll get into all of that a bit later first let's dig a bit deeper
that doesn't feel consensual on any level oh it's just it's very tightly sprung so now
we have a decent look at the inside of the system and i am immediately worried cpu-wise
this system has a ryzen 5 3500 in it which is a bit of a weird oem ryzen part and then
its fan is just stuffed behind the back of the power supply for that fan's sake i really
hope it's got a choking fetish at least the motherboard's power delivery has some pretty
chunky looking heatsinks they did put a pretty herculean looking fan above all of these components
so hopefully that helps with the airflow situation and then over here is another really big issue
with this configuration it only has one stick of ram it's yeah it's 26 66 megahertz and
that mixed with the fact that it's in single channel is a huge huge no-no when it comes
to ryzen so that may kneecap the performance of the system quite a lot and then finally
let's just take this gpu out and have a closer look at it this is actually a very interesting
oem version of this graphics card the standard reference design has like a metal blower cooler
on it which looks very nice but it doesn't cool very well this on the other hand has
two fans it's got a pretty serious looking fin stack with four heat pipes i think it
could perform very well and you've actually got space for a reasonable amount of hard
drives so you've got two hard drive cages here and then the one in the front that already
has the hard drive on it and then you've also got an m.2 slot which it's very proud of on
the box but that's enough of the inside let's plug in this alienware and power it up for
the first time
where no how did you how did you get in here
it does collect dust really quickly but oh yeah there we go we've got some alienware
happening there's actually a surprisingly small amount of bloatware on this system no
way i i feel like i'm being scammed here i feel like where where is mcafee because mcafee
is always on these systems that's surprising i mean there's a bunch of pointless alienware
crap on it but that's surprisingly good let's see under system how recent is this driver
set up 1930 okay i think that is very old and then it's got this ryzen 5 3500 in it
which is a pretty weird cpu because it's a 3600 x but just without hyper threading so
you just have six cores and six threads as opposed to six cores and 12 threads now this
is definitely not a great start temperature wise we're just downloading some games 27
odd percentage of cpu utilization and we've had an average of 73 degrees celsius on the
cpu so oh no [Music]
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that went a lot worse than i thought it was gonna go here you can see the system trying
desperately and failing to run battlefield 5. that's appalling it's only at like 1080p
high settings with an rx 5700 in the system it shouldn't be running like a polio victim
what's even worse is seeing it try to run escape from tarkov look at that frame drop
it was running so badly that the anti-cheat softer actually kicked in and timed out the
server connection because it couldn't figure out why the system was behaving so weirdly
now my first thought was it's definitely overheating because well it sounds like it's trying to
reenact the hindenburg disaster next to me just have a bit of a listen
but after running msi afterburner the temperatures are actually fine so it's very noisy because
the system is trying really hard to maintain those temperatures and in all fairness to
the pc the ambient temperature in the room that i did the test in was 30 degrees celsius
so yeah it is a bit of a tough use case i did do a bunch of gaming again the next day
with the ambient temperature in the room at about 26 degrees celsius and then it was a
lot quieter but it's all the cpu making that noise and i would definitely recommend specking
up the liquid cooler option because i think that would make a big difference on the other
hand the graphics card temperatures are really good we're sitting at just over 60 degrees
celsius in a high ambient temperature room on an rx 5700 that cooler is really impressive
so it's not overheating so the weird performance can only be caused by one thing this single
8 gig stick of ram and sure enough after i dropped this 16 gig kit of ddr4 3200 megahertz
in there the performance was so much better it turned into a really good little gaming
machine
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you can see here that battlefield 5 runs as smooth as a cucumber and even escape from
tarkov runs very well in this system when you upgrade the ram and then another issue
on the performance front is the fact that this pc doesn't have an ssd in it which means
it runs windows like a first generation windows vista machine it's just all sluggish and terrible
but despite all of these issues i actually really like the little alienware system i
was initially very outraged about the whole ram issue and the terrible gaming performance
straight out of the box and i filmed the whole bit where i was like ranting about how we
should burn dell to the ground for selling these terrible configurations but then i thought
to myself the thing is that ram kit only costs about 58 us dollars on amazon and dell does
make it really easy for you to upgrade these systems they don't have any weird warranty
void if removed stickers and you have easy access to the ram and ssds and all kinds of
stuff now on dell's website you can get 16 gigs as opposed to eight gigs but you have
to pay an extra hundred dollars for that so yeah i would definitely just buy my own ram
and drop it in here when it comes to the noise issues they're also really easy to solve all
you need to do is spec up the all-in-one liquid cooler option for the cpu which is like an
extra 20 or 30 on the website and i would highly recommend doing that because it'll
make the cpu run significantly cooler and quieter and to get an ssd in here you just
need to pay an extra 50 for a 256 gig boot drive you still keep the one terabyte storage
drive you just get an extra ssd for the actual operating system [Music] if you spec up one
of these systems incorrectly you get this experience which is a pc that runs like it's
recently performed a frontal lobotomy on itself which considering the fact that this configuration
cost me the canadian equivalent of a thousand one hundred us dollars making it the cheapest
rising configuration i could get on dell canada is outrageous at that price point it should
at least have had 16 gigs of ram and an ssd in it and honestly a lot of these alienware
configurations are complete garbage but you can spec up some pretty decent systems that
don't cost that much more than building your own system now there are a couple of secrets
to buying these alienware pre-builds the first one is always buy them when they're on sale
which is often in fact they're on sale at the moment and then you just need to suss
out the configurations to get the one that's the best price to performance currently for
a thousand four hundred and sixty us dollars you can spec up a system that has a ryzen
7 3700 x in it and an rx 5700 xt 16 gigs of ddr4 3200 megahertz it's got an ssd and a
storage drive with the all-in-one liquid cooler option for the cpu and that only costs about
90 dollars more than actually buying all the parts yourself and building the pc yourself
and that's not including the price of windows the only thing that's a little bit sketch
about the setup for me is the fact that alienware doesn't let you spec up the bigger power supply
with the rx 5700 xt although weirdly it lets you do it with nvidia graphics card selected
and 550 watts for a 3700 x and an rx 5700 xt is just borderline fine i mean i typed
all of the wattage calculations into c sonic's wattage calculator and even with boost frequencies
taken into account of the components it says it'll be fine but you really are on the limit
there and this is purely subjective but i actually kind of like the way it looks as
well initially i thought it was pretty gaudy but is it really more gaudy than like a rainbow
vomit gaming system that you build yourself although some of the pictures on dell's website
does make it look a little bit like a robot's lady garden and the build quality is not amazing
but when it's on the desk next to you like this it looks pretty cool and when it's like
in a more dimly lit room this little rgb ring in the middle just like floats in nothingness
inside the machine it really is starting to grow on me now i'm not saying we should all
just run out and go and buy alienware pre-builds but for somebody who wants to buy a pre-built
gaming system for whatever reason you can do a hell of a lot worse than a correctly
spec alienware system bought at the correct time i may actually do a follow-up video at
some point where i upgraded with a bunch of my own parts and turn it into a real a real
lady garden monster now i know this is gonna cause some mad outrage in the comments section
so let me know what you think of my conclusion here if you enjoyed the video please do consider
supporting me on patreon i'll have it linked in the description below and it'll really
help me buy more of these kinds of systems to do more videos on so i'd really appreciate
that i've got a bunch of other social media links down there as well and yeah until the
next video bye-bye
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