Hey everyone Trisha Hershberger here.
After drooling all over their booth at
E3 this year Alienware was kind enough to send me this little guy.
The
Alienware Aurora R5 as well as this beauty.
The Alienware 13 Oled Gaming
Laptop.
Now today’s video will focus on the R5 and I’ll have another video
on the 13 Oled coming out soon.
When that video is available I’ll link to it in
the description and probably put a card up there.
So a huge thanks to
Alienware and the Alienware Hive Program for supplying me with these
items to review on my channel.
Okay after many years the Aurora finally
returns!
Only this time it’s much smaller and available at a much smaller
price point then before.
So while it is a mid tower desktop starting at $799 if
money is no option for you you can customize it to be a VR ready 12K
gaming beast in a fairly tiny form factor.
Now while I want to jump right in
and undress this baby and see what’s inside I haven’t even taken the time
to admire the exterior how rude of me.
Oh baby you’re so cute would you
let me just.
I can’t.
In my opinion the exterior of the Aurora R5 is really nice.
I like the unusual shapes and curves borrowing from the design of the Area
51 R2.
The handle on top is a nice touch and at about 33lbs I can actually
consider taking this out with me.
The size as I mentioned before is one of
my favorite things about this desktop.
18.6” tall 8.35” wide and 14.2” deep.
The plastic exterior might draw cries of horror from some but paired with
the traditional Alienware FX lighting and cool angles I think it’s pretty clean
and polished while still very unique look.
There are 4 USB 3.0 Type A Ports
at the top.
Two are powered and a headphone and mic jack which is
fantastic if you keep it on the floor like I do.
On the back you’ll see 6 USB
2.0 3 more USB 3.0 Type A 1 USB 3.1 Type A and 1 USB 3.1 Type C as
well as Gigabit Ethernet.
There’s just about every audio port that you could
ask for as well as Tosslink and Coasculex PDIF Port.
The graphics card is
installed here has 3 display ports 1 HDMI and 1 DVID.
Okay now to the
good stuff!
Here’s where the Aurora R5 really impressed me.
It makes use
of every single square inch of space its got.
In a configuration that I have
here you can see a Skylake Core i76700 K Quadcore Processor great for
over clocking.
A liquid cooling system to handle any said over clocking
Micro ATX Motherboard Nvidia GTX 1080 Founders Edition with 8GB
GDDR5X Memory and the ability to add a second GPU down here if you
like up to 300w each.
It’s got a 2T CD8 Harddrive paired with a 512G
PCIExpress SSD Bootdrive and it supports up to 5 Storage Drive +1 ODB
and then up here we got 16G over clockable DDR 4 RAM.
It pulls in cool air
on the right and from the front and has a surprisingly quite exhaust fan up
here on the top.
Now the 850w power supply is housed here in this
moveable arm.
It sounds terrifying and every time I move it I keep thinking
I’m going to break it.
But it’s actually incredibly cool and it really does make
use of every little bit of space in here.
I’d imagine that this would make
BPSU a little bit trickier to replace due to any specialty wiring to make the
swing possible but I really can’t say for sure.
And you may have noticed I
don’t need to use any tools in here.
I really love that Alienware is so into
you customizing your own set up that they’ve made it super easy to swap
and add components.
Look ma’ no tools needed!
For graphics expansion
cards hard drives or memory and everything in here is replaceable.
Two
thumbs up.
In actual testing I couldn’t find a game that my configuration
didn’t run fantastically in 1080p.
When upping things to 4K I was right
around 60fps for tougher to run games which I consider a win especially
when you think about the fact that you can add a second graphics card
down the line.
And the VR?
Well lets just say I need to start buying and
streaming a lot more virtual reality content.
It is just gorgeous.
Now if you
are in the market for a new desktop keep in mind the Aurora comes in a
variety of configurations from budget to high end.
And you’re going to pay
more the more fancy you want.
To play most of today’s games at 1080p
with higher settings you probably want to upgrade the video card atleast a
GTX 1970 and put your Aurora OS on an SSD and Quadcore i5 6400
Processor.
Those upgrades alone will cost about $500 on top of the base
price.
Now as always you’ll never do better price wise then when you build
your own rig but if you’d rather configure it yourself have someone else put
it all together for you and have a warrenty on the whole entire system
rather than individual components then something like the Aurora R5 might
be right for you.
Personally I’ll be using this system for both streaming and
editing moving forward and I’ll continue to update with any further findings.
Big thanks again to Alienware for including me in the Alienware Hive
Reviewer Program and as always I would love to hear from you.
If you’ve
gotten to check this particular model out tell me what you thought about it in
the comments below.
Thanks as always for watching and be sure to both
like and subcribe for me techy gamey vloggy stuff.
I’m Trisha Hershberger
and I will see you soon.