**The Review: A Critical Analysis of the Alienware System**

As I began to examine the Alienware system, I couldn't help but notice the potential issues with airflow. Considering its design and layout, it appears that airflow is severely compromised, which could lead to overheating and other performance-related problems.

**Overclocking Issues**

One of the major concerns with overclocking this system is the poor fan speed implementation in the Alienware software. The AC tech AIO liquid cooling system spins at a relatively slow pace, making it difficult to maintain stable temperatures during intense periods of overclocking. In my experiment, I attempted to push the CPU to 3.6 GHz and was met with a temperature reading of over 100 degrees Celsius. While the system remained stable, the poor fan speed implementation made it impossible to continue pushing the CPU further. Furthermore, tripping the plug on the fan speed controller resulted in an unexpected increase in fan speed, which was not only loud but also uncontrolled.

**Performance Metrics**

In terms of actual performance metrics, the system performed similarly to a 9-920, with Cinebench results indicating that it's not the most powerful CPU for productivity tasks. However, the system is still capable of handling some gaming applications, albeit with low settings and limited frame rates. Crysis was one of the few games that could run on the system without too much struggle, but even then, the performance was subpar.

**Gaming Performance**

For those who may be thinking of upgrading this system by simply adding a better GPU, I must advise against it. The motherboard's limitations make it difficult to squeeze out any significant performance improvements. With the system already struggling with low settings in modern games like Skyrim and Dota 2, attempting to add a more powerful GPU would only serve to further strain the system.

**Value for Money**

Considering its age and the fact that it still features an Alienware-branded system, this machine is a poor value for money. The individual parts can be purchased cheaper on eBay, making it a less appealing option compared to buying separate components.

**RGB Implementation**

One of the most interesting aspects of this system is its RGB implementation. It was one of the first systems to feature such a dynamic lighting system, which provides excellent control over the various zones. While it may seem like a frivolous aspect, it's actually quite impressive and showcases Alienware's early adoption of cutting-edge technology.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, while the Alienware system is an interesting piece of history, its performance issues make it a less desirable option for those seeking a powerful gaming machine. The poor fan speed implementation, limited overclocking capabilities, and struggles with modern games make it a disappointing purchase. However, its RGB implementation remains a notable feature that showcases Alienware's early innovation in the field.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthey may have probed me but at least they gave me this pretty sweet ring alien wear has always been controversial some people or noobs as people on the PC gaming community call them really like them and then anybody who's ever built a PC before hates them because well they seem to be plastic overpriced garbage but this one was quite interesting because of its RGB implementation as you could see from the footage that I played earlier it's one of the first ever Aurora ones and it's from like 2008 2009 around that period and it has some pretty ballin RGB in it so is it just plastic garbage or is it way ahead of its time when it comes to the bling but as you can see from the screen behind me with its overclocking failed warning it wasn't all rose-tinted glasses and happiness it actually all started pretty terribly when I found out that they lied to me about what graphics cards were in it specs wise it's rocking an X 58 platform with 16 gigs of RAM and an i7 920 in it and I was told that it had two gtx 280s in it but they lied to me and it only has two gtx 260 s in it but let's open it up take it apart and have a look what it looks like inside so now let's crack open the Alienware Aurora like a week old I have to admit I actually had to Google how to open this case because it doesn't make any sense but there's this kind of like slot thing here which you then used to push that up so this back panel here and it comes off and it comes off like that and as you can tell it's absolutely massive if you just have a quick look at the side panel it's super thick and very heavy yeah that's pretty cool you've got like like alien e symbols on there the thing that immediately strikes you when looking past of any of the kind of random plastic crap that they have everywhere is this just looks like a server case it really looks like kind of took a server case and glued a bunch of plastic crap to it so let's try and get further inside so I think the first thing I'm gonna try to do is get this bracket off that's over the graphics card so that we can have a look at that setup I think oh there we go that's quite that's quite elegant here are the two GPUs which I was lied to about what they are that's what is very exciting it's really interesting that they went with an EM ATX motherboard so it's a smaller motherboard and then they have like 15 foot of space in front of that if you look down here you can see they there's a huge amount of hard drive slots available and then you can put a bunch of 3.5 inch front drives in I just made a pretty awesome discovery because I saw that all of the SATA cables were plugged in but there's only one hard drive so that didn't really make sense but all of these hard drive bays are actually hot swamped so if you look in there you can see the SATA power and SATA cable or plug there so you can just slide a hard drive in I'm really curious to see what they did with the actual airflow implementation here because it kind of looks like there's no air coming through to the graphics cards so with the two GPUs set up like this the top ones not really getting any airflow so you have to use quite a bit of force to get this off sorry I didn't get that on camera and then when you look in the back here you've got a fan that blows on the graphics cards over there and also looking in there you can kind of see the front IO configuration which isn't hugely neat and basically just have a huge amount of cables that they kind of stuck in there again this could have been done way more neatly but this PC is very old so I don't know how much of the cable management and stuff is down to somebody else at digging around in it because you can also see here those cables that's just a huge cable nest on there now I think Kyle from bit wit wouldn't be very happy with this case design because it's ketchup and mustard for you know this main board here or this circuit board here kind of seem like they're for the RGB implementation which is something that's really interesting on this case because it's really old I mean this is before the RGB craze and they obviously went to a huge amount of effort to get the ology be working in the way that it does now this whole kind of a i/o configuration here so that they can call it liquid-cooled it just looks like a kind of standard AC tech cooler it doesn't look like anything particularly fancy but then they kind of have the Alienware head and they've got some some you know extra plastic a garbage on it to make it look more alien II and I think that's why people have such a huge issue with Alienware product is you know there is a lot of attention to detail but in the end of the day they are just sticking a bunch of plastic to stuff that you normally don't have to pay as much for weirdly enough though this only has five sticks of ramen I don't know where this guy went I kind of really want to just take off the entire screw on each side at a time just to piss off the Internet oh there's like barely any thermal paste on that it's all good that is a seriously fat man oh good huge so now I'm gonna take all of this and I'm gonna clean all of it and put some new thermal stuff everywhere I feel a bit stupid that I didn't put the thermal pan that I didn't do Thermal tests beforehand but you know once it done is done I'll take tech yes cities Brian's word for the fact that it's gonna make a pretty big difference and unfortunately I'm not gonna clean it with brake fluid cleaner because I'm not that ratchet okay so it's the beginning of day five hundred and sixty eight million of the making of this video and I just can't seem to finish it but I'm gonna try and do that today so having a look here I've kind of and it's all gonna be very out-of-focus initially there we go that's a bit better so I've kind of finished putting everything back on the motherboard and it's ready to completely reassemble the PC and we're gonna try play some games on it now let's get started and I think we can do it with a good old-fashioned time-lapse so I finished installing a motherboard Reese installing the block and as you can see the alien head is actually pointing up now and it's done it doesn't the worse than it did when I started which is I guess a minimum requirement but I'm still pretty happy with that one of the problems with that case is that everything is kind of routed in a way that it kind of just has to go that way so you have to have this huge amount of cables lying around and I think one of the reasons that Dell didn't worry too much about the cable management situation is because you can't see into the case but considering what it looks like in the front in front of the GPUs I think that situation airflow wise is really bad and we'll have a look at the temperatures a little bit later okay so now with all of the faffing out of the way we can actually look at how this PC performs and as you can see back here it doesn't do very well because I couldn't get it to start up in the last 45 minutes or so and that's because I overclocked it and then something went wrong and now it just isn't working anymore now it's got two big problems when overclocking one is the fact that it's fan speed implementation in the Alienware software is really bad it doesn't give you control over how fast the fan spins of the AC tech AIO spins way too slowly so when I overclock the CPU it was running at about a hundred degrees at 3.6 gigahertz which is completely unacceptable it was stable though but then when I kind of tripped the plug in the thing for the fan speed controller it actually went running at a hundred percent fan speed but then it's so loud that it bothers neighbors four doors down but it had performed way better I was sitting at about 70 degrees the problem is you can't seem to overclock it further than that and you can't overclock it further than that because of the actual vrn the implementation on the motherboard or I got a really bad I 7 928 and then as far as actual performance metrics goes in Cinebench it performs the way 920's do overclocked to 3.6 gigahertz it's not the most insane CPU for kind of productivity tasks but you can still game on it although you can't game on this machine because pretty much nothing worked I couldn't play anything that was made after spiral basically Skyrim really struggled it was playable like low settings but really playable at low settings and the same word for dota 2 dota 2 worked but it was again you had to drop the settings way down and then who was still really not that Pleasant a gaming experience Crysis ran but not very well now before somebody tells me to just put a better GPU in it first of all stop heckling me and number two it just is a really bad value even though the system is very old it still does have an alienware attached to it which means that you could get the same specs for way cheaper if you just buy the parts individually off of ebay and the problem with how bad the motherboard is it means that you can't grab the system by the balls and squeeze all the performance out of it because you can't get further than 3.6 gigas which is just ridiculous and that very brief overview is pretty much all I'm going to talk about when it comes to the actual performance of this machine if you want a more detailed breakdown let me know in the comment section below and I could do a follow-up video but the fact of the matter is it sucks for gaming and at this point no one's gonna buy it to use as a main rig the reason I thought this was an interesting topic for a video is because of its RGB implementation I know that sounds like a ridiculous thing but it came out so long ago it came out before anybody was talking about RGB and it does it fairly spectacularly you have amazing control in the software of how to lie to the various zones and it's pretty cool to be honest maybe it was too ahead of its time I remember people talking about how flashy the Alienware machines were because they had this RGB implementation and it's really interesting that it's almost as though Dell set a standard for RGB before they even knew Oh anyone else even knew there was gonna be a thing later down the line and I think that that's pretty interesting and what more can I ask for in a video like this anyway thank you very much for watching if you like the video do like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one if you dislike the video dislike it and then let me know what you disliked about the video and what kind of content you'd like to see from the channel in the future I know I've been gone for a while sorry about that but I'll be making regular content again from now potentially anyway until the next onethey may have probed me but at least they gave me this pretty sweet ring alien wear has always been controversial some people or noobs as people on the PC gaming community call them really like them and then anybody who's ever built a PC before hates them because well they seem to be plastic overpriced garbage but this one was quite interesting because of its RGB implementation as you could see from the footage that I played earlier it's one of the first ever Aurora ones and it's from like 2008 2009 around that period and it has some pretty ballin RGB in it so is it just plastic garbage or is it way ahead of its time when it comes to the bling but as you can see from the screen behind me with its overclocking failed warning it wasn't all rose-tinted glasses and happiness it actually all started pretty terribly when I found out that they lied to me about what graphics cards were in it specs wise it's rocking an X 58 platform with 16 gigs of RAM and an i7 920 in it and I was told that it had two gtx 280s in it but they lied to me and it only has two gtx 260 s in it but let's open it up take it apart and have a look what it looks like inside so now let's crack open the Alienware Aurora like a week old I have to admit I actually had to Google how to open this case because it doesn't make any sense but there's this kind of like slot thing here which you then used to push that up so this back panel here and it comes off and it comes off like that and as you can tell it's absolutely massive if you just have a quick look at the side panel it's super thick and very heavy yeah that's pretty cool you've got like like alien e symbols on there the thing that immediately strikes you when looking past of any of the kind of random plastic crap that they have everywhere is this just looks like a server case it really looks like kind of took a server case and glued a bunch of plastic crap to it so let's try and get further inside so I think the first thing I'm gonna try to do is get this bracket off that's over the graphics card so that we can have a look at that setup I think oh there we go that's quite that's quite elegant here are the two GPUs which I was lied to about what they are that's what is very exciting it's really interesting that they went with an EM ATX motherboard so it's a smaller motherboard and then they have like 15 foot of space in front of that if you look down here you can see they there's a huge amount of hard drive slots available and then you can put a bunch of 3.5 inch front drives in I just made a pretty awesome discovery because I saw that all of the SATA cables were plugged in but there's only one hard drive so that didn't really make sense but all of these hard drive bays are actually hot swamped so if you look in there you can see the SATA power and SATA cable or plug there so you can just slide a hard drive in I'm really curious to see what they did with the actual airflow implementation here because it kind of looks like there's no air coming through to the graphics cards so with the two GPUs set up like this the top ones not really getting any airflow so you have to use quite a bit of force to get this off sorry I didn't get that on camera and then when you look in the back here you've got a fan that blows on the graphics cards over there and also looking in there you can kind of see the front IO configuration which isn't hugely neat and basically just have a huge amount of cables that they kind of stuck in there again this could have been done way more neatly but this PC is very old so I don't know how much of the cable management and stuff is down to somebody else at digging around in it because you can also see here those cables that's just a huge cable nest on there now I think Kyle from bit wit wouldn't be very happy with this case design because it's ketchup and mustard for you know this main board here or this circuit board here kind of seem like they're for the RGB implementation which is something that's really interesting on this case because it's really old I mean this is before the RGB craze and they obviously went to a huge amount of effort to get the ology be working in the way that it does now this whole kind of a i/o configuration here so that they can call it liquid-cooled it just looks like a kind of standard AC tech cooler it doesn't look like anything particularly fancy but then they kind of have the Alienware head and they've got some some you know extra plastic a garbage on it to make it look more alien II and I think that's why people have such a huge issue with Alienware product is you know there is a lot of attention to detail but in the end of the day they are just sticking a bunch of plastic to stuff that you normally don't have to pay as much for weirdly enough though this only has five sticks of ramen I don't know where this guy went I kind of really want to just take off the entire screw on each side at a time just to piss off the Internet oh there's like barely any thermal paste on that it's all good that is a seriously fat man oh good huge so now I'm gonna take all of this and I'm gonna clean all of it and put some new thermal stuff everywhere I feel a bit stupid that I didn't put the thermal pan that I didn't do Thermal tests beforehand but you know once it done is done I'll take tech yes cities Brian's word for the fact that it's gonna make a pretty big difference and unfortunately I'm not gonna clean it with brake fluid cleaner because I'm not that ratchet okay so it's the beginning of day five hundred and sixty eight million of the making of this video and I just can't seem to finish it but I'm gonna try and do that today so having a look here I've kind of and it's all gonna be very out-of-focus initially there we go that's a bit better so I've kind of finished putting everything back on the motherboard and it's ready to completely reassemble the PC and we're gonna try play some games on it now let's get started and I think we can do it with a good old-fashioned time-lapse so I finished installing a motherboard Reese installing the block and as you can see the alien head is actually pointing up now and it's done it doesn't the worse than it did when I started which is I guess a minimum requirement but I'm still pretty happy with that one of the problems with that case is that everything is kind of routed in a way that it kind of just has to go that way so you have to have this huge amount of cables lying around and I think one of the reasons that Dell didn't worry too much about the cable management situation is because you can't see into the case but considering what it looks like in the front in front of the GPUs I think that situation airflow wise is really bad and we'll have a look at the temperatures a little bit later okay so now with all of the faffing out of the way we can actually look at how this PC performs and as you can see back here it doesn't do very well because I couldn't get it to start up in the last 45 minutes or so and that's because I overclocked it and then something went wrong and now it just isn't working anymore now it's got two big problems when overclocking one is the fact that it's fan speed implementation in the Alienware software is really bad it doesn't give you control over how fast the fan spins of the AC tech AIO spins way too slowly so when I overclock the CPU it was running at about a hundred degrees at 3.6 gigahertz which is completely unacceptable it was stable though but then when I kind of tripped the plug in the thing for the fan speed controller it actually went running at a hundred percent fan speed but then it's so loud that it bothers neighbors four doors down but it had performed way better I was sitting at about 70 degrees the problem is you can't seem to overclock it further than that and you can't overclock it further than that because of the actual vrn the implementation on the motherboard or I got a really bad I 7 928 and then as far as actual performance metrics goes in Cinebench it performs the way 920's do overclocked to 3.6 gigahertz it's not the most insane CPU for kind of productivity tasks but you can still game on it although you can't game on this machine because pretty much nothing worked I couldn't play anything that was made after spiral basically Skyrim really struggled it was playable like low settings but really playable at low settings and the same word for dota 2 dota 2 worked but it was again you had to drop the settings way down and then who was still really not that Pleasant a gaming experience Crysis ran but not very well now before somebody tells me to just put a better GPU in it first of all stop heckling me and number two it just is a really bad value even though the system is very old it still does have an alienware attached to it which means that you could get the same specs for way cheaper if you just buy the parts individually off of ebay and the problem with how bad the motherboard is it means that you can't grab the system by the balls and squeeze all the performance out of it because you can't get further than 3.6 gigas which is just ridiculous and that very brief overview is pretty much all I'm going to talk about when it comes to the actual performance of this machine if you want a more detailed breakdown let me know in the comment section below and I could do a follow-up video but the fact of the matter is it sucks for gaming and at this point no one's gonna buy it to use as a main rig the reason I thought this was an interesting topic for a video is because of its RGB implementation I know that sounds like a ridiculous thing but it came out so long ago it came out before anybody was talking about RGB and it does it fairly spectacularly you have amazing control in the software of how to lie to the various zones and it's pretty cool to be honest maybe it was too ahead of its time I remember people talking about how flashy the Alienware machines were because they had this RGB implementation and it's really interesting that it's almost as though Dell set a standard for RGB before they even knew Oh anyone else even knew there was gonna be a thing later down the line and I think that that's pretty interesting and what more can I ask for in a video like this anyway thank you very much for watching if you like the video do like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one if you dislike the video dislike it and then let me know what you disliked about the video and what kind of content you'd like to see from the channel in the future I know I've been gone for a while sorry about that but I'll be making regular content again from now potentially anyway until the next one