**Upgrading an Alienware 3.4 with a GTX 8800 to an RTX 4090: A Challenging Experience**

As much performance as I could ring out of the Alienware 3.4 was stable, but gave basically the same result, which left me no choice. Now that we've gotten the CPU to not be the bottleneck, depending on where you look, the only logical thing left to do is replace that geriatric 8800 GTX with its great great great great great great great great great great grandson, the RTX4090.

Predictably, this terrible idea has already run into a problem with the 40 series Nvidia introduced this stupid arson connector which obviously the 16-year-old power supply in here doesn't have one of those. Now I could potentially use one of these uh this is a dual 8 Pin to arson adapter which should be fine cuz this is a th000 W power supply, but this th000 W power supply is very specifically wired for the 8800 GTX in here and it means that it's just got two six spin pcie power which won't work with this adapter.

So from my perspective, I think the best way for me to Power this 4090 in this old Alienware system is by using an external powersupply. Well, I actually remember when the 8800 GTX came out people were losing their minds over how huge it was, but compared to the 490, it's looking pretty small and it weighs so much less.

**Comparing Performance**

Performance-wise comparing these two graphics cards is like pitting Hussein Bolt against Biden in a 1,500 M Sprint. Although in the context of running in the old Alienware, it's more like bolt with both his kneecap shattered and recently waterboarded.

I also had a really good idea so that we can still have the side panel on, I'm just going to kind of feed the connector through one of the open PCI slot covers on the back. This is like the hardest part of interacting with this system is I was going to say putting on the side panel but I got lost in the struggle.

**The Results**

After an embarrassing amount of time, the side panel finally gave in. Okay, now all you need to do is not go to the right side of the system then you'll never know that it's being powered in a way that will definitely invalidate your House's fire insurance.

After a very successful second boot, all I had to do was install some drivers and we were ready for some Carnage. And after dropping our state-of-the-art GPU into the system, we've gained no performance, very exciting! And that's even in the cave bit where we didn't have a CPU bottleneck before.

Yeah, it's running exactly the same as before okay so I don't think the overclocking did overcome our CPU bottleneck. Now I was lying when I said that it didn't make a difference because with the 490, we do have actual HDMI ports which means I'm able to run the monitor at its native 240 HZ.

So I can feel the stutters a lot more clearly which is good if anything GTA 5 took even longer to load. Like, at what point do I just give up? Oh it's finally happened but it is still running the same as it was running with the pre.

This seems like very reasonable 4090 performance but before we finish off the video there is one more game we need to try. This is basically the exact same performance as with the 8800 GTX and I think the only reason it's even a little different is cuz of the CPU overlog.

**The Conclusion**

So, what did we learn in today's video? Well, if you do terrible enough things to Hussein Bolt's legs, even Biden will be able to outrun him. Which brings me to the end of the video! If you want more valuable life lessons like that subscribe to the channel and until the next video bye-bye oh and the PC's crashed very good oh.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin 1996 childhood friends Nelson Gonzalez and Alex Aguia established Saikai of Miami  soon to be renamed Alienware and apparently in the early days the mere sight of an Alienware  system was enough to get any PC gaming Enthusiast slipperier than a greas up pig but then in 2002  Dell started eyeing them up from across the dingy Subway and finally pulling the trigger  into 2006 and as The Story Goes Dell hooked Alienware up to the corporate milking machine  slowly bleeding them of all their life resulting in the dried up husk that is Alienware today but  was Alienware actually that good predel or were we all just stupider back then well to  find out I've bought what I can only assume to be a very used old Alienware but first today's  video is sponsored by corsair's new IQ link McGuffin being able to daisy chain all of your  RGB and fans together with a single cable run makes life so much easier I recently swapped a  bunch of IQ link fans into a test system and had a great frustration free time magneting  everything together and because of all the heartache I saved dealing with RGB clutter  I didn't blow an artery struggling with a corrupt Windows install so if you want a  greatl looking easy to ous premium RGB solution check out IQ link using the link in the videodescriptionooh I don't know I feel like this is how I blow out my rectum butlet's cool it smells like single dude house uh but aside from that it is huge and kind of  magnificent and I'm sure it doubles as a male chasti belt we've got this really cool looking  ventilation on the front with some front I/O and then above that we have look at that door I mean  the mechanism does feel pretty worn out but that's quite a mechanism now in terms of the  acid green paint you can see that it was once very high quality although it's kind of had its teeth  kicked in at this point I really would liked to see a new and box one because that is some high  quality looking paint now the exact model is an Alienware Area 51 7500 which was launched  in 2007 which is after Dell bought Alienware but despite that as far as I understand it's  one of the last Alienware alien Wares the Handover was gradual and the first Dell Alienware branded  system was the m17x laptop launched in 2009 so this potentially counts as Peak Alienware the  next step is to remove that voloptuous side panel to see if the guts stand up to the hype and what  state the internals of this 16-year-old system from eBay is in um oh oh there wego wa oh it smells so much like dude inhere who look at how neat and clean it is in here and aside from some mismatched Ram it looks  exactly like pictures from back in the day which makes me think this is a completely unmolested  example of one which I can imagine is quite rare considering that it's older than some mountains in  the Himalayas now aside from this basically being a time capsule the next thing you'll notice is the  quality of the components this is just high-end components from the period the system came out  in there is no proprietary crap to be seen aside from this little RGB fanhub daughter board thing  in the basement which makes sense RGB was rare back then and it even has these little contact  pins for the fan and Lighting in the side panel which is something that even modern cases brag  about component wise at least in regards to the CPU I'm not 100% sure what we have in here some  core to Duo but I do recognize the graphics got and it's got my internal baby doid giddy  with excitement this is an 8800 GTX a legendary graphics card from 2006 really excited to get to  play with one of these the motherboard was also real snazzy back in the day and should allow us  to overclock the crap out of the mystery core to duo in here and considering the case layout  the cable Management's also causing some adult feelings to happen look at that IDE cable and  how they've routed all of this stuff like it looks amazing in terms of the power supply I think this  is still the stock one which makes it a th000 wat power supply with no 80 plus rating I don't know  if it's a very good power supply but let me know in the comments section down below if you know  more about it in the front here you can see we don't have any hard drives this is how the eBay  seller sold it so we are going to have to add our own storage but it's cool that the hdds had their  own little fan to cool them speaking of airflow we've got this 120 mil in the front with the  cavernous space behind the alien head providing it with ample room to breathe very undel physically  especially taking its age into account this system is what nerd boners are made of and not that weird  hate boner caused by Dell Alienware systems I really think their reputation is welld deserved  so now it's time to drop a hard drive in here or more realistically an SSD so that I don't spend  my whole life waiting for Windows to install and then we can see how it handles games in2023 and then I'm just goingto very heavy my God okay well now we get to see if if it works uh it was listed four parts  but that could be because it didn't have a hard drive in it no way the alien head  is the power button okay this is the best PC ever oh that's a lot of sound the alien head  actually lights up as well oh the alien head on the side also turns on okay it is not posting wa  it sounds like something terrible is happening in here let's see okay it sounds like it's this  that's shouting like that now luckily because this motherboard is very fancy it does have  post codes so let's Google what that means apparently it means waiting for user so do I  just like press space let's restart it hey hey we've got an e6400 in here which I think means  I guessed correctly in the previous video and it's very close to to the CPU I had in my first  gaming system the Intel core2 Duo e6400 was a $2 200ish dual core CPU that really brought  the fight to AMD and it has quite the trick up its sleeve that we'll explore a bit later  on wow now that it's on it is making a lot of smells after that very useful observation I ran  ddu wipe and installed the final Legacy drivers from 200 years ago for the 8800GTX ooh it runs halflife 2 pretty well which you'd hope it's got an 8800 GTX in it this game is from  2004 and this is a flagship GPU from 2006 yeah I'm glad it runs it well this is a 1080p High  settings although once you get outside things are a lot less convincing seemingly entirely because  of the little cor 2 Duo oh no that's quite the bottleneck next I want to give Bioshock a try  which was visually a revolutionary game for like like 2 months until crisis came out see  here it's got dx10 texture options and the 8800 GTX was the first dx10 GPU so I'm curious to see  how it runs it unfortunately for some reason MSI after burner's overlay wasn't working so all we  get is the little fraps counter in the top very informative oh yeah look at the water physics I  remember how excited the developers were about it they're all like H the water is so real ooh fire  makes it struggle a little but we're still very very comfortably over oh never mind I was going  to say comfortably over 60 frames per second there but it does dip below that although in  fness to the 8800 GTX in 2007 1080p was considered a high resolution so it's kind of hopeful trying  GTA 5 uh it launched but now it's just been loading for the last 15 minutes I'll give it  some more time but it it's not seeming likely oh yes some fun GTA a 5 render struggles okay  outside it seems to have stabilized with about 20 frames per second at 1080p this is like low-end  Modern igpu Performance although to be fair with a low-end modern igpu things start disappearing way  later let's try drop it to 720p uhoh and it's crashed oh no that's a disaster does that mean  I have to wait 20 minutes for it to load in again okay it's been a very long time but we're back in  and the performance is basically the same because of the CPU bottleneck I've been so desensitized  to terrible GTA 5 performances that like like I'm not even surprised when I see this kind of  crap anymore although this is particularly bad I I think there's meant to be like buildings over here  oh yeah there they are oh damn optimal settings does not trust the power of this PC very much now  before we reveal the cor to Duo's secret weapon obviously we need to try the Widow Maker yo that's  crazy even the mighty alien wear is just giving us like 40 frames per second at medium settings hello  granted it is a 1080p oh damn yeah here with the sunrise we've got just over 30 frames per second  crisis was such a beast I am willing to bet though that the CPU is at least partially responsible for  what's happening here oh it seems like weirdly mismatched Hardware configurations are a bit of  a theme with Alienware systems although I mean these systems were highly configurable so it's  more this configuration's fault having said that the amazing thing about $ 200ish core to  Duos from this generation was that all you had to do was get a decent motherboard with them  overclock them a bit and you'd get basically the same performance as a $500 cor to Duo so let's do  that and see if it alleviates the dumpster fire that is the CPU bottlenecking situation in thissystem yeah okay that should be fine I think this motherboard does support 1333 MHz FSB  speed so that may be it let's save and see if it explodes a few moments later I mean hopefully it  makes windows run better as well I this system very much isn't equipped for running Windows 10  yes there we go look at that 2.7 is GHz wa half lifee 2 is running way better and in this tunnel  at least we're almost getting 100% GPU utilization although the moment we got outside the little cor  to Duo's life started flashing in front of its eyes again but despite that the Improvement  was massive so the moral of the story kids is overclock your core 2 Duos lest you suffer thestutters let's overclock it somemore whoa we actually had a brief second there of the CPU not being pegged to 100% which gave us  another healthy performance jump and with pretty much no extra effort it was just running at 3.2  GHz like it wasn't a big deal I didn't think it was going to just go to 3.2 GHz but I'm glad it  did because now at least while we're in the tunnel the GPU is the bottleneck but unfortunately this  was about as much performance as I could ring out of the Alienware 3.4 was stable but gave basically  the same result which left me no choice so now that we've gotten the CPU to not be the bottleneck  depending on where you look the only logical thing left to do is replace that geriatric 8800  GTX with its great great great great great great great great great great great greatgrandson the RTX4090 okay now predictably this terrible idea has already run into a problem with the 40 series  Nvidia introduced this stupid arson connector which obviously the 16-year-old power supply  in here doesn't have one of those now I could potentially use one of these uh this is a dual  8 Pin to arson adapter which should be fine cuz this is a th000 w power supply but this th000 W  power supply is very specifically wired for the 8800 GTX in here and it means that it's just got  two six spin pcie power which won't work with this adapter so from my perspective I think the  best way for me to Power this 4090 in this old Alienware system is by using an external powersupply well I actually remember when the 8800 GTX came out people were losing their minds over how  huge it was but compared to the 490 it's looking pretty small and it weighs so much less I guess  performance-wise comparing these two graphics cards is like pitting Hussein bolt against  Biden in 1,500 M Sprint although in the context of running in the old Alienware it's more like  bolt with both his kneecap shattered and recently waterboarded I also had a really good idea so that  we can still have the side panel on I'm just going to kind of feed the connector through one of the  open PCI slot covers on the back this is like the hardest part of interacting with this system is I  was going to say putting on the side panel but I got lost in the struggle but after an embarrassing  amount of time the side panel finally gave in okay now all you need to do is not go to the right side  of the system then you'll never know that it's being powered in a way that'll will definitely  invalidate your House's fire insurance after a very successful second boot all I had to do was  install some drivers and we were ready for some Carnage and after dropping our state-ofthe-art  GPU into the system we've gained no performance very exciting and that's even in the cave bit  where we didn't have a CPU bottleneck before yeah it's running exactly the same as before okay so I  I don't think the overclocking did overcome our CPU bottleneck now I I was lying when I  said that it didn't make a difference because with the 490 we do have actual HDMI ports which  means I'm able to run the monitor at its native 240 HZ so I can feel the stutters a lot more  clearly which is good if anything GTA 5 took even longer to load like at what point do I just giveup oh it's finally happened but it is still running the same as it was running with thepre oh no yeah this seems like very reasonable 4090 performance but before we finish off the  video there is one more game we need to try reasonable stuff happening here this  is basically the exact same performance as with the 8800 GTX and I think the only reason  it's even a little different is cuz of the CPU overlog so with that what did we learn in today  video well if you do terrible enough things to Hussein Bolt's legs even Biden will be able to  outrun him which brings me to the end of the video if you want more valuable life lessons  like that subscribe to the channel and until the next video bye-bye oh and the PC's crashed verygood oh