**The Verdict: A Correctly Spec'd Alienware System is a Good Pre-Built Option**

As I reflect on my experience with the Dell Alienware pre-built system, I must say that it's been a wild ride. Initially, I was ranting about how terrible the configuration was and how we should "burn Dell to the ground" for selling such subpar systems. But then, I took a step back and thought, "Wait a minute... ram kits only cost about $58 USD on Amazon, and Dell makes it ridiculously easy to upgrade these systems."

**The Ease of Upgrades**

You see, on Dell's website, you can get 16 gigs of RAM instead of the default 8 gigs, but that'll set you back an extra $100. But honestly, I'd just buy my own RAM and drop it in there when it arrives. As for the noise issues, they're a breeze to solve – just spec up the all-in-one liquid cooler option for the CPU, which adds about $20-$30 to the price tag. And if you want an SSD in there, you can get one for an extra $50, still keeping the 1TB storage drive.

**The Price Point: A Thousand One Hundred Dollars is Outrageous**

If you spec up this system incorrectly, you'll end up with a PC that runs like it's just had a frontal lobotomy. And considering the price point of the configuration I got (the Canadian equivalent of $1100 USD), which makes it the cheapest rising configuration on Dell Canada, I think it should at least have come with 16 gigs of RAM and an SSD.

**Alienware Configurations: A Mixed Bag**

Honestly, a lot of these Alienware configurations are complete garbage. But you can spec up some pretty decent systems that don't cost too much more than building your own system.

**The Secret to Buying Pre-Built Systems**

Here's the thing – always buy them when they're on sale (which is often, and currently). Then, just need to suss out the configurations to get the one that's the best price-to-performance currently available. For example, you can spec up a system with a Ryzen 7 3700X, an RX 5700 XT, 16 gigs of DDR4 3200 MHz RAM, an SSD, and the all-in-one liquid cooler option for the CPU – all for about $90 more than buying all the parts yourself.

**The Only Sketchy Part: Power Supply**

Now, there is one thing that's a little bit sketchy about this setup – Alienware doesn't let you spec up the bigger power supply with the RX 5700 XT, although weirdly, it does allow you to do so when you select an NVIDIA graphics card. And for a 3700X and an RX 5700 XT, that's just borderline fine.

**The Aesthetics: Not Bad**

Initially, I thought the system looked pretty gaudy, but now I'm not so sure. The build quality is not amazing, but when it's on your desk next to you like this, it looks pretty cool – especially in a more dimly lit room. And that little RGB ring in the middle just floats in nothingness inside the machine... it's starting to grow on me.

**The Verdict: Not Bad at All**

So, while I wouldn't say we should all go out and buy Alienware pre-built systems willy-nilly, for someone who wants a pre-built gaming system for whatever reason, you could do a hell of a lot worse than a correctly spec'd Alienware system bought at the right time.

**The Final Note: A Follow-Up Video**

I may actually do a follow-up video where I upgrade this system with a bunch of my own parts and turn it into a real "monster".

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enfor today's video i got my hands on an amdryzen based alienware pre-built and let metell you by the end of this video i have areal love-hate relationship with that damnthing now over the last couple of months i'veseen some linus tech tips videos where theyhad a look at these new alienware prebuiltsbut they're liners tech tips videos so it'sobviously the highest end special editionoil baron version so i decided to get thecheapest ryzen based alienware pre-built thatyou can buy just to see what the other endof the spectrum is like and this definitelyhas nothing to do with the fact that i can'tafford a more expensive version inthis box i've got a pre-built alienware gamingsystem and i genuinely can't wait to get intoit now the first massive disappointment wasthe fact that it was just delivered by thepostal service and it wasn't beamed into myconsciousness from the mothership and thenthe other big disappointment was that thissystem took nearly a month to get here althoughi did go on to alienware's website today andthe estimated shipping time for the majorityof the configurations at the moment is betweenthree to five business days so i guess theywere just running low on stock but bear inmind the shipping dates do fluctuate wildlybased on when you buy them so with that let'stear it open and have a look at this at thisalienware pre-built oh look at that that'sa that's a real good-looking box it's definitelyat least what 200 worth of box you got righthereand the moment of truth is oh it looks likethere's another box in here is it a thirdbox oh no no it's like a it's like an accessorypouch thing and then underneath that you havean alienware pc that textured plasticthat's actually surprisingly challengingto do by yourself but there we go we got analienware oh yeah now before we comment uhon its appearance let's just let's just dothisthe first thing that i think when i see itis it does look a lot like a dyson doesn'tit but that's not the worst thing ever becausedysons are fans they like make airflow happenright so that means that this system has tohave good airflow there's ventilation on thetop here and then two more ventilated cutoutson the side and then when you move to thefront there's that dyson fan looking venthaving a quick look at the rear i o it's actuallysurprisingly good you've got 6 usb 2 ports4 usb 3 ports a usb 3.1 type c port and abunch of audio connectors as far as displayoutputs go you've got three display portsand one hdmi port it's pretty impressive andthen on the front we've got three usb portsand then a type c port and a microphone headphonejack that is actually a really good fronti o although the build quality isn't amazingit's very plasticky and as you can see herethere is definitely some panel gap actiongoing on but with that let's tear it openand see what it looks like inside okay soit's like a little lever that you pull andthen that comes off so that's not bad that'sa pretty cool implementation and then in therewe've got kind of what looks like the insideof an office pc quite frankly now the firstthing that you'll notice is that you can'tactually see a huge amount because like imentioned earlier the power supply does blockthe entire cpu cooler area so that does notlook promising for airflow over here the graphicscard is a very interesting oem version ofthe rx 5700 hmm that graphics card is a low-keysexy cooler on it yeah i don't know how coolingis going to work for it does have a fan rightthere blowing straight onto it so maybe maybeit'll be okay and then this is actually theboot hard drive so it is about a thousanddollar system that doesn't have an ssd init there are a couple of glaring issues withthis peasant spec aside from the fact thatit has a pretty decent graphics card in itbut we'll get into all of that a bit laterfirst let's dig a bit deeperthat doesn't feel consensual on any leveloh it's just it's very tightly sprung so nowwe have a decent look at the inside of thesystem and i am immediately worried cpu-wisethis system has a ryzen 5 3500 in it whichis a bit of a weird oem ryzen part and thenits fan is just stuffed behind the back ofthe power supply for that fan's sake i reallyhope it's got a choking fetish at least themotherboard's power delivery has some prettychunky looking heatsinks they did put a prettyherculean looking fan above all of these componentsso hopefully that helps with the airflow situationand then over here is another really big issuewith this configuration it only has one stickof ram it's yeah it's 26 66 megahertz andthat mixed with the fact that it's in singlechannel is a huge huge no-no when it comesto ryzen so that may kneecap the performanceof the system quite a lot and then finallylet's just take this gpu out and have a closerlook at it this is actually a very interestingoem version of this graphics card the standardreference design has like a metal blower cooleron it which looks very nice but it doesn'tcool very well this on the other hand hastwo fans it's got a pretty serious lookingfin stack with four heat pipes i think itcould perform very well and you've actuallygot space for a reasonable amount of harddrives so you've got two hard drive cageshere and then the one in the front that alreadyhas the hard drive on it and then you've alsogot an m.2 slot which it's very proud of onthe box but that's enough of the inside let'splug in this alienware and power it up forthe first timewhere no how did you how did you get in hereit does collect dust really quickly but ohyeah there we go we've got some alienwarehappening there's actually a surprisinglysmall amount of bloatware on this system noway i i feel like i'm being scammed here ifeel like where where is mcafee because mcafeeis always on these systems that's surprisingi mean there's a bunch of pointless alienwarecrap on it but that's surprisingly good let'ssee under system how recent is this driverset up 1930 okay i think that is very oldand then it's got this ryzen 5 3500 in itwhich is a pretty weird cpu because it's a3600 x but just without hyper threading soyou just have six cores and six threads asopposed to six cores and 12 threads now thisis definitely not a great start temperaturewise we're just downloading some games 27odd percentage of cpu utilization and we'vehad an average of 73 degrees celsius on thecpu so oh nothat went a lot worse than i thought it wasgonna go here you can see the system tryingdesperately and failing to run battlefield5. that's appalling it's only at like 1080phigh settings with an rx 5700 in the systemit shouldn't be running like a polio victimwhat's even worse is seeing it try to runescape from tarkov look at that frame dropit was running so badly that the anti-cheatsofter actually kicked in and timed out theserver connection because it couldn't figureout why the system was behaving so weirdlynow my first thought was it's definitely overheatingbecause well it sounds like it's trying toreenact the hindenburg disaster next to mejust have a bit of a listenbut after running msi afterburner the temperaturesare actually fine so it's very noisy becausethe system is trying really hard to maintainthose temperatures and in all fairness tothe pc the ambient temperature in the roomthat i did the test in was 30 degrees celsiusso yeah it is a bit of a tough use case idid do a bunch of gaming again the next daywith the ambient temperature in the room atabout 26 degrees celsius and then it was alot quieter but it's all the cpu making thatnoise and i would definitely recommend speckingup the liquid cooler option because i thinkthat would make a big difference on the otherhand the graphics card temperatures are reallygood we're sitting at just over 60 degreescelsius in a high ambient temperature roomon an rx 5700 that cooler is really impressiveso it's not overheating so the weird performancecan only be caused by one thing this single8 gig stick of ram and sure enough after idropped this 16 gig kit of ddr4 3200 megahertzin there the performance was so much betterit turned into a really good little gamingmachineyou can see here that battlefield 5 runs assmooth as a cucumber and even escape fromtarkov runs very well in this system whenyou upgrade the ram and then another issueon the performance front is the fact thatthis pc doesn't have an ssd in it which meansit runs windows like a first generation windowsvista machine it's just all sluggish and terriblebut despite all of these issues i actuallyreally like the little alienware system iwas initially very outraged about the wholeram issue and the terrible gaming performancestraight out of the box and i filmed the wholebit where i was like ranting about how weshould burn dell to the ground for sellingthese terrible configurations but then i thoughtto myself the thing is that ram kit only costsabout 58 us dollars on amazon and dell doesmake it really easy for you to upgrade thesesystems they don't have any weird warrantyvoid if removed stickers and you have easyaccess to the ram and ssds and all kinds ofstuff now on dell's website you can get 16gigs as opposed to eight gigs but you haveto pay an extra hundred dollars for that soyeah i would definitely just buy my own ramand drop it in here when it comes to the noiseissues they're also really easy to solve allyou need to do is spec up the all-in-one liquidcooler option for the cpu which is like anextra 20 or 30 on the website and i wouldhighly recommend doing that because it'llmake the cpu run significantly cooler andquieter and to get an ssd in here you justneed to pay an extra 50 for a 256 gig bootdrive you still keep the one terabyte storagedrive you just get an extra ssd for the actualoperating system if you spec up oneof these systems incorrectly you get thisexperience which is a pc that runs like it'srecently performed a frontal lobotomy on itselfwhich considering the fact that this configurationcost me the canadian equivalent of a thousandone hundred us dollars making it the cheapestrising configuration i could get on dell canadais outrageous at that price point it shouldat least have had 16 gigs of ram and an ssdin it and honestly a lot of these alienwareconfigurations are complete garbage but youcan spec up some pretty decent systems thatdon't cost that much more than building yourown system now there are a couple of secretsto buying these alienware pre-builds the firstone is always buy them when they're on salewhich is often in fact they're on sale atthe moment and then you just need to sussout the configurations to get the one that'sthe best price to performance currently fora thousand four hundred and sixty us dollarsyou can spec up a system that has a ryzen7 3700 x in it and an rx 5700 xt 16 gigs ofddr4 3200 megahertz it's got an ssd and astorage drive with the all-in-one liquid cooleroption for the cpu and that only costs about90 dollars more than actually buying all theparts yourself and building the pc yourselfand that's not including the price of windowsthe only thing that's a little bit sketchabout the setup for me is the fact that alienwaredoesn't let you spec up the bigger power supplywith the rx 5700 xt although weirdly it letsyou do it with nvidia graphics card selectedand 550 watts for a 3700 x and an rx 5700xt is just borderline fine i mean i typedall of the wattage calculations into c sonic'swattage calculator and even with boost frequenciestaken into account of the components it saysit'll be fine but you really are on the limitthere and this is purely subjective but iactually kind of like the way it looks aswell initially i thought it was pretty gaudybut is it really more gaudy than like a rainbowvomit gaming system that you build yourselfalthough some of the pictures on dell's websitedoes make it look a little bit like a robot'slady garden and the build quality is not amazingbut when it's on the desk next to you likethis it looks pretty cool and when it's likein a more dimly lit room this little rgb ringin the middle just like floats in nothingnessinside the machine it really is starting togrow on me now i'm not saying we should alljust run out and go and buy alienware pre-buildsbut for somebody who wants to buy a pre-builtgaming system for whatever reason you cando a hell of a lot worse than a correctlyspec alienware system bought at the correcttime i may actually do a follow-up video atsome point where i upgraded with a bunch ofmy own parts and turn it into a real a reallady garden monster now i know this is gonnacause some mad outrage in the comments sectionso let me know what you think of my conclusionhere if you enjoyed the video please do considersupporting me on patreon i'll have it linkedin the description below and it'll reallyhelp me buy more of these kinds of systemsto do more videos on so i'd really appreciatethat i've got a bunch of other social medialinks down there as well and yeah until thenext video bye-bye