Putting an RTX 3070 in an Alienware Pre-Built: A Terrible idea?

**Alienware System Review: Unboxing and Benchmarks**

After removing the fan, I can see that this little plastic cage that they use to mount it actually adds to the clearance a bit. So, I'm curious if I can fit the GPU with the fan without this little plastic cage. This is just a quick attempt, but I'll see if I can wedge the fan into place with the GPU. Um, no, I wouldn't say that fits, in fact, it's now stuck.

So, that didn't work, so I'm just going to have to wing it when it comes to airflow. It's you know, it's an Alienware system, they're renowned for having really good airflow, so it can do with a couple fewer intake fans, you know that's what I always say. Okay, so now it should just slip into place without much hassle, yeah, look at that, look at that. We got it in here.

I've got many concerns, uh, the first one is the fact that it's got one of those pass-through cooler designs, which is gonna pass through straight into that metal bit, and there's no front intake fan here anymore. But hopefully, there's enough space for the GPU to actually breathe. Yeah, I think it should be okay; we've got some ventilation on the side panel here, uh, which you know, there's not much space to breathe but it's better than nothing.

Oh, I almost forgot the other concern I have is the power supply because it's like a 500 watt unit, i think, which is not much for this system. At least, it does have two 8-pin PCI express power connectors, so it's going to be able to start up, but how well it can actually power this GPU, yeah, it's yet to be seen.

Other than the actual physical installation process, this is actually surprisingly easy to get running when I started up the system. I just got an error warning, the PC was a bit worried about that front fan not being plugged in, but once I boot it into Windows, I just installed the graphics card drivers, and it's kind of working.

As you can see here, I was kind of expecting I'd have to sacrifice a goat to the gods of Dell to get this system to recognize the GPU, but it's worked surprisingly easily. Now, let's see if it catches on fire when we run games on it. Here I'm about 20 minutes into a session of Battlefield V, and look at those temperatures; it's actually way better than I was expecting.

It's surprisingly close to the temperatures of the previous benchmarks that I did in that Lienly 215 mesh front panel case and bear in mind this is with the GPU boosting to 2 GHz, in the same way that it did in that airflow-optimized case. Although, it is worth noting that that little Ryzen 5 3500 is thermally throttling up the butt.

Don't worry; I'll put an even bigger thermal load on that 3070 to see if we can get it to overheat. So, yeah, it seems like the Alienware has its GPU temperatures pretty well under control. Just out of curiosity, I redid the benchmarks for Battlefield 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider so that we can compare it to the 10850K results.

Yeah, there's definitely a drop in performance, but that's to be expected those are two very different CPUs. Finally, I just wanted to see if I could actually get the GPU to overheat in this system. Uh, so I ran an instance of FurMark, and yeah, again, the temperatures topped off pretty quickly, and it didn't run that hot; I'm surprised at how well this Alienware system manages its GPU thermals.

Again, the CPU thermals are a different story, but that's that's pretty impressive. I was kind of expecting that we were going to get temperatures close to the fusion point of silicon in that system but yeah, that luckily didn't happen. That brings me to the end of the video, so if you enjoyed it, like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one check out my Twitch account; I stream about twice a week, and yeah, until the next video, bye!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay so this is a little bit of an awkward video for me to make considering that just on saturday i posted a video talking about how on launch day i queued for an rtx 3070 couldn't get one and then bought something even better instead now the thing is halfway through editing that video i got a phone call from memory express saying that they actually got a shipment of rtx 3070s gigabyte versions of it that nobody had pre-ordered and they wanted to know if i wanted one and i was like hell yes i want one i've been trying to get my hands on an ampere card for ages now so that i can do some experimentation on them that involves alienware probing here we have an rtx 3070 that was actually bought at a shop yep apparently they do exist uh before we carry on i just want to say thank you so much to a viewer called neo who pretty much fully paid for this graphics card so thank you so much i i really appreciate that uh so let's just pop this open we've got all of the paperwork and then here is the actual gpu oh that's that's it there's not much going on in here actually oh it feels like a like a chunky beast oh hell yeah that's a pretty big gpu on the box it says that it's got a metal backplate which i really like the sound of oh yeah look at that what a beauty of a card actually so if you have it in your system it's going to be this way around and that looks like a really nice gpu the first thing that jumps out to me about this card is that the actual pci express connectors aren't physically soldered on to the pcb it's like power connectors that attach it uh that's interesting so it looks like in here those look almost like molex pins in there so that's a bit worrying um it's got a bios switch so it's got dual bios's as standard it's actually set to the oc bios as opposed to the silent one as far as the rear i o goes we've actually got two hdmi and two display ports that's nice and versatile yeah this is a good looking card and it looks like it's gonna perform really well temperature wise because you've got this like through the heatsink design for for the cooling over here i mean this all looks pretty good although my only concern is the reliability of those power connectors although i guess only time will tell at this point most of us know how the rtx 3070 performs so i'm just gonna do a quick tldr of my experience with this gigabyte card basically when it comes to high refresh rate 1440p gaming with the rtx 3070 it's a little bit like that scene from the avengers where loki just gets his salad tossed all over the room by the hulk maybe i remember that scene incorrectly but anyway the gaming performance is insane when looking at these couple of gaming benchmarks you're getting above 120 frames per second average at ultra settings with most of these games well not with crisis remaster but we all know whose fault that is these results are very impressive for 500 and once this stock stabilizes i think these gpus are going to do very well i mean that's depending on how well the big navi launch goes this is actually a really exciting time for pc gaming there's so much competition going um but yeah basically if you're trying to game at like high refresh rate 1440p you don't need to spend more money than this gpu even if you're doing ray tracing without dlss which is a bit of a stupid use case but even in that situation you're still getting above 60 frames per second at 1440p with battlefield 5 and shadow of the tomb raider and then when it comes to the actual thermal performance of this specific gigabyte card it does pretty well in a well ventilated case like the lienly 215 mesh front paneled airflow case uh we're getting about 64 celsius with an extended gaming session and it doesn't get that noisy so yeah i mean it runs pretty cool and pretty quiet you'll probably get cooler and quieter results from one of the bigger cards but i like the fact that this cooler isn't just obscenely massive so with that let's see how much we can destroy this gaming performance by shoving it in an alienware pre-built system it's so heavy i love how sturdily this system lies on its side now here is the gaming oc rtx 3070 and i really hope it fits in that alienware system because it's uh it's a real long boy and i'm i'm not sure it's going to it may be a little bit like fitting a cucumber into a zucchini patch so yeah let's let's try it out okay yes so i think the power supply goes up first let's get this out the way and then we remove this somehow yes there we go so now that we've got everything pulled open the way that it needs to be it's the moment of truth let's see if this 3070 fits in here oh no it's so close there is a couple of millimeters in it look at how close it is to fitting in there yeah i think i'm just gonna have to take this front fan out and then we're gonna be in business although we're gonna be missing the intake fan for the gpu so i i don't know if that's gonna be a worthwhile trade-off to make something we do have going for us is the fact that this isn't a really chody graphics card so yeah we're definitely going to have space vertically in the system it's just it's just horizontally that we have a problem now now i was kind of thinking that maybe i should just remove this plastic shroud because as you can see in there it does extend a little bit beyond where the actual heatsink sits you can see the same thing on the other side here there's definitely some wasted space and it would be very easy to remove the back plate and and the cooler and try and do that the problem is as you can see here the actual fans are attached to this shroud so if you remove the shroud you have to remove the fans as well uh it's not modular in any way so yeah there's no way around that the only way that i can do this is by removing that intake fan okay now we just need to get this front fan out it should be pretty straightforward we just okay that's a very fine tolerance we're working with here but wait how do i okay there we go hell yeah after removing the fan you can see here that this little plastic cage that they use to mount it actually adds to the clearance a bit so i'm curious if i can fit the gpu with the fan without this little plastic cage now this is just a quick pretty stupid attempt but i'm gonna see if i can just like wedge the fan into place with the gpu um no i i wouldn't i wouldn't say that that fits in fact if anything it's now stuck um so that didn't work so i'm just gonna we're just gonna have to wing it when it comes to airflow it's you know it's an alienware system they're renowned for having really good airflow so it can do with a couple fewer intake fans you know that's what i always say okay so now it it should just slip into place without much hassle yeah look at that look at that we got it in here i've got many concerns uh the first one is the fact that it's got one of those pass-through cooler designs which is gonna pass through straight into that metal bit and there's no front intake fan here anymore but hopefully there's enough space for the gpu to actually breathe yeah i think it should be okay we've got some ventilation on the side panel here uh which you know there's not much space to breathe but it's better than nothing oh i almost forgot the other concern i have is the power supply because it's like a 500 watt unit i think which is not much for a city 70. at least it does have two 8-pin pci express power connectors so it's going to be able to start up but how well it can actually power this gpu yeah it's it's it's yet to be seen other than the actual physical installation process this is actually surprisingly easy to get running when i started up the system i just got an error warning the pc was a bit worried about that front fan not being plugged in but once i boot it into windows i just installed the graphics card drivers and it's kind of working as you can see here i was kind of expecting i'd have to sacrifice a goat to the gods of del to get this system to recognize the gpu but it's worked surprisingly easily so now let's see if it catches on fire when we run games on it here i'm about 20 minutes to half an hour into a session of battlefield v and look at those temperatures it's actually way better than i was expecting it's surprisingly close to the temperatures of the previous benchmarks that i did in that um in that lienly 215 mesh front panel case and bear in mind this is with the gpu boosting to 2 gigahertz in the same way that it did in that very airflow optimized case although it is worth noting that that little ryzen 5 3500 is thermally throttling up the butt but don't worry in a second i'll put an even bigger thermal load on that 3070 to see if we can get it to overheat so yeah it seems like the alienware has its gpu temperatures pretty well under control just out of curiosity i redid the benchmarks for battlefield 5 and shadow of the tomb raider so that we can compare it to the 10850k results and yeah there's definitely a drop in performance but that's to be expected those are two very different cpus and then finally i just wanted to see if i could actually get the gpu to overheat in this system uh so i ran an instance of fur mark and yeah again the temperatures topped off pretty quickly and it didn't run that hot i'm surprised at how well this alienware system manages its its gpu thermals again the cpu thermals are a different story but that's that's pretty impressive i'd say i was kind of expecting that we were going to get temperatures close to the fusion point of silicon in that system but yeah that that luckily didn't happen and that brings me to the end of the video so if you enjoyed it like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one check out my twitch account i stream about twice a week and yeah until the next video byeokay so this is a little bit of an awkward video for me to make considering that just on saturday i posted a video talking about how on launch day i queued for an rtx 3070 couldn't get one and then bought something even better instead now the thing is halfway through editing that video i got a phone call from memory express saying that they actually got a shipment of rtx 3070s gigabyte versions of it that nobody had pre-ordered and they wanted to know if i wanted one and i was like hell yes i want one i've been trying to get my hands on an ampere card for ages now so that i can do some experimentation on them that involves alienware probing here we have an rtx 3070 that was actually bought at a shop yep apparently they do exist uh before we carry on i just want to say thank you so much to a viewer called neo who pretty much fully paid for this graphics card so thank you so much i i really appreciate that uh so let's just pop this open we've got all of the paperwork and then here is the actual gpu oh that's that's it there's not much going on in here actually oh it feels like a like a chunky beast oh hell yeah that's a pretty big gpu on the box it says that it's got a metal backplate which i really like the sound of oh yeah look at that what a beauty of a card actually so if you have it in your system it's going to be this way around and that looks like a really nice gpu the first thing that jumps out to me about this card is that the actual pci express connectors aren't physically soldered on to the pcb it's like power connectors that attach it uh that's interesting so it looks like in here those look almost like molex pins in there so that's a bit worrying um it's got a bios switch so it's got dual bios's as standard it's actually set to the oc bios as opposed to the silent one as far as the rear i o goes we've actually got two hdmi and two display ports that's nice and versatile yeah this is a good looking card and it looks like it's gonna perform really well temperature wise because you've got this like through the heatsink design for for the cooling over here i mean this all looks pretty good although my only concern is the reliability of those power connectors although i guess only time will tell at this point most of us know how the rtx 3070 performs so i'm just gonna do a quick tldr of my experience with this gigabyte card basically when it comes to high refresh rate 1440p gaming with the rtx 3070 it's a little bit like that scene from the avengers where loki just gets his salad tossed all over the room by the hulk maybe i remember that scene incorrectly but anyway the gaming performance is insane when looking at these couple of gaming benchmarks you're getting above 120 frames per second average at ultra settings with most of these games well not with crisis remaster but we all know whose fault that is these results are very impressive for 500 and once this stock stabilizes i think these gpus are going to do very well i mean that's depending on how well the big navi launch goes this is actually a really exciting time for pc gaming there's so much competition going um but yeah basically if you're trying to game at like high refresh rate 1440p you don't need to spend more money than this gpu even if you're doing ray tracing without dlss which is a bit of a stupid use case but even in that situation you're still getting above 60 frames per second at 1440p with battlefield 5 and shadow of the tomb raider and then when it comes to the actual thermal performance of this specific gigabyte card it does pretty well in a well ventilated case like the lienly 215 mesh front paneled airflow case uh we're getting about 64 celsius with an extended gaming session and it doesn't get that noisy so yeah i mean it runs pretty cool and pretty quiet you'll probably get cooler and quieter results from one of the bigger cards but i like the fact that this cooler isn't just obscenely massive so with that let's see how much we can destroy this gaming performance by shoving it in an alienware pre-built system it's so heavy i love how sturdily this system lies on its side now here is the gaming oc rtx 3070 and i really hope it fits in that alienware system because it's uh it's a real long boy and i'm i'm not sure it's going to it may be a little bit like fitting a cucumber into a zucchini patch so yeah let's let's try it out okay yes so i think the power supply goes up first let's get this out the way and then we remove this somehow yes there we go so now that we've got everything pulled open the way that it needs to be it's the moment of truth let's see if this 3070 fits in here oh no it's so close there is a couple of millimeters in it look at how close it is to fitting in there yeah i think i'm just gonna have to take this front fan out and then we're gonna be in business although we're gonna be missing the intake fan for the gpu so i i don't know if that's gonna be a worthwhile trade-off to make something we do have going for us is the fact that this isn't a really chody graphics card so yeah we're definitely going to have space vertically in the system it's just it's just horizontally that we have a problem now now i was kind of thinking that maybe i should just remove this plastic shroud because as you can see in there it does extend a little bit beyond where the actual heatsink sits you can see the same thing on the other side here there's definitely some wasted space and it would be very easy to remove the back plate and and the cooler and try and do that the problem is as you can see here the actual fans are attached to this shroud so if you remove the shroud you have to remove the fans as well uh it's not modular in any way so yeah there's no way around that the only way that i can do this is by removing that intake fan okay now we just need to get this front fan out it should be pretty straightforward we just okay that's a very fine tolerance we're working with here but wait how do i okay there we go hell yeah after removing the fan you can see here that this little plastic cage that they use to mount it actually adds to the clearance a bit so i'm curious if i can fit the gpu with the fan without this little plastic cage now this is just a quick pretty stupid attempt but i'm gonna see if i can just like wedge the fan into place with the gpu um no i i wouldn't i wouldn't say that that fits in fact if anything it's now stuck um so that didn't work so i'm just gonna we're just gonna have to wing it when it comes to airflow it's you know it's an alienware system they're renowned for having really good airflow so it can do with a couple fewer intake fans you know that's what i always say okay so now it it should just slip into place without much hassle yeah look at that look at that we got it in here i've got many concerns uh the first one is the fact that it's got one of those pass-through cooler designs which is gonna pass through straight into that metal bit and there's no front intake fan here anymore but hopefully there's enough space for the gpu to actually breathe yeah i think it should be okay we've got some ventilation on the side panel here uh which you know there's not much space to breathe but it's better than nothing oh i almost forgot the other concern i have is the power supply because it's like a 500 watt unit i think which is not much for a city 70. at least it does have two 8-pin pci express power connectors so it's going to be able to start up but how well it can actually power this gpu yeah it's it's it's yet to be seen other than the actual physical installation process this is actually surprisingly easy to get running when i started up the system i just got an error warning the pc was a bit worried about that front fan not being plugged in but once i boot it into windows i just installed the graphics card drivers and it's kind of working as you can see here i was kind of expecting i'd have to sacrifice a goat to the gods of del to get this system to recognize the gpu but it's worked surprisingly easily so now let's see if it catches on fire when we run games on it here i'm about 20 minutes to half an hour into a session of battlefield v and look at those temperatures it's actually way better than i was expecting it's surprisingly close to the temperatures of the previous benchmarks that i did in that um in that lienly 215 mesh front panel case and bear in mind this is with the gpu boosting to 2 gigahertz in the same way that it did in that very airflow optimized case although it is worth noting that that little ryzen 5 3500 is thermally throttling up the butt but don't worry in a second i'll put an even bigger thermal load on that 3070 to see if we can get it to overheat so yeah it seems like the alienware has its gpu temperatures pretty well under control just out of curiosity i redid the benchmarks for battlefield 5 and shadow of the tomb raider so that we can compare it to the 10850k results and yeah there's definitely a drop in performance but that's to be expected those are two very different cpus and then finally i just wanted to see if i could actually get the gpu to overheat in this system uh so i ran an instance of fur mark and yeah again the temperatures topped off pretty quickly and it didn't run that hot i'm surprised at how well this alienware system manages its its gpu thermals again the cpu thermals are a different story but that's that's pretty impressive i'd say i was kind of expecting that we were going to get temperatures close to the fusion point of silicon in that system but yeah that that luckily didn't happen and that brings me to the end of the video so if you enjoyed it like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one check out my twitch account i stream about twice a week and yeah until the next video bye