I Bought a RISKY Alienware Gaming PC...
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- čas přidán 5. 02. 2024
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I bought a risky Dell Alienware pre-built gaming PC! For $300, is it any good? Oh, and it's used, by the way... I wonder if we've made a good deal?
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Greg, that single stick of RAM is what’s holding that CPU back.
Exactly. The cpu shouldn't hold back that rtx 2060 that much.
6:05 Because Dell. I work in a school with roughly a 150 dell SFF PCs and some of them (model 3080) have battery issues, and when some teachers unplug them for vacations for exemple, we come back to boot device inaccessible bluescreens because it reverts to RAID instead of AHCI due to the battery failing (and thus the bios resetting), as we use AHCI for image builds
The raid on thing is something dell does in their bios all the time, I work on dell machines for warranty repairs and they do this a lot. I’ll swap in a new motherboard and the new motherboard is set to raid mode, or the old motherboard was set to raid mode and the new one is in AHCI/sata.
I discovered that the hard way. I still have no idea why Dell does that.
when i get a free dell pc for parts, i know the previous owner took the gpu out and leaves everything else. i take the cpu ram and ssd out and buy my own mb to slot it in.
@@williamjones4483 yeah like how many people even get their boot drives in raid anymore
My company uses Dell laptops and we image them ourselves after receiving them. Dell enabled "RAID" mode so they can use the native Intel driver in Windows because it "improves performance." We just change it to AHCI/NVME and build a clean image ourselves.
Yeah, mine too. What a piece of shit laptops these are.
Same thing here. As Windows has 4 partitions normally, Dell have put something like 7 partitions on the SSD. Am really not sure how you gain performance from RAID multiple partitions on the same drive, but I have seen Dell do stranger things.
That dang Intel VMD controller driver needed for RAID mode isn't even included in latest W11 23H2 image, let alone anything older. It wouldn't be so annoying if Windows weren't so picky about which version of the driver you used during install.
When I was making our company's image I decided to roll in the Intel VMD driver. But of course forgot to add it to the WinRE image. So when we decided to Intune join all our machines using Autopilot, resetting Windows would fail because it couldn't detect the NVMe. Luckily adding the driver is just a few commands and wasn't a show stopper.
Steve from "Gamers Nexus" always updated the cpu cooling,replacing it with water cooling upon buying them Alienware machines.
Ahhh. I wasnt sure why raid was enabled when the device had a single drive 😅 . Or reimage fails with raid mode enabled.. but not a massive issues when we are only reimaging a few laptops a month.
I believe that the single stick of ram is what is holding the CPU so hard, I use an i5 8400 (basically the same as fhe 9400 in here) along an rtx 4060 with 16 GB of RAM in dual channel and I haven't experienced a bottleneck such as this
can using a single stick of ram really cause cpu bottleneck?
@@ssm840 yes indeed, you can search for this subject all around CZcams and see the massive hit in fps with a single stick of RAM, dual channel is the way
@@ssm840 yes, especially since it's only 8gb
@@ssm840 Yup. CPUs like to run with 2 sticks of RAM so that it can take advantage of dual channel.
Exactly I have i5 8400 also and it handles a Quadro P5000 (GTX1070) just fine with 10% bottleneck
Adding dual channel ram should increase performance some.
Was about to say the same thing. Single channel ram is one of the biggest bottlenecks in prebuilts. The GTA V bench with dips down to 40 ish fps, would likely be solved with a cheap 16GB dual channel kit.
I upgraded a G5 Dell from a single 8GB stick of DDR4-3200 (running at 2667), to two 16GB DDR-3200. It made a huge difference in everything. I tried to convince them to dump the 1TB hard disk drive for a SSD but they didn't want to.
@@LionWithTheLamb How anyone can be content with a HDD in 2024, i'll never understand. I guess mechanical drives are still relevant for mass storage/NAS and the like but in a PC for regular use or gaming, not having an SSD is just kinda silly. When my brother bought his first SSD, when it was still a brand new thing for consumers, he paid like 330€ for around 100 GB, so using a HDD made a lot of sense. But SSD's are dirt cheap these days.
When you re-image a Dell machine, turn Raid off as it will cause BSOD's - I work with a Dell Config center partner and I complain about this all the time to Dell PM's and Engineers.
I had to laugh that the first thing he did was remove the instructions for how to open the power supply hinge while saying i dont know how this opens. I ended up with one of these during covid times when i was in desperate need
Too funny! Dell couldn't make it much easier.
not gonna lie i kinda hoped it doesn't work so we get a fix or flop episode LOL
As someone who is an independent contractor for Dell, I replace lots of motherboards, and even their laptop motherboards usually come with RAID on by default. Network boot will often take priority too. My best guess was these boards are refurbs and come back out with those settings after being thoroughly tested.
I had to find this sold auction on eBay and then looked at the seller's other items. I got the impression that they buy re-posessed storage units or something similar as there really wasn't any other computer related items. Lot's of random stuff. Might explain why they never took the time to plug it in and test it. It's not worth their time, just sell it cheap and move it out. What a great purchase.
Wiping the drive is good and all, but just an FYI, there are actually viruses that infect BIOSes and hidden areas in SSDs, and use it to infect any new OS you install persisting through wipes. They are rare though, so just a reminder
Gamer's Nexus did an Alienware teardown that will show you a lot of problems with this PC.
Secondly, the single stick of RAM will lead to severe drops in FPS due to single channel stutters
Also the fact that it's only 8GBs that doesn't exactly help matters either, in some games even dual channel DDR4 RAM is still not enough to make the game playable
Loved watching this. Many thanks! ❤️
Used to do warranty work on DELLs. Raid on is a storage option DELL turns on by default for all of their machines. So if you reset it after installing in AHCI. It will bluescreen or freeze at boot and reboot.
I bought a $200 R9 on fb marketplace a few years ago, no cpu, gpu or storage. Had the factory AIO and 850w psu upgrade. I added a spare 980ti hybrid I had sitting around and put the aio and fan up where the top 3.5" drive sits. Added a 9700, another 16gb of ram for a total of 32, and a 512gb m.2 ssd and 1tb laptop hdd down below the gpu. For as much shit as people give these computers in the stock form, they can be modified to be pretty good and not overheat. Just have to find one cheap enough and be clever about solving some of Dell's idocies.
Nice looking case for a prebuilt. Fun to watch these kind of videos.
Always enjoyed your videos Greg keep it coming.
Love your videos was able to learn how to build my first pc through them keep up the good work
Thank you for the larger overlay !!
Dell commonly turns "Raid On" on out of the box and it can still work with a single drive as long as the OS was installed with the BIOS configured that way. Also the swing out PSU is how the PSU swings out of their SOHO Servers like the T40. I work on quite a bit of them heh. SO they basically took the T40 case and slapped on some new plastic. Efficient for them? Yeah, you bought an interesting box.
Yup that’s totally a dell thing
I have also seen Bitlocker partially activated waiting for it to be completely activated.
Oh i have seen Dell Windows Home Edition have that and Raid enabled @@GregM i hope you are having a great day today
there was all so a HDD installed front side was there till bench marks
The new 3050 6GB has models with DVI a port too. Perhaps Dell specified that they specifically wanted a DVI port on this card, considering their potential consumer base.
prolly also to keep using the probably gigantic pile of DVI monitors Dell still has lying around
nvidia added DVI to 2060 and 2060 super its not dell thing . look at something like palit rtx 2060 super and you will find DVI on that too
@@aminbagheri9044 Perhaps, but those GPUs, just like everything else in Dell systems, are built to their specifications. So it's just as plausible that the DVI was included at Dell's request.
Love watching your videos bro❤❤❤keep it up..I like to be awake to just see your videos...It has become an entertainment for me.....
Thank you so much 😀
This was a great find. May the luck continue.
That is quite a good score.
Just upgrade the RAM to 16 and the RTX 2060 to a 3060 / 3060 Ti and it's fine for another few years.
Ill be honest, whenever i see "Untested" on a listing, I assume they mean "I tested it and I know it doesnt work". Literally never bought a pc listed as untested and it not be in some way none functional
I usually take it to mean "I'm selling this for someone else".
@@found13 Same here, even if it was known working prior to being placed in storage, I sell as untested as I don't waste my time retesting everything.
Nice score! Love the vids Greg
I always enjoy your videos.
Nothing fishy about the raid config for some reason Dell does that to all its products. I disable it on every single Dell machine I touch.
Exactly why no one should buy an Alienware. As soon as something goes wrong (and it will, given the "quality" of their computers), it's a nightmare to fix
ehh, idk. no doubt alienware makes some bad computers. but i bought a Aurora R8 on ebay for $440 a year ago, I7 9700K, RTX 2070, 32GB Ram. i put a 2TB m.2 ssd, i put a aftermarket Corsair H60 liquid cooler in it, and a noctua fan for the front, those 2 mods brought the temps and noise from absolutely unbearble noise/near overheating to running cool and super quiet. im under $550 in this pc and its given me 0 issues. so its a hit or miss really but the good ones will treat you well.
They actually came out with a new Aurora and a new case. The new one comes with a 4060. I think that is what it said. It looked okay but I probably won't ever buy another Alienware. Only because its from Dell. They don't care about gamers. Alienware did care about gamers though. I mean look at the old Alienware cases. They were huge.
@@uhavemooface Old alienwares are insane man, i so want a Aurora R4 and gut the parts and make a new pc in it. there has been success doing it and keeping the light controls.
@@ZzzsamzzzG59That's a really good deal. I bought a PC from OFFERUP in March of 2023 for $300 that came with an MSI Z370-A PRO Motherboard, an i7 8700k, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, an ASUS GTX 1060 6GB Turbo, a Corsair H100i 240mm AIO cooler, and the case which is a Kediers C570 open air with 7 RGB fans. It didn't come with a PSU or storage but I already had those from a previous build.
@@ZzzsamzzzG59 I have an r1 case with the top vents that open. It's a cool case
I have the same components, just in a Lenovo prebuilt. Previously I had a 3rd gen i7 HP SFF and in my experience, these OEM systems are more stable and have less compatibility issues than custom built PCs. Plus, they are often super cheap like yours because people associate HP, DELL and Lenovo with office PCs and their value drops, regardless of the specs. I don't think a 9th gen system is old yet, as you say, it still plays games decently and upgrading it to a 9th gen i7 would greatly improve performance with a 2060, not to mention, these systems support 9th gen i9 9900 cpus that are 8C 16T and boost up to 5GHz.
Saying OEM systems are "more stable and have less compatibility issues" is an outright falsehood. These prebuilts are some of the least stable systems out there, while also getting significantly less performance than they should for the hardware due to cheap/poor build quality, and terrible nonstandard cases with insufficient cooling.
@@StormsparkPegasus that's why I said, in my experience.
With these, you do need to use a Dell-specific ISO, have the BIOS in AHCI mode, disable RAID, disable network boot. It's the same with my XPS 8910 - it's the same form factor, just in a different case.
that is certainly a unique layout inside that case, also alienware cases look cool
awesome find and great video
Hey man. Love the channel. I had a Cemos battery low voltage that sent similar messages and kept saying I had to switch to raid and would not boot to my drive. Not sure why but i changed the battery since the rest of my imputs not being saved....and solved my startup/memory issue. It effected alot of my software as far as saving profiles. I always check my battery now every once in a while.
FYI, if you boot into Windows, hold down shift while rebooting and tell it you want to restart in safe mode, then go into the bios DURING the reboot BEFORE you get into safe mode, you can change the bios mode from RAID to AHCI. Something about safe mode allows the OS to boot in either RAID or AHCI mode, and then once you restart to leave safe mode, it will continue to work. Of course, take a backup first if you have any data on the drive you care about, and while this has worked on every system I have ever tried it on, it may not work on all systems.
Future video idea?
The confusion when you saw it was a rtx card and it has dvi port had me in stitches xD
Great video as always, looking forward to the next one :D
Yeah the raid thing is very specific to dell. To switch to another drive you have to set your system to boot into safe mode, switch to achi, actually boot into safe mode, and then you can go back to normal. All their laptops ship with it and it's not even a real raid config, it's some sort of pseudo raid. You have to disable it to image a drive too because it doesnt detect the drive correctly with it on. You cant even capture an image with it on.
These videos have made me consider trying my luck at an "untested" pc, you can get some really good value out of them if you know what you're doing and some luck of course
It boots to network first as they is how they image them on they assembly line using a PXE server. Also if you have a dell management system it would be enabled for that same reason
I'll take this rig for 300 $ all day . I am still running i7700 with 1060 -6 gb and 120 GB normal SSD sooooo , pretty good deal Greg.
... where did the optical HDD drive go?? mounted on the front of the case.... that is how and why raid was enabled right??? was in there till bench marks the HDD after the bench marks the HDD was removed
speccy or gpu z are great softwares to use to figure out all the hardware info
First PC I bought many years ago was an Alienware Auraura R1, I wanted the one with the breathing fins but I couldn't afford it. I still have it and one day I will build a new PC using that chassis as the base, its such a beautiful machine
out of curiosity, what do you do with these ebay pc's you buy? resell them?
Raid is even setup in their sff optiplexes, its a dell board thing
I wonder what maximum hardware was sold in the case? I7? RTX 2080? The fact that it's a lower power CPU and GPU may be what's saving it from thermal D-hell.
It's the same problem with XPS 8930 overheat problem that "Salem Techperts" discover 1 year ago. CPU cant get much of fresh air.
Any Dell edition on 9th Intel edition, maybe has the same problem?
Love this channel
Congrats, Greg. Stay Safe.
is there a CPU upgrade for this board? as you mention i7? then test?
RAID ON in the BIOS just allows for the installation of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver.
Historically RST out performed AHCI but it's much of a muchness these days.
Much of a muchness certainly is a new term to me, thx I like it lol
good work great info thank you😁
I bought an HP way back in the day (around 2009) that ended up coming with two hard drives in it (a 300 GB and a 700 GB) with Windows installed to the smaller one, and RAID enabled by default in the BIOS. Turns out it was because the PC had an Easy Backup button on it that you could press and it would (to my knowledge) mirror the boot drive over to the second drive. When I later upgraded the drive to an SSD, I disabled RAID, and it didn’t like to boot without that.
ur the best Plz Never Stop.
I picked up a refurbed R8 in 2019 for 900 bucks. Only difference was mine had the 120mm AIO with a RTX 2070. Slammed in 32gigs of 3600 memory and all core overclocked the 9600k to a stable 5.4ghz. It was one heck of a budget gaming rig.
I would put that cpu and gpu in a different rig and run those tests again. Alienware prebuilts are notorious for very bad thermals and they tend to be undervolted and locked in bios to save those thermals.
My MSI Z390 board you have to enable raid and install the driver for it. Its motherboard specific. Without enabling it it wont see any nvme or m.2.
DELL, HP and other similar integrators can be a lot more involved, with specific Drivers & Software that is usually in my experience difficult to find sometimes.
Especially in there older systems. Generally when it has an OS in it already I just do the Restart windows and delete my files, way easier.
or keeping the old drive in tact and adding another drive for the new OS. That way when you have an issue you have the old OS to see why.
Greg and the system is clean, no dust in the GPU.
Standard DELL configuration. They always turn on raid on by default on any of their machines.
We buy them as a company - first thing is put it on AHCI mode, and we do a clean reinstall any time (when stocked we keep them with the doak wiped aswell). RaidON has a value in terms of performance, but on DELL systems it just doesn't work like it should. And actually the performance gain is negligible.
Fun little thing is that my old 2060 super founders edition has a dvi port. I specifically had to find a card because my old monitor only supported 144hz through a dvi port so when i was upgrading my gpu i had to find one that had that and came across the 2060 super.
Quite a few of the early revisions of the 2060 had that exact video out layout, even the EVGA RTX 2060 KO has that layout (I know this from having owned one not that long ago). And even if it only has 6gb vram, the 2060 regardless of the brand is still a great 1080p card, even in 2024 (dlss is definitely a life saver for that card).
I'd avoid it if possible because there's a batch of gpus with micron memory tend to crap out with non super models of 2060 to 2080.
I had similar issue with my workstation. For me it was just the SATA ports dying. Only the one I used for a DVD drive was working. The windows and bios did recognize the drives while connected, but couldn't access them. I think turning the raid off would've fixed it.. But at least it gave me a good reason to downgrade to a tad smaller case with smaller motherboard. LOL
That's a steal and a perfect first PC for my abou to be 10 on year old the 10th .. lol. Like you said, maybe the next level cpu, but other than that... solid buy.
6:02 Dell does this on probably all of their computers, RAID is enabled and windows is installed with RAID enabled, even if there’s only a single drive, I’ve seen this from Optiplexs from 2013 to a 2021 XPS 17
Because of this I always switch the setting to AHCI and then reinstall Windows, and it looks like this was the culprit for this computer
If you ever try to upgrade the CPU and need better cooling, the mounting mechanism should be the same as any Asetek Intel Lga 115x, so any Asetek-based 120mm AIO should work and should give a bit of a cooling boost despite the awful case
(Also single channel memory, this thing basically would win any Dell bingo)
That may be a OPTANE drive as opposed to a regular m.2 drive so you may just need drivers. There was a sata cable - is there not also an actual SATA HDD?
I've got a 2060 Super FE model and it's got a DVI port on it.
I would like to point out that for earlier dell platforms like this, a simple cmos reset would have solved everything immediately most likely. The default for this model year is typically set to AHCI.
Hi Greg, Great video salvaging 9th gen stuff, atleast it is windows 11 compatible. I wonder if you tried a sata ssd as a boot drive?
Yes, I believe we highlighted in the video that we had even tried a 2.5" SATA SSD :-)
Device manager could also have told you which gpu you have in there
Hi Greg, and thanks for another great video. My R8 died, and I refused to pay the outrageous price for replacement parts. I did discover it makes a great doorstop and bug trap.
First modern PC I built accidentally turned on Intel RAID [Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST)] instead of standard AHCI. It was not clear when setting up, and I’m honestly not sure how it happened. Took some searching, but was able to disable with command line a a year or so later when I realized there was an issue.
I wasn’t even half through this video and started commenting that this was maybe the issue, then saw you figured it out. I think I turned on Intel RST accidentally when trying to use an old version of Intel XTU. Still no idea. Command line worked to fix it all (thankfully).
Intel RST can be used with/without RAID, but I don’t know what the benefits are without RAID. Thanks for the video!!!
Another thing to watch out for with these is: If you chuck in a different SSD even if it has an OS on it, the bootloader on these OEM machines often wont show the drive if it wasn't installed with an intel VMD driver (Loaded during the Win 10 / 11 setup process)
I work in a Dell Shop. Dell does some goofy stuff in the bios. we always have to change from raid to AHCI on our systems we get.
I think if your main target is 1080p, the 2060 will do just fine in 2024 with 6gb VRAM. It's on par with the 1080 non TI in raw performance, and you could turn on DLSS if needed.
I bought an untested for parts GTX 970 on ebay for 15$, when I received it I disassembled it first thing to clean and test for shorts and it turned out to be a brand new card, clean and working great.
My adult daughter bought the slightly older 7700/1060 version of this. It is not a great build with the air cooled option struggling for air, but it has been a reliable machine that she still uses today. It still plays minecraft and GW2 just fine after all - and she does a bit of Beat Saber as well. It works, but it's not a great one for upgrading and it's stuck with windows 10 for now. When it dies I'll build her a real PC. lol.
why that psu isn't up top? That massive compartment is just sitting there such strange case design
Perhaps they used it in as an enterprise pc for work. Those dells are always set on RAID by default. I have one that did the same.
I like that you change up your video types with these eBay purchases. Keep up the good work.
My 2060 Super FE has a DVI port. I think a lot of the 2060's did but my 2070 and 2080 supers do not
Hate to admit that an R7 was my first venture into PC gaming. I learned my lesson from that thankfully.
Yup that risk you take with untested/ as is listing as it cover the seller butt so you can't turn around tell them doesn't work and buyer try get their money back and keep item or have deal with shipping back
Honestly i have this Alienware aurora pc before i built my own and it has let me down yet and its about 5 years old, and i use if for streaming only
my GTX 1650 in my 2nd PC has a DVI port so i could see why some cheaper models of 20 series cards might have one
Did you check the memory to see if no memory errors? Ya, I just bought a brand new system on last Black Friday and I was getting BSoD once and a while... like watching youtube or playing a game thru google chrome and it would crash.... Did that Windows Memory Diagnostic and on pass 2 reported errors. So yesterday finally went back to the computer store and they swapped out the DDR5 6000 ram and now works fine so far. So goes to show even brand new systems have these pesky problems.
That's great! Love this!
I work at school district and we have around 40 of them in stock from our esports team just sitting around know because they got the new nicer models
ASUS and MSI I know make a few RTX cards with DVI. MSI also has provided graphics cards for Dell in the past.
for untested listings it helps to check the description and other items listed by the seller. If they specialize on electronics resale and list it as untested, its likely there is some issue. Could be an easy fix or DOA. If its a private user, low sales, non technical or maybe even honest description, it could be true that they just don't have the capacity to fully test it. if reseller is super large business, reviews in 10,000s and they sell random return pallets stuff, it could be not worth their time to test it, so it could be true in that case as well.
RTX 20,20 super series FE card still have DVI output.
To switch from RAID mode to AHCI,run command prompt in admin and type this command
bcdedit /set {current} safeboot minimal
to boot to safe mode ,run command prompt in admin and type this command
bcdedit /deletevalue {current} safeboot
to save boot setting.
Awesome ! I shop Ebay quite a bit , great win .
6:25 JUST FYI for Greg or anyone else. Idk why they chose it, but DELL has RAID instead of AHCI mode even back in the XP days. I guess it is because they chose this mode of IDE mode in the bios back then and just never switch, but every DELL we work on here n shop RAID is selected mode.
Where did you get your signed sempiternal Greg??
Does it have room for an AIO on the top?
9th gen I5, and a 2060 should be a good pairing. They are both from around the same year. A lot of systems came with that config.
I always liked the look of those Alienware cases, but the internals seem to be built for utility rather than performance. I think it would be kind of interesting to build a decent system inside one of those cases, but you'd probably need to do some fabrication to clear space for a decent CPU cooler.
I washed with isopropyl alcohol inside, but now my laptop is not turning on. Is there any way to fix this?
Nice snipe!