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Aurora R8, Experience of Buying
My Alienware Aurora R8 experience
It has been 95 days since I hit the "order" button and at this point, I am glad to say that I am happy with my purchase of the R8. My decision to buy an Alienware desktop started a month before that when I bought another Dell system, an Optiplex 27" AIO with i7 8700 and GTX 1050. At that time, my plan was to use the PC mainly as a surfing/ email machine with some additional juice to run games like Forza Horizon 4. Long story short, that plan fell apart and I decided I needed something that I can have a little bit more control over. Enter the desktop PC.
I've been over to several BYO websites like wepc and pcgamer to look at building my own rig but like many of us here observed, Dell's solution are usually cheaper... provided you're willing to live with what it means to deal with the many colorful issues we see in this forum.
Configured my system as below (trimmed to show the main parts):
1 210-ARGS Alienware Aurora R8
1 801-1540 Onsite/In-Home Service After Remote Diagnosis, 1 Year
1 490-BEUO AMD Radeon RX 560X with 4GB GDDR5
1 321-BDXH 850W EPA Bronze PSU Liquid Cooled Chassis
1 801-1493 Dell Limited Hardware Warranty Initial Year
1 570-AACN Alienware Mouse Is Not Included
1 580-ABUI Keyboard Not Included
1 555-BDBY 802.11ac 1x1 WiFi and Bluetooth
1 400-AMXY 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s (64MB Cache)
1 370-ADUC 8GB, DDR4 2666MHz
1 619-AHCQ Windows 10 Home (64bit) English
1 338-BSDW 9th Gen Intel Core i5-9400 (6-Core/6-Thread 9M Cache,4.1GHz Processor with Intel® Turbo Boost Technology)
The order was placed about a week before a US holiday so I was wary of a price drop. However, there was a good 15% discount and that takes a big chunk out of the 850W PSU + liquid cooling upgrade. Total damage is $875 + $76 in tax. I also have DFS account with 12 month interest-free payment and 6% reward.
Like many of you AW owners, waiting for the PC to arrive was a practice of patience. Initially the system showed that it will take ~10 days for it to arrive. I reached out to order support via chat and the rep was very helpful in explaining that other than ready-to-ship AW (like the tons of outlet R7s), most AW systems are built after order received. He did mention he will put a note that we chatted about my wait time concern. I didn't expect that to change anything until 2 days later, I was notified the system was shipped! And 2 days after that, a huge brown box with an alien head sat on my front porch. Without any signature required. Thanks UPS!
Unboxing the system brought me back to my first Dell which was a 17" laptop bought as a college graduation gift in 2003. As I plugged the cables and powered on the system, everything was flawless. Including Cortana's 90dB "HELLO". Ran Heaven benchmark just to get some numbers on the RX560 before shutting down the system and adding/ replacing the following:
WD Blue 1 TB HDD --> Crucial P1 500GB SSD [$61]
RX560X --> MSI RX580 Armor OC 8GB [$160 after $20 rebate]
Reinstalled Win10 with the image from Dell's recovery tool on the SSD. Everything worked great after that until the day I decided to upgrade my RAM...
GTS81
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June 30th, 2020 17:00
@Anonymous :
I cook up plans for the orange julius even when I'm showering the toddler or I'm here at office 10 miles away. It's just a background task running in my mind visually imagining the various mods/ cabling/ placement.
Just got a message from Fedex that they delivered a package from PPCS today.
r72019
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June 30th, 2020 21:00
How is it that you quoted the same text twice in one reply and only the first quote got moderated.
Anonymous
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June 30th, 2020 23:00
@r72019 @GTS81
Copying some chatter from up-thread;
I talked about getting three M.2 NVMe SSDs like this ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro but @r72019 mentioned something about using up a lot of PCIe lanes (or some such thing). So let me know what you think about that SSD brand and if getting three is a problem.
So if you don't mind let me know what you think about ADATA SSD quality, and installing three SSDs. I don't know anything about PCIe lanes or how many I have and/or what they are even used for.
Also, if you could check the photos of the i9-10980XE box sticker info and let me know if you detect anything suspicious of peculiar. It is all Greek to me
I can sorta see 'back-asswards' being flagged in a convent forum, but 'fan hub'
GTS81
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July 1st, 2020 00:00
I looked up at the clock and it was past midnight. All I did was sleeve 3 fan cables and played around a whole lot in placing the Quadro controller. Perhaps it's one of the most masochistic way to mount a fan controller and connect 3 fans to it. That's why it took 2 hours.
@Anonymous : I'll cogitate on your questions in the morning. Right now in my state of mind, everything seems like Greek to me too.
r72019
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July 1st, 2020 03:00
Where did you post the box picture?
Anonymous
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July 1st, 2020 05:00
@r72019
GTS81
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July 1st, 2020 06:00
Anonymous
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July 1st, 2020 07:00
@GTS81 Plug in those numbers from the box? I can’t see the batch number clearly.
as always (click photo to embiggen)
Thanks for the link. Looks like a very full 3 year warranty.
GTS81
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July 1st, 2020 07:00
@Anonymous :
the iPad doesn't allow me to click to embiggen. Looks like we're all good that this boxed processor is genuine, unless seller has a very skillful way to slap on labels.
r72019
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July 1st, 2020 23:00
Empty Intel box with pristine sticker:
r72019
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July 1st, 2020 23:00
Hot air gun. But I mean you'll be able to tell if it's genuine as soon as you plug it in. Are you worried they slapped a 10980xe IHS on a 10940x?
r72019
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July 1st, 2020 23:00
Most likely just trying to make a quick $250 a pop by selling them $500 over cost. I'd only worry about something like that if you bought from like say someone with 0 feedback as a seller, or the new member icon after their name and a couple small value feedback.
Anonymous
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274.2K Posts
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July 2nd, 2020 17:00
@r72019 Empty Intel box with pristine sticker:
GTS81
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July 2nd, 2020 20:00
@Anonymous :
That's probably @r72019 own box which he opened using a heatgun. How about the anti-tamper translucent sticker? I see them on both my boxed 9th Gen CPUs.
Anyways, things have gone south with the 420mm big boy.
I totally missed the width by 7mm. So focused on the height which actually fits nicely.
Illegal extension #1
Illegal Extension #2
I've submitted a return request to PPCS. Let's hope there's some mercy for me.
RGB cable on the GPU waterblock popped out this morning so I decided to sleeve them together to clean up the stringy mess from them.
Anonymous
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July 2nd, 2020 23:00
@GTS81 things have gone south
Don't go south . . . where the COVID has hit the fan
I can't see the clearance underneath, but if there is a full opening for air flow, I like Illegal Extension #2 better.
Don't make me have to show you how to orient photos again
. . . and please . . . no more Kudos. All I do here is repeat what I have learned from you guys.
(click photo to embiggen)