Aurora R15 , thoughts

First off, this is long winded, so I apologize in advance. I am like most people in that I am more inclined to post a problem or a negative finding, but thought I would share on what has largely been very positive.  

I am a fan of Alienware and have had a number of Alienware systems over the years, starting with the old company and the classic Predator with an AMD FX-51 Sledgehammer. Then a couple of my own full build updates in that case before an R4 and then the R13. The R13 was "quirky" and upon delivery could at times sound like a leaf blower when under stress. I spent some time changing fans, adding fans, repasting, adding a 4080 and then finally reading that the R15 was enough of an improvement to upgrade.

I went with the 13900KF/4090 build and with the sale Dell had coupled with some incentives from Chase, it really was hard to beat from a pricing perspective. Delivery was fast and safe and out of the box everything was good. Waiting may of given me the advantage of some of the early issues being sorted, but I experienced nothing unusual.

The good:  I was honestly shocked and how quiet this machine is. I had bought fans in expectation that they would need replacing, but found that was a non issue. I put it through a bunch of games, some benchmarks and it rarely was even audible, even next to me. All the panels fit tightly and it didn't have a mark on it, all that plastic film did the job. For a prebuilt I was happy as it had no issue with anything I tried at 4K and scored a respectable 35K+ in Cinebench R23.  AWCC worked as it should and hasn't flaked out or lost any settings.

The questionable / bad: I honestly hesitate to say there is anything I have found that is "bad", but there were a few things that stuck out. First, I am sure that there is a design decision on the routing of the power cable for the GPU and it was securely routed, but it is not pretty. Also, the NVME and the WiFi/Bluetooth card look a bit bare next to the rest of the heatsinks. Maybe a RGB offering for the RAM since Dell uses Kingston for their XMP sets anyway. These are small things, but do have a noticeable return visually.

Changes: I did redo the power cable as it bothered me every time I walked by it. I'm sure it is frowned upon, but OCD wins there over warranty. I upgraded the RAM to DDR5 7200 (runs at 7000 with XMP timings) and changed the front fan to an OEM Alienware RGB fan to match the rear, taking advantage of the extra unused RGB ports up front. I added a second NVME and then heatsinks for the others.

TLDR: This is the best Alienware / Dell machine I have had and with a few small changes is just about perfect for me. I get the whole build your own and the potential throttling etc. that can be part of a prebuilt, but I feel like I got what I paid for and hope the next version will be just as good or better!