Aurora R8, memory questions

I figured as much. Thank you for the feedback. I will attempt to go through Dell first but ultimately I see myself getting impatient and just buying the 32GB elsewhere. Do you have any recommendations. I have always seemed to have had luck with Kingston.

You are right though, the wording was a bit confusing and mixing the optane together with where you select actual memory didn't help. The two should have been separate entities.

Do you have any recommendations. I have always seemed to have had luck with Kingston.

I use 2x8GB Crucial Ballistix 3200MHz in my R8 You'd need to be careful with choosing them Kingston based on voltages. @r72019 I think may know more?

You may want to get your SSD/ Optane-HDD business sorted out first. What's your plan? Do you want to do a fresh install of Win10 on your SSD? Or do you want to make a Macrium mirror image of the HDD onto the SSD?

@mikemilk: Correct, the Optane module is supposed to boost up the speed of your HDD and it is not DRAM/ regular memory. Your Windows 10 system will only see the "16GB HyperX™ FURY DDR4 XMP at 2666MHz" as available memory. You may confirm this by loading up task manager and looking at the memory capacity which should be 16GB and not 32GB.

Is your plan to have 32GB available memory? If yes, you would have to talk to Dell and convince them there's been an honest to truest misunderstanding here, hoping they will ship you a matching 16GB HyperX Fury XMP 2666MHz module for a nominal price of an upgrade as though you paid for it during time of purchase (and not the exorbitant jacked up price they charge for post-purchase upgrades).

I'd say you might not have much luck with the above given the community's collective experience here. The nuclear option is to return the entire system to Dell, making them acknowledge that they will give you a full refund as it was their confusing terminology that led to this mistake, and then repurchase, hopefully at the same price. Good luck!

You can try downloading Dell's OS recovery tool from here:

https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/drivers/osiso/recoverytool/wt64a

It gives you options to:

1. A full restore of the factory image of your R8, including all the drivers and additional baggage shipped.

2. Just plain Win10 installation

You will need a USB stick drive for this. All of the drivers you need should be part of #1. If you decided on #2, you can go to Dell's support page and download them again. I'd recommend doing all these changes before you load too many personal files onto your current HDD+Optane setup. Of course, that precludes your interaction with Dell and how satisfied you are with them. 

I plan to call Dell tomorrow. I will update then.

As far as Windows 10 to my SSD my first thought was to clone then format the original HDD. It's been years since I bought a computer. Last time I bought a computer they still came with the install disc. I'm guessing now in order to do a fresh install of Windows from the HDD I would need to download the installation files onto a USB or something of that nature? So I don't know if in this case it will make any difference but I just don't want to lose any drivers or any important files that may be pre-installed on the original HDD. What do you recommend?

That's a handy link. Things really have changed since my last computer purchase. I haven't even plugged this new one in yet. Gonna wait until I talk to Dell. After I get the ram straightened out I will move right into installing Win10 on my SSD. I think I will go the OS only route and install/update drivers as needed.

I remember the days of installing Win95 using 5 pcs of 1.44" floppies. Followed by 30 disks of MS office. 

Can you add an intel optane Memory to a 9th Gen Intel Core i7 9700 ?? I'm planning on getting an Aurora R8 1660 ti, 32gb: 16gb intel optane Memory + 16gb hyperX fury , liquid cooling,  with 2tb sata hdd. And I also seen that dell requirement for the optane are 7th or 8th gen  (and dell with factory installed by default when intel optane is purchased)?

When you received you're Aurora R8 did you have the Intel optane Memory built in and shipped to you or you added once you received it?

Yes, mine came pre-installed but I ordered it that way. I don't think you would have the option to add it if the setup you chose could not support it. So I believe you will be okay.

Follow up to my original questions / issue:

So I finally got a chance to call Dell yesterday. I could probably write half of a book explaining my experience on the phone with them but I will try to condense this down.

Literally, I was on the phone with them for 4 hours and 2 minutes. Before I called them I had discovered something new. They had installed the wrong ram memory. Instead of hyperx fury it was just basic ram so my original issue had totally changed. Now this became their fault and my quest was to have them correct it. At this point I just wanted what I paid for. As I said, I don't want to go on and on about this so to cut it short basically the only solution they gave me was to send the entire computer back for a full refund and buy a new one! Totally ridiculous. All they had to do was just send me the correct ram.

Their argument was I could not prove that I ordered the hyperx fury. My invoice did not reflect that. My invoice stated basic ram. Yet if you do the math you could see the price reflected I paid for it and also the first 2 representatives I talked to found and admitted the problem before they passed me along to the next person. Wouldn't it be cheaper just to send me a couple ram cards instead of having to pay for shipping to send the unit all the way back and shipping to send it out to me again and to build me a new one and recycle the old one ect.?

All of the customer service Representatives did an excellent job and were more than courteous to me and understanding. The problem was they could not override the ridiculous policies and what their supervisors were telling them. I was dealing with a manager in the end but still to no avail. There was an easy fix to the situation yet they decided to take the most customer unfriendly solution possible.

I'm going to wait a few days before I make a decision. As it stands now my mindset is to just return the computer for good and buy somewhere else.

Now would be a good opportunity to assemble your own unless you're dead set on pre-built.

But yeah, I feel for you.  The few times I've had to be on the phone with Dell was quite annoying to say the least. It was for that reason alone I let my warranty lapse with nary a thought of extending it.

If something breaks, I'd rather fix it myself than deal with those clowns.

Their argument was I could not prove that I ordered the hyperx fury. My invoice did not reflect that. My invoice stated basic ram. Yet if you do the math you could see the price reflected I paid for it and also the first 2 representatives I talked to found and admitted the problem before they passed me along to the next person.

I experienced the same glitch as you did but with a much more trivial part. I was very sure I selected the free keyboard and mouse while purchasing my R8 and the final confirmation page before I hit "pay" still reflected that. We all know that these gaming rigs don't ship with keyboard and mouse by default but there was an option to select the complementary cheap accessories which really, I needed to use for just 2-3 days before my real keyboard arrived.

Anyway, upon receiving my order confirmation, I found that the "R8 doesn't ship with keyboard and mouse" wording back on the order sheet. By then the order was "in processing" state and I got on the phone with Dell around 6 hours after order was placed. Similar to you, I was told there was no way I could prove that I selected the non-default option and the presented with this solution:

"We can cancel your order, reorder with the same config, add in the mouse and keyboard."

Sounds good

"Of course there will be extra charge for the free keyboard and mouse. I mean, there is charge for the keyboard and mouse."

bleep

"And you won't get the basement bargain price you nailed yesterday by successfully gaming our system to stack offers."

double bleep.

I courteously thanked the agent and told her to not make a single change to my order. Walked over to the Target near my workplace and bought a $9 Logitech keyboard.

Ironically I video recorded every single step of my transaction while ordering the R8 so that I can prove everything but the keyboard and mouse was just too trivial I skipped it.

@mikemilk, even if you do reorder a new rig, please make sure Dell honors the lowest price paid for your system. The prices can change every 3-5 days so you can actually track the prices and demand an adjustment credit within 30 days. Good luck.

Don't know about the rest of you, but I got my mouse and KB in the box when my R7 arrived.

Here's a snip of my purchase order:

I checked the box for mine and received it fine.