Alienware - Aurora R12 - Gaming Desktop - Intel Core i7 - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 - 512GB SSD+1TB HDD - Lunar Light

People have been buying Alienware desktops to rip out the GPU. A few weeks ago, I bought one from a guy after he took out the RTX 3080 and RAM. I then put in an NVMe SSD, 16GB (8GB x 2) of quality RAM, found an old GTX 1080 and gave the PC to my dad. It's a super nice mid-level gaming PC. He LOVES it. Some people think they look tacky, but it's fun. And it has TWO USB-C ports! After trying to get myself an RTX 3080 since launch I had the chance to buy this. I figured I would just keep entire PC and sell my current gaming PC. Then I read the reviews... Honestly, it really seems to me that they cut corners on this build because they assumed people would just rip the GPU out. I returned it several reasons before I even opened it. 1. One stick of RAM. ONE. This means it's running in single channel vs dual channel mode. There are some benchmarks of RAM that suggest you'll get same performance out of 1x16GB vs 2x8GB, but they also noted that single channel config caused higher CPU usage. 2. No water cooling. The picture shows water cooling on the CPU, but that is not correct. In fact, the BOX had a symbol that indicated water cooling. While I did not actually open the PC to verify, I did go to Dell's website to pull build and confirmed it has an air CPU cooler on the specs parts list. (You can too...use Service Tag: 17GQZC3 to look it up) 3. The pictures on Best Buy clearly say R11 on back of case. It made me skeptical overall of what I was getting. 4. i7-11700F instead of i7-11700K or KF. Go look up comparison of K vs F variant. For such a small price difference, just use the K/KF variant. 5. Only one M.2 slot. There's tons of space for HDDs (and I think there's a RAID controller), but I'm so used to having two M.2 slots that it seems silly to only have one. 6. Ghetto-looking RTX 3080. Sure the case does NOT have a window and you won't see it, but it just looks like a knock-off. I'm sure it's legit and all, but it just doesn't inspire excitement and after spending $2,200 I want to be excited. 7. Loads of people are reporting cooling issues. Of course my first thought would be to put water cooling on it, but another review mentioned they had issues with the cooler being recognized. And the fan noises sound rough. I have a pretty great PC right now running i7-8700k and RTX 3070 and it seemed like I would be spending $2,200 to get less performance and more hassle. I'm pretty bummed because this was the closest I got to getting a 3080 finally, even if I did have to buy a whole new PC. If you don't want to tinker with your PC, I still think Alienware is not a bad option, but you better get one built correctly, and this is NOT it.

Havent bought a prebuilt so i thought this might be decent for the specs. I'm an avid builder and am still super shocked by Alienware, supposed to be the high end of gaming Prebuilts, makes utter garbage still. Make more ventilation. Its not hard, not only will it make the PC run faster, but it'll last longer, less crashes, and have quieter operation... Youtube, reddit, and twitter exposes all the dirty deeds. Tend to your customers more before you fall behind. Watch gamer nexus on youtube. They exposed a lot of bad practices by Dell... careful out there. Theres a reason why reviews are trash. Honestly im staying away from Dell until they show they care more.

Im going to do some quick pros and cons. Let me start this off by im a loyal best buy member 5k to 10k spent every year at the store no problem this order missed the pickup date by almost a month i only got comunication when i say that it was back for sale on bestbuy.Com and i havent received mine so i contacted support for the 3rd time i believe... i still have not received my intel gamer days code either ... such a bad experience... now the alienware i bought for a very specific thing and it does its job just fine and the dell 3080 is one of the best build cards and easy/cheep to mod out of all of the 3080 cards no matter what after a quick paste mod my vram temps never go past 92c even when ots hot in the house usally they stay at 88c for the price add a watercooler and another stick of ram if its your daily with the chip shortages this is the best way to go

Very disappointed in the performance. The 1999$ price was much more reasonable than the second wave of 2199$ especially with the upgrades that need to happen. You have to put alienwares water cooler in to keep it from over heating. Or turn case fans too 100 which makes it sound like it has phoned home and will be returning to the mother ship lol. The one stick of 16g ram is ridiculous. I’ve gotten a bunch of PCs for my business and this is only one that hasn’t come with dual channel from the factory so yet another expense. Stock it is gaming on cod mw at 97-120 FPS on high settings with dlss on at only 1080p. All other 3080s I have were clearing over 220 FPS. I don’t know how much of this is do to only the single channel ram. I haven’t had a chance to upgrade it yet. Because I don’t know if I’m going to keep. I’m just really disappointed in it and Best Buy for selling it like this. With the water cooler and dual channel for 1999 or 2199 it would be much more reasonable but that’s a lot of upgrades and possibly case fans as well. If you don’t want as much noise. I will say you can do some really cool things with Alienware software suite. But I had to watch a 30 min YouTube video on how to use it lol. And it is kinda pretty. But it’s a chunk and is surprisingly heavy too. The way it comes apart is pretty cool too. So it does have some neat features. And has a decent 3080 I think. I haven’t been able to really stretch it because of the limitations of the cpu cooler and ram I believe. I will update if I pull some ram from another computer or get some to put in there and get a drastic improvement. But so far feels like a flop if you want a 3080 I guess it’s one way to get one but don’t be expecting great frame rates out of the box. That’s the most honest review I have for you.

What a terrible job by Dell. For a company that has been around so long I don’t understand why they knowingly put a product out that performs like this. There is a solution to the cooling problem. You can buy a couple fans remove the hard drive and put another intake fan in its place. You’ll also need to put a liquid cooler. I used the H60 120mm by Corsair. I did a push pull config for it on the top of the case. Lastly I bought the heat sink that Dell should have already included in this build. Hopefully this helps someone. There are many guides on youtube on how to do all of this. GET IT RIGHT DELL.

I was excited to pick this one up to say the least. Fresh out of the box was a basic keyboard and mouse. So keep that in mind, usually you are just upgrading and should already have a gaming mouse and keyboard already, if not make sure to buy those items. Upon powering up the set up as fast I mean lightning fast, this thing comes ready to game with a 16 gigs of RAM and plenty of storage. There’s four different zones of lighting, in front zone there’s three different colors zone you can choose as you can see in my pictures, it on the back right side you can choose another color for the Alienware wording. Overall this is a great gaming computer it’s fast and runs cool, but I do notice at times it can get a little warm and at that point you can open up the side compartment which Dell made it really easy to actually open this thing up and get access to everything. That makes the computer run cooler and it very easy to upgrade it in the future as well. Once you take one screw in the back and basically unscrew it a few turns and release the latch the power supply can just swing out of the way to get access to the cpu in the middle of the case which is liquid cooled and also the ram area (128gb max). Additional storage is located at the bottom of the case where you would normal see the power supply. I do like the Alienware command center overall, it makes it easy to change the lighting on the computer as well as set different fans and power setting for the different games that you play automatically. You will then notice once you switch to different games the lighting will change accordingly and depending on how demanding the game gets so will your fan settings based on what you set them as far the different games. The Dells site makes it very easy to keep your computer up-to-date and protected and it’s basically one of the first place you can go to to make sure your computer is up-to-date. Do you also get Dell support with getting a Dell product which is a big plus at least for me. I will say it’s price very aggressive though. My main gripe with this all said and done is that out of all my computers I have or had I won’t say any names, Dell computers seem to run the warmest so I would keep that in mind. There could be a fan upgrade in the future for the Graphics Card area.

I am not too sure what the previous reviews are referring to when they call this desktop computer “terrible”, “horrible”, “nightmare”. This computer is a winner. CPU temperatures while light use (youtube video watching) are ~43°C, which is perfect, while the gpu is ~36°C which is also perfect. While gaming Call of Duty Warzone, the CPU temps reach ~74°C and the gpu reaches ~71°C. (Everything stock). As soon as I got it, I upgraded the 16gb single channel ram stick that it came with, with 4x16gb of corsair’s ram, giving me 64gb of ram and have already installed the liquid cooler and heatsinks to upgrade the air cooler that dell includes in these machines. I have also upgraded the front fan with a corsair one and the top with two (push-pull) fans also from corsair which push and pull air through the radiator I installed. People are complaining about the air cooler and the loud fans that it came with, however, this is not something they hid while selling it, it comes with a really bad air cooler (gets the job done, but it is not the best) but I knew what it came with. The fans that it comes with are very loud, which I knew this too, reason for me having all the parts I will be needing for upgrading it in hand, prior to purchase. The temps I listed are with stock everything, if Bestbuy allows it, I will update my review to the temps after i actually use it, since I haven’t had time yet. Have no doubt in your mind, this is a great machine and Dell nor Bestbuy are hiding what it comes with at the time of sell. Also, if you buy the one with the 3070 rtx or lower, it comes with a 550w power supply, if you buy the one with the 3080 rtx, it comes with a 1000w power supply. Do yourself a favor and buy the version with the 3080. My warzone is consistently running 240 fps at 1080p while averaging at 190-200 fps. Hope this helps.

This is absolutely ridiculous. I own a few Dell laptops and I know they aren't known for their quality control, but wow... There was a piece of plastic between the cooler and the CPU! They forgot to remove it during assembly for a $2000 computer! Luckily I was swapping the cooler for an AIO and noticed it before I turned it on but just wow... Never trust Dell to get anything right, especially with the thermals of their machines. So who do you support to get a 3080? I'm leaning more towards ebay scalpers over Dell because this is just ridiculous.