This Was The Cheapest Alienware Gaming PC on eBay... 

Hey man, i know it is not related, but please keep up your work. The best thing is coming home from a very long day and having you check out some cool hardware. Thanks a lot for lighting up my day

Could imagine this back in the day, with all the hard drive slots full, SLI graphics cards, probably sounded like some sort of massive industrial air conditioning unit when going.

Wheres the seagull?

You forgot another caveat: "Willing to lug around a 100lb PC when moving". These Alienware cases are equal to moving around a 32" CRT television, or so they feel like it.

A fun video idea might be to see when X generation of processor was finally a bottleneck for Y gen of GPU, maybe look at flagship and entry level ends. Could be a fun retrospective!

I used to own this tower. I sold it in 2018 to an enthusiastic 20yr old guy and I didn't understand why he loved it so much but now I wish I had kept that case. The components inside were long outdated, I wouldn't want those back but the case yes. I built my PCs myself after owning an Alienware tower like this. Overpriced and under performing is what Alienware is now but I would say that about any pre-built tower. Nevertheless, I will own this case again one day. Also, my Alienware tower had a Radeon Hd5870 1gb. That is one component that I wish I still had sitting on my shelf.

Great video. Surprised the old i7-920 performed so well, I'm sure helped by the triple channel ram.

You told that you would deliver longer and more in depth videos. Since that video your uploads became even more entertaining and informative! Very nice effort Steve, keep up the good work mate ;)

So something you might find interesting. My first Alienware was a Cyborg green Area 51m notebook which apparently I purchased in Feb 2003. I'm looking at the product manual that came with it right now, it's in the form of a black Alienware branded A4 ring binder. Upon opening the ring binder you're met with a front page that has TOP SECRET printed across it, CONFIDENTIAL, followed by "For your eyes only" and Agent followed by name and an agent number that's been assigned which is the order number. What follows is 8 chapters on almost 20 pages of printed A4 sheets, the exact details of each component in the system, the burn in benchmark results, a nice intro from them thanking you for buying a system and asking for feedback on the experience. Almost all the pages are scribbled on by myself from the many experiences of system reinstalls, nightmare driver experiences, dodgy ram and broken dvd rom drives, horrid dial up modem issues, nothing just worked and it was a rolling car crash for the most part being a battlefield 1942 pc gamer. This was a pretty unique experience back in those days, well I wasn't aware of anything else like it anyway, cost me £2300 for a Pentium 4 2.8GHZ, 512 mb ram, ATI mobility Radeon 9000 and a 40GB hdd, which was a huge amount of money then. It came from Miami by ship with FEDEX and took several weeks to arrive, and if there was a problem it would have to go back the same way, although they had tech support in Ireland, and you always needed tech support in those days because there were no resources, just dial up modem and shitty internet. Ah, the good old days, when Alienware was quite a special PC. I moved to an Alienware Area 51m desktop a couple of years later, also a good experience, the alien head machine, but the laptop lived on as a business pc for many years afterwards. It's great to see people like yourself digging out these old giants and cleaning them up, having some fun with them!

Especially in older systems mismatched memory is not an issue. You just have to check your clocks and timings, as usually (at least in newer systems) it might default to some "low" jedec spec speeds

A gtx 1060 6 gb, 1660 ti or RX 570/580 8gb would be a good pairing. An RTX 3050 oR 3060 would be a nice try to see if the 920 is still capable of handeling ray tracing. Love the content.

Thank you for showing off these cool features, would also like a deep dive in cable management, and check out that chipset cooler!! I also love these old Alienware machines! Back in the day of course I didn't have the money, but for a few years it was like "If I win the lottery, I'll buy an Alienware machine" - price/performance was always bad, but they were really special in the way that you got features that you wouldn't get easily from simply selecting parts and building your own machine.

been watching you for a while and never thought id see a pc similar to my old one its almost exactly like it 920 12gb 1050ti but 4gb version on a dell mobo damn crazy. glad to see this thing can still do some modern gaming gotta pull it from the garage one of these days

It always amazes me how capable old hardware can be after so long. Imagine being able to run Crysis on a Pentium 4 1.5 and a GTS 250 in 2011.

I like these new longer videos. Keep them coming Mate.

I've been thinking about buying some of these, gutting them, putting a good quality paint job on them, and building some nicely spec'd out systems. I think the nostalgia factor would attract some people.

I have this Alienware Aurora R1 too. Got it from a friend as I helped him upgrade a few years back. When I got it it had the i7-920, 12 GB ddr3-tripple channel, and the "upgrade" GT 630 my friend put in it. Now it has an i7-950, 18 GB (3x 4GB + 3x 2GB sticks), and a GTX 1050 ti. I use it hooked up to the TV to mostly watch TV and movies and RU-vid, with some light gaming. It can do 4k movies just fine, and 1080p/1440p gaming (at 6+ feet from the 55" TV, it can use medium settings and look fine.)

I picked one of these up a few years ago and still use it as my main gaming rig. 1366 Xeons (like an X5680) work on these without any bios mods (or at least mine did) which is what I used in mine before eventually swapping the whole motherboard for an AM4 board. Surprizingly, the case takes a standard micro atx board. It took some work and special dell software to get the lights to work and the consensus of anyone whose tried a mobo swap is that your mileage may vary if the daughter board in these (controls the lights and case fans) will play nice with your particular board. Once I got dells software setup it stopped trying to be a jet harrier and is a really quiet, modern machine now.

Its great to see we've completed the trilogy of reviewing this beast!

Yeah, one of the biggest and nowadays not to pricey upgrade to do is update from HHD to SSD. Just doing that alone will make a huge difference that an average person will notice right away. Excellent video as always!

My first gaming prebuilt. Loved those older Auroras and Area 51 desktops

This was one of my favourite cases they did. I think they went down over the years. I would like to put my modern hardware into one of those cases.

16:46 Unoptimized games that somehow look even worse than previous gen titles because they lack style, lots of games just look like each other just because they lack that certain mood and atmosphere, i'm playing MGS V The Phantom Pain and that game despite being 8 years old looks great and has some of the greatest most fluid gameplay you can find in any game, and card manufacturers just pushing up the price and making underwhelming lower end cards. Sorry for going on this long rant here, cool video as always, enjoy how much time you put on making videos like this, stay like this forever.

Great video, I'm gaming on an Alienware R7 with a 1080 ti, love the thing! :D

Seriously love your video's. Keep up the good work.

My friend bought an Alienware when they first came out and they only used the CoolerMaster server tower cases. The cable/wire management was a work of art, hours must have been spent building them back then.

Curious on how you keep all of the things you've bought in the past videos

Great video👍 I'm still using a 990X here, with an Asus ROG GTX1070 8GB, 16GB RAM, and Samsung SSD. All coupled to an Asus ROG Rampage II Extreme. Plays anything I throw at it, with a bit of careful tweaking 😉

i love this channel so much for no reason you just make me laugh keep it up

Hey Mr. Random game HD just describe to your channel Got 2 of these at the flea market about a month ago for a 100 bucks x58 the other 1 is 1155 The guy told me that 1 wordk and other one didn't but he would sell me both of them for a 100 bucks I got them both running I had to buy new coolers I got 2 of them for $69 Put an SSSD and a 2TB hard dlive with the X58 having an RX470mining card then I paid $43 on eBay The 1155 machine has a AMD radion 7950 Love your channel glad to see someone still keeping older to computer technology alive Keep up the great work You deserve more subscribers Some of these other computer RU-vid channels that I used to love Went corporate won't mention any names Sometimes the smaller channels are the better ones When it comes to computers Thank you

Will there be another vid about unpacking random gpus? Really enjoyed these.

Just love these Alienware style cases. Been searching for just the chassis to rebuild my hardware into

Hey dude i really enjoy your videos! keep them up 💯

like your channel, more real life aspect not a mouthpiece for the industry always focusing on the latest tech 👍

Heey! That motherboard.. memories! I had the DX58 S02. It allowed me a 5Ghz+ overclock on an i7 970 some years ago. 5.5Ghz boot i think too. Fun times.

Very nice and in depth video Steve! The change you decided a few days ago has gone pretty well in my opinion Story time: I actually had my secondary PC with very similar specs (i7 920 , 12gb , GTX 1050 2gb ) until last spring That was when a friend of mine changed his old server and a got his Xeon w3565 which replaced my i7. Until Christmas I was using it just fine but then another friend of mine was in need of motherboard-cpu-ram because his old ones died so I gave him that x58 mobo together with the RAM and the i7. A couple of months ago a bought another x58 combo for cheap with another 920, but I replaced it with the w3565 again and since the new Gigabyte motherboard has support for 6core Xeons, when I find some time I will flash it with the latest bios and I will try an X5650 that I have lying around. I have also gone for the max out approach and I have been using this system with 24gb (actually,more than my maim system) and a GTX 1660 Super.

Oh I had a Alienware like that, Aroura v3 I believe. Different parts but that futuristic train design. I had the one with finns and lights, it was really cool for teenage me.

Oh man, I just finished one of these at work. It was ridiculously dusty. Honestly shocked the AIO still worked.

I have a similar Alienware R3, but the second generation i7 - 2600 (3.4GHz). Came with no hard drive, no video card and 8GB DDR3 stick. I have replaced it with matched 12GB of DDR3-1600. The case looks exactly the same, with the same side lights. I am testing it in various games now; however the best (and more period accurate) video card I have now is a 560ti, which is of course a limiting factor for newer games. One thing it does have is the different overclocking settings in the BIOS itself, which I am yet to try out. So far on stock settings after 10 minutes of OCCT stress test max temperature was 64 degrees. Not sure I'd want to push it higher with the stock watercooling. While the air fans are quite powerful (16-19 watts each!) the air flow through the case isn't the best. There is also no dust filters, and doing a full disassembly for through cleaning is quite a long process. It almost appears as it was assumed by Dell that a customer would simply buy the next model in five or so years and no service would be necessary in between. A pity, as the motherboard and light/fan control board have some really good caps and components and can definitely work for more than five years. And yes, it IS heavy, weighs over 20 kilos. No wonder i was able to pick it up for free.

Nice little machine, with some fancy quirks - also, not all machines have a DVD drive! I also like the triple channel RAM arrangement, with up to 6 modules being available. This reminds me of the X58 boards that could also take 6 RAM slots, with some even going up to 48GB DDR3, a huge amount back in its day when higher end PCs were having 8GB and most PCs had 4GB.

Cool, I'd put a nice screen behind that fall-down door and probably a nice bluetooth speaker..cool find.

I like that the radiator is out of a motorbike and there is no fancy plumbing from the CPU to the radiator. I wonder if the CPU could handle 32 gigs of ram.... ;) Thanks for the interesting videos and the quirky style that you have, I do rather enjoy it sir.

Would love to see a video where you upgrade this to a i7 2600K (is it the same socket?) and a GTX 1660/RTX 2060, hooefully the power supply has PCIE power cables! And some quieter fans!!! Great video as always 🔥

I'm still using a custom built X58 system as my main PC with a X5670 6c/12t @ 4.4GHz, 24GB RAM, GTX 1080. I bought my first X58 system, HP Z400 Workstation, 10 years ago. Originally it had a Xeon W3520 (i7-920), 6GB RAM and Quadro FX 1800 but I upgraded the RAM to 12GB and GPU to a GTX 660.

These would be great for some kind of Pimp My Pre-built thing; you could test the stock configuration, then upgrade it to it's full potential and compare the results. older/preowned OEM machines have always been super interesting.

I remember gaming on one of these beasts in a well-known gaming café chain back in the day, we would pay 17 Euros with my mates to participate in the Friday night LAN Party and would play from midnight until noon. The price also included a sub and a Red Bull. There was also a couch to crash on when you needed a power nap. At the end of the LAN party we would grab a milkshake from the café next door and walk home. Good times.

That was a good buy,. well done, I saw one similar a while ago on another channell, when I looked on eBay they were too expensive. Just lately I've been looking at those mini PC's have you looked at any of them?

I'm currently using the huge triangular case from an Alienware Area 51 R2. It fits standard ATX motherboards and PSUs, and even all the gimmicks like lighting and card readers work perfectly with a non-AW motherboard, since they just use a standard internal USB 2.0 connector.

I don't know why, but hearing your intro felt like seeing an old friend after a long time away. It was oddly comforting. Hope you're doing well.

Impressive garden thumbnail❤! Impressive content!🥰

My first high performance PC was the Dell Studio XPS from 2012 and I just recently upgraded. That thing was a beast and still runs to this day. It now lives an easy life as a file and Plex server.

Keep up the good work!

So, uh, it's an alien dog?

Phwoar, WD Black hard drive. Hard to imagine those were the big boy storage option back in the day. 7200rpm, bit noisy, but fast drives. Now we've all got M.2 NVMe drives moving GB/s.

I really liked your rescue dog analogy

I remember being a teen and seeing these things circa 2007 at best buy here in the us, and thinking one day I will own one of these that was back when the 775 quads came out, only having a single core e machines @ home I was blown away.

I rememberwhen these first came out. They were extremely expensive. But wow, talk about at the time fantastic. They were able to play all the games at super high and all the. Bells and whistles, but that's when games, who had great graphics like battlefield. 2 bad company, those games ran A1080P full graphics. Extremely smooth on the Alien War systemsthey were the bomb, but now. You're just too expensive Also, half-life half life 2, the graphics were phenomenal and super smooth high resolution. I think they were able to even play those games at 1440p. Great video as always, excellent job.😂❤❤

I have the 3GB 1050 version laying around. I'm looking forward to the video featuring it, and how it compares to the 2GB version.

Hi there. Thanks to you I found how to switch on the Xbox gaming overlay on Windows ^^; Btw, why did you choose to use this method to show cpu/gpu load instead of Afterburner? Thanks for the answer, eventually.

that case looks amazing, I'd use it on my main rig!

I'm just wondering, is it possible to use a little die set to mount a newer mobo in one of these and fully upgrade it? I love the old Alienware cases.

this video made me rewatch your aurora video 4 years ago😂 the one with 9gb of mixed ram and gts 240

I have the Area 51 ALX and I love that machine. I’ve upgraded the motherboard and gpu but left the original psu. It’s quite loud but the quality is almost, if not on par with seasonics stuff. I’m also using the original aio cooler but upgraded it’s radiator to a 360mm one

i love the case.... love the X58 Platform too u can upgrade GPU and CPU to 6 Core... and maybe overclock too ?

This week I found a PC in a trash heap, has a FX-8320, GTX 1060 6GB, and 16GB of DDR3! Took it home and it turns the HDD had died and was preventing Windows from booting. Removed the HDD, reinstalled Windows on the included 120GB SSD, and it runs great! Gonna be giving it to a friend who needs a PC.

Hello, great video! A question for you if I may: If I search for i7 920, will I find this video? Does "i7 920" need to be in the description or title? Plainly I don't know ... how it works

Be cool to see this thing maxed out

Nice. I recently bought an Alienware X51 R2 with an i7 4770 and brought it back to life! Swapped out the ole GTX 760 ti for the RTX A2000 12gb (listed as a 6gb) 1tb HDD was replaced with 2 SSDs 120gb/1tb and went from 8gb to 16gb ram. This thing is about the size of an Xbox One and it can handle any game you throw at it, I just leave the side panel off so the i7 doesn't hit 91c...

I love my Alienware Aurora. Got an i7 4960X, gtx 1070 (originally came with an i7 3960x+ gtx 690) 32gb ram.... was a beast back in the day. The best case I've ever had!

I got an old alienware R3 from a friend back in 2014 and ive been upgrading it ever since, currently it houses a i5 13600k and a RTX 4070. Probably one of the most advanced R3's out there :D

A 6-core Xeon would be an interesting upgrade since those are half-free those days.

I rescued an M11x r2 from the trash...love it.

These have all standard parts so they are great for sleeper builds. Any mATX board will work and you can still get functional AlienFX lighting.

Got my Aurora R2 quite cheap. upgraded graphics card, ram and ssd still runs great

Found an Alienware PC from the same era by the dumpster a few years ago. The AIO was busted, but the machine was otherwise fully functional. Had all stock config - i7-960, 6gb DDR3, Radeon HD 6950 2gb. Upgraded it to i7-x990, 12gb, and a GTX1070ti, and have been using it as a living room PC/home media server ever since (SO MANY HDD BAYS!!!). Still can't believe someone dumped it, as it's such a dramatic beast! EDIT: I guess mine is the Aurora ALX, as it's a bulkier case with fins, lots of RGB, a bunch of internal and back-panel lighting, and 9 HDD bays, 6 of which are cable-less (in a super over-engineered, illuminated compartment behind the rear side-panel).

My exgf has this same PC. She paid top dollar for this back in the day, over $2,000 if I recall correctly. She had upgraded hers with something like a GTX 780, but still has whatever Nvidia card came in it originally. It was working until recently when it developed some sort of boot problem. It's now been picked apart, I know I took the HDDs and SATA cables from it not that long ago, and the mumbo jumbo of mismatched RAM it had in it got put into something else awhile back. It is a really cool looking case, I wanted to build a modern PC in that case, but all of the USB ports and switches are wore out, and I don't think you can find replacements for those things, plus its Dell proprietary Motherboard mounting would make mounting a modern Motherboard in it problematic. I remember looking at these when they came out, they were absolute beasts. If not for Dells use of non standardized parts they would be really cool to upgrade.

You can set xeon model cpu in that thing . So if you look for a upgrade a xeon cpu is the cheap way to do it.

Bought 1 with a GTX 650 Ti Boost and 24 gb of ram but it developed a problem with the PSU after a couple of days which ended up being a mobo problem. I've been looking out for a replacement aurora mobo but buying 1 would double my outlay. Since I needed something I ended up getting a Dell Precision T3500 to use in the meantime... (all components are interchangeable) It cost half as much and came with a Xeon better than the i7 I had and I can just use the ram from the aurora while I make up my mind whether to eventually get something like an x58 sabretooth mobo, an original alienware or go for something more modern. Also need a replacement power switch if I want to do a proper restoration...

Its funny those bigger older cases dont have as much room because of the 5.25” drive bays. My oldest modern case is a coolermaster storm stryker and it struggles to hold any of the big modern gpu’s. I have a zotac 1070 amp extreme in it and thats about as big of a card that will fit. I do love the case because of the built in handle makes it so easy to carry and always likes the look of the case. Cd and dvd drives are going the way of the dodo. The first pc I bought with a dvd drive was an hp with a pentium 3 500mhz and the first dvd I ever bought was Blade. Got them the same day so thats the only reason I remember that

Ooo that's ballistix sport too

Any chances you can try upgrading to a more modern system using this chassis, Steve?

I have a lot of my games on a 3tb Toshiba HDD. I don't have the issues that you were describing. They take more time to load obviously. I play The Witcher 3 at 4k with no issues related to the hdd. Cyberpunk is on my hdd with no issues. I have world density cranked up. I've never had in game performance issues in any modern games that could be blamed on the hdd.( longer load times, and maybe lower 1% lows) My o.s. is on an m.2 ssd. Is that the difference? Not trying to be a jerk. I'm just curious. I am upgrading my game drive to an ssd because the prices are good right now. I enjoy your videos. Those old Alienware pcs are cool looking, even if they are a bit loud.

I'm more interested in finding the old Socket A Alienware PCs that used the old Chieftec cases for nostalgia's sake as I've always wanted one of those PCs when I was a kid but they were more expensive than a dell as they used top of the line parts and took time to cable manage the old IDE and ketchup mustard cables.

man i remember back in 2010 that case design was all the rage, it looked like a tuned car or a transformer lol

Could a 1650 or 1650 super help out performance? Seeing those charts, those might help the aging chip.

looks like the fish tank the fully evolved navigator was rolled about in, from dune 1984.

Oh man, this brings back HORRIBLE memories from working at a local repair shop. These things are so annoying. Loud, shockingly heavy, offensive specs for their original asking price, and the wasted bench space. My back hurts just seeing it.

Would be great to see what you think is a good pairing with the i7 920 in 2023...mine is coupled with an hd 7950 1000mhz click 3gb by gigabyte

impressive for a cpu from 2008... i can imagine X58 will still be usable for some stuff when it turns 20 years old, especially when combined with a 6 core xeon

I have an i7-860 model and I love that machine but the board that controls the fan speed and lighting quit so it doesn't have lights and I had to hook up a fan controller

i love those old cases, you should chuck a xeon X5670 6 core 12 thread, 4.3ghz inside, pair it with a, GTX 1060 6gb

Wow I remember my nephew had this and something in it stopped working display or idk, either way I sometimes regret taking this apart and using the parts for other builds but in all honesty this thing was too much weight and it was a pain for my back.

Oh nice. I still have an i7-950 somewhere, but at some point I replaced it for a Xeon X5675. It runs a GTX 980 pretty well, for the most part.

Long ago, I used to pair that Gigabyte GTX 1050 with an i3-2120. The combo worked well for me back in the day, until i (accidentally) fried the mobo with a CPU upgrade, the i7-2600K, to be exact (my younger self thought that pairing an unlocked i7 with a H61 mobo was a brilliant idea) Luckily for me, the GTX 1050 survived. Ended up selling what remains of the rig and upgraded to 9th Gen Intel

While I was building my extreme budget sff gaming PC I found out that load times actually don't depend on computational power, they relied on disk speed and when I upgraded to an SSD I lost my ability to take breaks during all the load screens in Skyrim.

Wow! the i7-920 holded up pretty well, impressive.

I used to have a single fan variant of that 1050! Was amazing for overclocking, I could get it to reach 1050 Ti performance

I always dreamed about owning an Area 51 with a mighty Phenom II X6 back when I got into PCs. How times have flied by!

my neighbor found this EXACT SAME RIG in our apartment dumpster 5 DAYS AGO. I cleaned it, slapped a 750ti OC ,extra channel of ram, fresh windows, games he wanted (gta 5, rdr2, nfs:hot pursuit 3, nfs:mw and Max payne 1)

Wow. I thought that X58 platform did not have drivers for Win 10, but apparently it works.