6:05 Because Dell. I work in a school with roughly a 150 dell SFF PCs and some of them (model 3080) have battery issues, and when some teachers unplug them for vacations for exemple, we come back to boot device inaccessible bluescreens because it reverts to RAID instead of AHCI due to the battery failing (and thus the bios resetting), as we use AHCI for image builds
My company uses Dell laptops and we image them ourselves after receiving them. Dell enabled "RAID" mode so they can use the native Intel driver in Windows because it "improves performance." We just change it to AHCI/NVME and build a clean image ourselves.
Same thing here. As Windows has 4 partitions normally, Dell have put something like 7 partitions on the SSD. Am really not sure how you gain performance from RAID multiple partitions on the same drive, but I have seen Dell do stranger things.
That dang Intel VMD controller driver needed for RAID mode isn't even included in latest W11 23H2 image, let alone anything older. It wouldn't be so annoying if Windows weren't so picky about which version of the driver you used during install. When I was making our company's image I decided to roll in the Intel VMD driver. But of course forgot to add it to the WinRE image. So when we decided to Intune join all our machines using Autopilot, resetting Windows would fail because it couldn't detect the NVMe. Luckily adding the driver is just a few commands and wasn't a show stopper.
Ahhh. I wasnt sure why raid was enabled when the device had a single drive 😅 . Or reimage fails with raid mode enabled.. but not a massive issues when we are only reimaging a few laptops a month.
When you re-image a Dell machine, turn Raid off as it will cause BSOD's - I work with a Dell Config center partner and I complain about this all the time to Dell PM's and Engineers.
I believe that the single stick of ram is what is holding the CPU so hard, I use an i5 8400 (basically the same as fhe 9400 in here) along an rtx 4060 with 16 GB of RAM in dual channel and I haven't experienced a bottleneck such as this
@@ssm840 yes indeed, you can search for this subject all around RUclips and see the massive hit in fps with a single stick of RAM, dual channel is the way
The raid on thing is something dell does in their bios all the time, I work on dell machines for warranty repairs and they do this a lot. I’ll swap in a new motherboard and the new motherboard is set to raid mode, or the old motherboard was set to raid mode and the new one is in AHCI/sata.
when i get a free dell pc for parts, i know the previous owner took the gpu out and leaves everything else. i take the cpu ram and ssd out and buy my own mb to slot it in.
I had to laugh that the first thing he did was remove the instructions for how to open the power supply hinge while saying i dont know how this opens. I ended up with one of these during covid times when i was in desperate need
As someone who is an independent contractor for Dell, I replace lots of motherboards, and even their laptop motherboards usually come with RAID on by default. Network boot will often take priority too. My best guess was these boards are refurbs and come back out with those settings after being thoroughly tested.
Raid on consumer systems is almost always for intel rapid storage or AMD's equivalent, and in my experience working on them since IRST launched is that most has raid enabled but not set up or has another IRST feature running in the background.
I had to find this sold auction on eBay and then looked at the seller's other items. I got the impression that they buy re-posessed storage units or something similar as there really wasn't any other computer related items. Lot's of random stuff. Might explain why they never took the time to plug it in and test it. It's not worth their time, just sell it cheap and move it out. What a great purchase.
Used to do warranty work on DELLs. Raid on is a storage option DELL turns on by default for all of their machines. So if you reset it after installing in AHCI. It will bluescreen or freeze at boot and reboot.
Dell commonly turns "Raid On" on out of the box and it can still work with a single drive as long as the OS was installed with the BIOS configured that way. Also the swing out PSU is how the PSU swings out of their SOHO Servers like the T40. I work on quite a bit of them heh. SO they basically took the T40 case and slapped on some new plastic. Efficient for them? Yeah, you bought an interesting box.
I have the same components, just in a Lenovo prebuilt. Previously I had a 3rd gen i7 HP SFF and in my experience, these OEM systems are more stable and have less compatibility issues than custom built PCs. Plus, they are often super cheap like yours because people associate HP, DELL and Lenovo with office PCs and their value drops, regardless of the specs. I don't think a 9th gen system is old yet, as you say, it still plays games decently and upgrading it to a 9th gen i7 would greatly improve performance with a 2060, not to mention, these systems support 9th gen i9 9900 cpus that are 8C 16T and boost up to 5GHz.
Saying OEM systems are "more stable and have less compatibility issues" is an outright falsehood. These prebuilts are some of the least stable systems out there, while also getting significantly less performance than they should for the hardware due to cheap/poor build quality, and terrible nonstandard cases with insufficient cooling.
Wiping the drive is good and all, but just an FYI, there are actually viruses that infect BIOSes and hidden areas in SSDs, and use it to infect any new OS you install persisting through wipes. They are rare though, so just a reminder
Exactly why no one should buy an Alienware. As soon as something goes wrong (and it will, given the "quality" of their computers), it's a nightmare to fix
ehh, idk. no doubt alienware makes some bad computers. but i bought a Aurora R8 on ebay for $440 a year ago, I7 9700K, RTX 2070, 32GB Ram. i put a 2TB m.2 ssd, i put a aftermarket Corsair H60 liquid cooler in it, and a noctua fan for the front, those 2 mods brought the temps and noise from absolutely unbearble noise/near overheating to running cool and super quiet. im under $550 in this pc and its given me 0 issues. so its a hit or miss really but the good ones will treat you well.
They actually came out with a new Aurora and a new case. The new one comes with a 4060. I think that is what it said. It looked okay but I probably won't ever buy another Alienware. Only because its from Dell. They don't care about gamers. Alienware did care about gamers though. I mean look at the old Alienware cases. They were huge.
@@uhavemooface Old alienwares are insane man, i so want a Aurora R4 and gut the parts and make a new pc in it. there has been success doing it and keeping the light controls.
@@ZzzsamzzzG59That's a really good deal. I bought a PC from OFFERUP in March of 2023 for $300 that came with an MSI Z370-A PRO Motherboard, an i7 8700k, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, an ASUS GTX 1060 6GB Turbo, a Corsair H100i 240mm AIO cooler, and the case which is a Kediers C570 open air with 7 RGB fans. It didn't come with a PSU or storage but I already had those from a previous build.
Gamer's Nexus did an Alienware teardown that will show you a lot of problems with this PC. Secondly, the single stick of RAM will lead to severe drops in FPS due to single channel stutters
Also the fact that it's only 8GBs that doesn't exactly help matters either, in some games even dual channel DDR4 RAM is still not enough to make the game playable
The new 3050 6GB has models with DVI a port too. Perhaps Dell specified that they specifically wanted a DVI port on this card, considering their potential consumer base.
@@aminbagheri9044 Perhaps, but those GPUs, just like everything else in Dell systems, are built to their specifications. So it's just as plausible that the DVI was included at Dell's request.
Ill be honest, whenever i see "Untested" on a listing, I assume they mean "I tested it and I know it doesnt work". Literally never bought a pc listed as untested and it not be in some way none functional
These videos have made me consider trying my luck at an "untested" pc, you can get some really good value out of them if you know what you're doing and some luck of course
Lol funny when you mentioned raid 0/raid 1 I thought, "oh it's probably an issue with raid in the bios", but then you searched for another drive didn't find one and called it a day.
Ok i bought the I7 model 12 cores water cooled 16 gigs of ram with a 1080ti. Upgraded the powersupply removed the 1080ti horrible coil whine upgraded the power supply to a 1000watt power supply. Been bullet proof machine
RAID ON in the BIOS just allows for the installation of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver. Historically RST out performed AHCI but it's much of a muchness these days.
I wonder what maximum hardware was sold in the case? I7? RTX 2080? The fact that it's a lower power CPU and GPU may be what's saving it from thermal D-hell.
Yeah the raid thing is very specific to dell. To switch to another drive you have to set your system to boot into safe mode, switch to achi, actually boot into safe mode, and then you can go back to normal. All their laptops ship with it and it's not even a real raid config, it's some sort of pseudo raid. You have to disable it to image a drive too because it doesnt detect the drive correctly with it on. You cant even capture an image with it on.
for untested listings it helps to check the description and other items listed by the seller. If they specialize on electronics resale and list it as untested, its likely there is some issue. Could be an easy fix or DOA. If its a private user, low sales, non technical or maybe even honest description, it could be true that they just don't have the capacity to fully test it. if reseller is super large business, reviews in 10,000s and they sell random return pallets stuff, it could be not worth their time to test it, so it could be true in that case as well.
Standard DELL configuration. They always turn on raid on by default on any of their machines. We buy them as a company - first thing is put it on AHCI mode, and we do a clean reinstall any time (when stocked we keep them with the doak wiped aswell). RaidON has a value in terms of performance, but on DELL systems it just doesn't work like it should. And actually the performance gain is negligible.
RAID was turned on by default, because on newer CPUs Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RTS) uses VMD driver that needs that RAID setup. This config can RAID NVMe drives without a problem, it can also work with single drives as it passes AHCI commands to a single drive, so TRIM and all other functions work as well. Best of both worlds. I personally change it to AHCI, since I don'r RAID my NVMe drives (unless in business, when I mirror them for mission critical PCs). Even laptops run controllers in RAID mode with a single drive with VMD driver installed. Boot from network - probably because it had troubles with seeing the failing drive and was resetting the list.
With these, you do need to use a Dell-specific ISO, have the BIOS in AHCI mode, disable RAID, disable network boot. It's the same with my XPS 8910 - it's the same form factor, just in a different case.
I bought a $200 R9 on fb marketplace a few years ago, no cpu, gpu or storage. Had the factory AIO and 850w psu upgrade. I added a spare 980ti hybrid I had sitting around and put the aio and fan up where the top 3.5" drive sits. Added a 9700, another 16gb of ram for a total of 32, and a 512gb m.2 ssd and 1tb laptop hdd down below the gpu. For as much shit as people give these computers in the stock form, they can be modified to be pretty good and not overheat. Just have to find one cheap enough and be clever about solving some of Dell's idocies.
RTX 20,20 super series FE card still have DVI output. To switch from RAID mode to AHCI,run command prompt in admin and type this command bcdedit /set {current} safeboot minimal to boot to safe mode ,run command prompt in admin and type this command bcdedit /deletevalue {current} safeboot to save boot setting.
I picked up a refurbed R8 in 2019 for 900 bucks. Only difference was mine had the 120mm AIO with a RTX 2070. Slammed in 32gigs of 3600 memory and all core overclocked the 9600k to a stable 5.4ghz. It was one heck of a budget gaming rig.
Quite a few of the early revisions of the 2060 had that exact video out layout, even the EVGA RTX 2060 KO has that layout (I know this from having owned one not that long ago). And even if it only has 6gb vram, the 2060 regardless of the brand is still a great 1080p card, even in 2024 (dlss is definitely a life saver for that card).
I would put that cpu and gpu in a different rig and run those tests again. Alienware prebuilts are notorious for very bad thermals and they tend to be undervolted and locked in bios to save those thermals.
I think if your main target is 1080p, the 2060 will do just fine in 2024 with 6gb VRAM. It's on par with the 1080 non TI in raw performance, and you could turn on DLSS if needed.
6:02 Dell does this on probably all of their computers, RAID is enabled and windows is installed with RAID enabled, even if there’s only a single drive, I’ve seen this from Optiplexs from 2013 to a 2021 XPS 17 Because of this I always switch the setting to AHCI and then reinstall Windows, and it looks like this was the culprit for this computer If you ever try to upgrade the CPU and need better cooling, the mounting mechanism should be the same as any Asetek Intel Lga 115x, so any Asetek-based 120mm AIO should work and should give a bit of a cooling boost despite the awful case (Also single channel memory, this thing basically would win any Dell bingo)
The case looks pretty cool, Only thing I ever liked about Alienware was their unique case designs (for the time) when most were just boxes lol. Well aside from the non-standard cramming of stuff inside lol 🤣🤣
Great find and you certainly got lucky. It was a gamble for sure, but for someone knowing and ready to risk it, this would be a good buy. I don't understand why you artificially amplified the CPU bottleneck in games though. The GPU was never utilised properly in your benchmarks because you had it set to much lower settings than necessary, causing frame drops due to CPU bottlenecking. If you increased the settings you could achieve slightly lower (though still very playable) and more consistent frame rates with better visual fidelity. It doesn't make sense to sit at medium settings and 100fps with the GPU hovering around 30% and the CPU peaking at 98%. Turning the settings up nearer to max and with say 85fps and GPU at 98% and CPU at say 80% would be far superior. I would be interested to see this comparison to be honest - how much does the gaming experience change when you force more of the load onto the GPU or the CPU with older or lower power hardware? This info may benefit budget gamers who get these old prebuilds and don't know how to tweak settings relative to CPU/GPU loads to achieve balance ... and those who don't realise that it's far better for frame pacing consistency to have the GPU maxed out than the CPU maxed out (not to mention that the cpu has less breathing room for cooling than the gpu).
6:25 JUST FYI for Greg or anyone else. Idk why they chose it, but DELL has RAID instead of AHCI mode even back in the XP days. I guess it is because they chose this mode of IDE mode in the bios back then and just never switch, but every DELL we work on here n shop RAID is selected mode.
Mr. Su from this small PC hardware shop in that one small back alley in Shenzhen sells lots of RTX cards with a DVI port. He also sells RTX cards with VGA ports. When I was in his shop, he told me Dell is one of his loyal customers. 🙃
Did you check the memory to see if no memory errors? Ya, I just bought a brand new system on last Black Friday and I was getting BSoD once and a while... like watching youtube or playing a game thru google chrome and it would crash.... Did that Windows Memory Diagnostic and on pass 2 reported errors. So yesterday finally went back to the computer store and they swapped out the DDR5 6000 ram and now works fine so far. So goes to show even brand new systems have these pesky problems.
The RTX 2060 doesn't get enough love, it's better than many people give it credit for. Being Alienware, I'm surprised the system even worked at all lol
First modern PC I built accidentally turned on Intel RAID [Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST)] instead of standard AHCI. It was not clear when setting up, and I’m honestly not sure how it happened. Took some searching, but was able to disable with command line a a year or so later when I realized there was an issue. I wasn’t even half through this video and started commenting that this was maybe the issue, then saw you figured it out. I think I turned on Intel RST accidentally when trying to use an old version of Intel XTU. Still no idea. Command line worked to fix it all (thankfully). Intel RST can be used with/without RAID, but I don’t know what the benefits are without RAID. Thanks for the video!!!
I bought an HP way back in the day (around 2009) that ended up coming with two hard drives in it (a 300 GB and a 700 GB) with Windows installed to the smaller one, and RAID enabled by default in the BIOS. Turns out it was because the PC had an Easy Backup button on it that you could press and it would (to my knowledge) mirror the boot drive over to the second drive. When I later upgraded the drive to an SSD, I disabled RAID, and it didn’t like to boot without that.
That may be a OPTANE drive as opposed to a regular m.2 drive so you may just need drivers. There was a sata cable - is there not also an actual SATA HDD?
I bought an untested for parts GTX 970 on ebay for 15$, when I received it I disassembled it first thing to clean and test for shorts and it turned out to be a brand new card, clean and working great.
I had similar issue with my workstation. For me it was just the SATA ports dying. Only the one I used for a DVD drive was working. The windows and bios did recognize the drives while connected, but couldn't access them. I think turning the raid off would've fixed it.. But at least it gave me a good reason to downgrade to a tad smaller case with smaller motherboard. LOL
i would diffidently upgrade the cpu to i7 and the ram to max. you will get more out of it. I'm still on i7 2600k still running like champ for old outdated 2nd gen chip. It hasn't let me down yet i just can't leave it in the dust
I would like to point out that for earlier dell platforms like this, a simple cmos reset would have solved everything immediately most likely. The default for this model year is typically set to AHCI.
So I deal with new Dell Laptops for the company I work for on a regular basis, when I tell you that “Raid On” setting is defaulted on ALL NEW DELLS is so annoying. You have to switch to AHCI every time you want to wipe and install a new boot of windows. Having an Alienware as my first PC, seeing this video really gave me a nostalgic battle of Dell’s bloatware and hardware design.
Another thing to watch out for with these is: If you chuck in a different SSD even if it has an OS on it, the bootloader on these OEM machines often wont show the drive if it wasn't installed with an intel VMD driver (Loaded during the Win 10 / 11 setup process)
Fun little thing is that my old 2060 super founders edition has a dvi port. I specifically had to find a card because my old monitor only supported 144hz through a dvi port so when i was upgrading my gpu i had to find one that had that and came across the 2060 super.
"I don't think that's the way we were supposed to open that..." Meanwhile Steve at GN is like "Aaaaaand we don't need that" "This is, hah, not exactly optimal design" (And Linus would've just dropped the entire thing and then blamed an employee)
My adult daughter bought the slightly older 7700/1060 version of this. It is not a great build with the air cooled option struggling for air, but it has been a reliable machine that she still uses today. It still plays minecraft and GW2 just fine after all - and she does a bit of Beat Saber as well. It works, but it's not a great one for upgrading and it's stuck with windows 10 for now. When it dies I'll build her a real PC. lol.
Oh man I just sold one of those with better specs for 400$ I wish you had bought it for this video. She had the water-cooled i7, 32 gb ram and a TB of storage. Plus the 2060 in mine was a MSI Ventus 12 gb. Great video. Glad it ran fine for you. Nothing worse than buying a brick.
I always liked the look of those Alienware cases, but the internals seem to be built for utility rather than performance. I think it would be kind of interesting to build a decent system inside one of those cases, but you'd probably need to do some fabrication to clear space for a decent CPU cooler.
I ran an i5 2500k with a GTX 570 for a number of years. When the 1660 Ti came out I replaced the 570. I later got a good deal on a 2060 from EVGA and ran it for 1080p gaming until 2021. I don't know too much about the i5 9th gen cpu, but with the longevity I got out of my 2500k it should still be viable for 1080 gaming.
... where did the optical HDD drive go?? mounted on the front of the case.... that is how and why raid was enabled right??? was in there till bench marks the HDD after the bench marks the HDD was removed
Not an AlienWare fan. Basically paying twice the amount for a nameplate and an RGB alien head logo. As for untested I’ll buy it depending on two factors - seller feedback and whether or not I can repair it. Pc parts I’ll go for. An untested window actuator for my car? Not so much. Thanks again for another great video! Love the series. 😊
It boots to network first as they is how they image them on they assembly line using a PXE server. Also if you have a dell management system it would be enabled for that same reason
Before the BSOD, the 'issue' I would conclude is, it was stolen. To give the seller a little flexibility, it was abandoned and they took it during a unit clean up or something.
6:05 Because Dell. I work in a school with roughly a 150 dell SFF PCs and some of them (model 3080) have battery issues, and when some teachers unplug them for vacations for exemple, we come back to boot device inaccessible bluescreens because it reverts to RAID instead of AHCI due to the battery failing (and thus the bios resetting), as we use AHCI for image builds
Greg, that single stick of RAM is what’s holding that CPU back.
Exactly. The cpu shouldn't hold back that rtx 2060 that much.
My company uses Dell laptops and we image them ourselves after receiving them. Dell enabled "RAID" mode so they can use the native Intel driver in Windows because it "improves performance." We just change it to AHCI/NVME and build a clean image ourselves.
Yeah, mine too. What a piece of shit laptops these are.
Same thing here. As Windows has 4 partitions normally, Dell have put something like 7 partitions on the SSD. Am really not sure how you gain performance from RAID multiple partitions on the same drive, but I have seen Dell do stranger things.
That dang Intel VMD controller driver needed for RAID mode isn't even included in latest W11 23H2 image, let alone anything older. It wouldn't be so annoying if Windows weren't so picky about which version of the driver you used during install.
When I was making our company's image I decided to roll in the Intel VMD driver. But of course forgot to add it to the WinRE image. So when we decided to Intune join all our machines using Autopilot, resetting Windows would fail because it couldn't detect the NVMe. Luckily adding the driver is just a few commands and wasn't a show stopper.
Steve from "Gamers Nexus" always updated the cpu cooling,replacing it with water cooling upon buying them Alienware machines.
Ahhh. I wasnt sure why raid was enabled when the device had a single drive 😅 . Or reimage fails with raid mode enabled.. but not a massive issues when we are only reimaging a few laptops a month.
When you re-image a Dell machine, turn Raid off as it will cause BSOD's - I work with a Dell Config center partner and I complain about this all the time to Dell PM's and Engineers.
I believe that the single stick of ram is what is holding the CPU so hard, I use an i5 8400 (basically the same as fhe 9400 in here) along an rtx 4060 with 16 GB of RAM in dual channel and I haven't experienced a bottleneck such as this
can using a single stick of ram really cause cpu bottleneck?
@@ssm840 yes indeed, you can search for this subject all around RUclips and see the massive hit in fps with a single stick of RAM, dual channel is the way
@@ssm840 yes, especially since it's only 8gb
@@ssm840 Yup. CPUs like to run with 2 sticks of RAM so that it can take advantage of dual channel.
Exactly I have i5 8400 also and it handles a Quadro P5000 (GTX1070) just fine with 10% bottleneck
The raid on thing is something dell does in their bios all the time, I work on dell machines for warranty repairs and they do this a lot. I’ll swap in a new motherboard and the new motherboard is set to raid mode, or the old motherboard was set to raid mode and the new one is in AHCI/sata.
I discovered that the hard way. I still have no idea why Dell does that.
when i get a free dell pc for parts, i know the previous owner took the gpu out and leaves everything else. i take the cpu ram and ssd out and buy my own mb to slot it in.
@@williamjones4483 yeah like how many people even get their boot drives in raid anymore
I had to laugh that the first thing he did was remove the instructions for how to open the power supply hinge while saying i dont know how this opens. I ended up with one of these during covid times when i was in desperate need
Too funny! Dell couldn't make it much easier.
not gonna lie i kinda hoped it doesn't work so we get a fix or flop episode LOL
As someone who is an independent contractor for Dell, I replace lots of motherboards, and even their laptop motherboards usually come with RAID on by default. Network boot will often take priority too. My best guess was these boards are refurbs and come back out with those settings after being thoroughly tested.
Raid on consumer systems is almost always for intel rapid storage or AMD's equivalent, and in my experience working on them since IRST launched is that most has raid enabled but not set up or has another IRST feature running in the background.
I had to find this sold auction on eBay and then looked at the seller's other items. I got the impression that they buy re-posessed storage units or something similar as there really wasn't any other computer related items. Lot's of random stuff. Might explain why they never took the time to plug it in and test it. It's not worth their time, just sell it cheap and move it out. What a great purchase.
Used to do warranty work on DELLs. Raid on is a storage option DELL turns on by default for all of their machines. So if you reset it after installing in AHCI. It will bluescreen or freeze at boot and reboot.
Dell commonly turns "Raid On" on out of the box and it can still work with a single drive as long as the OS was installed with the BIOS configured that way. Also the swing out PSU is how the PSU swings out of their SOHO Servers like the T40. I work on quite a bit of them heh. SO they basically took the T40 case and slapped on some new plastic. Efficient for them? Yeah, you bought an interesting box.
Yup that’s totally a dell thing
I have also seen Bitlocker partially activated waiting for it to be completely activated.
Oh i have seen Dell Windows Home Edition have that and Raid enabled @@GregM i hope you are having a great day today
there was all so a HDD installed front side was there till bench marks
I have the same components, just in a Lenovo prebuilt. Previously I had a 3rd gen i7 HP SFF and in my experience, these OEM systems are more stable and have less compatibility issues than custom built PCs. Plus, they are often super cheap like yours because people associate HP, DELL and Lenovo with office PCs and their value drops, regardless of the specs. I don't think a 9th gen system is old yet, as you say, it still plays games decently and upgrading it to a 9th gen i7 would greatly improve performance with a 2060, not to mention, these systems support 9th gen i9 9900 cpus that are 8C 16T and boost up to 5GHz.
Saying OEM systems are "more stable and have less compatibility issues" is an outright falsehood. These prebuilts are some of the least stable systems out there, while also getting significantly less performance than they should for the hardware due to cheap/poor build quality, and terrible nonstandard cases with insufficient cooling.
@@StormsparkPegasus that's why I said, in my experience.
Nice looking case for a prebuilt. Fun to watch these kind of videos.
Loved watching this. Many thanks! ❤️
Love your videos was able to learn how to build my first pc through them keep up the good work
Wiping the drive is good and all, but just an FYI, there are actually viruses that infect BIOSes and hidden areas in SSDs, and use it to infect any new OS you install persisting through wipes. They are rare though, so just a reminder
That is quite a good score.
Just upgrade the RAM to 16 and the RTX 2060 to a 3060 / 3060 Ti and it's fine for another few years.
Love watching your videos bro❤❤❤keep it up..I like to be awake to just see your videos...It has become an entertainment for me.....
Thank you so much 😀
Exactly why no one should buy an Alienware. As soon as something goes wrong (and it will, given the "quality" of their computers), it's a nightmare to fix
ehh, idk. no doubt alienware makes some bad computers. but i bought a Aurora R8 on ebay for $440 a year ago, I7 9700K, RTX 2070, 32GB Ram. i put a 2TB m.2 ssd, i put a aftermarket Corsair H60 liquid cooler in it, and a noctua fan for the front, those 2 mods brought the temps and noise from absolutely unbearble noise/near overheating to running cool and super quiet. im under $550 in this pc and its given me 0 issues. so its a hit or miss really but the good ones will treat you well.
They actually came out with a new Aurora and a new case. The new one comes with a 4060. I think that is what it said. It looked okay but I probably won't ever buy another Alienware. Only because its from Dell. They don't care about gamers. Alienware did care about gamers though. I mean look at the old Alienware cases. They were huge.
@@uhavemooface Old alienwares are insane man, i so want a Aurora R4 and gut the parts and make a new pc in it. there has been success doing it and keeping the light controls.
@@ZzzsamzzzG59That's a really good deal. I bought a PC from OFFERUP in March of 2023 for $300 that came with an MSI Z370-A PRO Motherboard, an i7 8700k, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, an ASUS GTX 1060 6GB Turbo, a Corsair H100i 240mm AIO cooler, and the case which is a Kediers C570 open air with 7 RGB fans. It didn't come with a PSU or storage but I already had those from a previous build.
@@ZzzsamzzzG59 I have an r1 case with the top vents that open. It's a cool case
Gamer's Nexus did an Alienware teardown that will show you a lot of problems with this PC.
Secondly, the single stick of RAM will lead to severe drops in FPS due to single channel stutters
Also the fact that it's only 8GBs that doesn't exactly help matters either, in some games even dual channel DDR4 RAM is still not enough to make the game playable
The new 3050 6GB has models with DVI a port too. Perhaps Dell specified that they specifically wanted a DVI port on this card, considering their potential consumer base.
prolly also to keep using the probably gigantic pile of DVI monitors Dell still has lying around
nvidia added DVI to 2060 and 2060 super its not dell thing . look at something like palit rtx 2060 super and you will find DVI on that too
@@aminbagheri9044 Perhaps, but those GPUs, just like everything else in Dell systems, are built to their specifications. So it's just as plausible that the DVI was included at Dell's request.
Thank you for the larger overlay !!
Ill be honest, whenever i see "Untested" on a listing, I assume they mean "I tested it and I know it doesnt work". Literally never bought a pc listed as untested and it not be in some way none functional
I usually take it to mean "I'm selling this for someone else".
@@found13 Same here, even if it was known working prior to being placed in storage, I sell as untested as I don't waste my time retesting everything.
WOW. I have a newer version of the Alienware Aurora and the guts still look the same. LOL
Always enjoyed your videos Greg keep it coming.
These videos have made me consider trying my luck at an "untested" pc, you can get some really good value out of them if you know what you're doing and some luck of course
Nothing fishy about the raid config for some reason Dell does that to all its products. I disable it on every single Dell machine I touch.
This was a great find. May the luck continue.
Lol funny when you mentioned raid 0/raid 1 I thought, "oh it's probably an issue with raid in the bios", but then you searched for another drive didn't find one and called it a day.
Ok i bought the I7 model 12 cores water cooled 16 gigs of ram with a 1080ti. Upgraded the powersupply removed the 1080ti horrible coil whine upgraded the power supply to a 1000watt power supply.
Been bullet proof machine
RAID ON in the BIOS just allows for the installation of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver.
Historically RST out performed AHCI but it's much of a muchness these days.
Much of a muchness certainly is a new term to me, thx I like it lol
I wonder what maximum hardware was sold in the case? I7? RTX 2080? The fact that it's a lower power CPU and GPU may be what's saving it from thermal D-hell.
The confusion when you saw it was a rtx card and it has dvi port had me in stitches xD
Great video as always, looking forward to the next one :D
is there a CPU upgrade for this board? as you mention i7? then test?
Yeah the raid thing is very specific to dell. To switch to another drive you have to set your system to boot into safe mode, switch to achi, actually boot into safe mode, and then you can go back to normal. All their laptops ship with it and it's not even a real raid config, it's some sort of pseudo raid. You have to disable it to image a drive too because it doesnt detect the drive correctly with it on. You cant even capture an image with it on.
My 2060 Super FE has a DVI port. I think a lot of the 2060's did but my 2070 and 2080 supers do not
that is certainly a unique layout inside that case, also alienware cases look cool
for untested listings it helps to check the description and other items listed by the seller. If they specialize on electronics resale and list it as untested, its likely there is some issue. Could be an easy fix or DOA. If its a private user, low sales, non technical or maybe even honest description, it could be true that they just don't have the capacity to fully test it. if reseller is super large business, reviews in 10,000s and they sell random return pallets stuff, it could be not worth their time to test it, so it could be true in that case as well.
Standard DELL configuration. They always turn on raid on by default on any of their machines.
We buy them as a company - first thing is put it on AHCI mode, and we do a clean reinstall any time (when stocked we keep them with the doak wiped aswell). RaidON has a value in terms of performance, but on DELL systems it just doesn't work like it should. And actually the performance gain is negligible.
RAID was turned on by default, because on newer CPUs Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RTS) uses VMD driver that needs that RAID setup. This config can RAID NVMe drives without a problem, it can also work with single drives as it passes AHCI commands to a single drive, so TRIM and all other functions work as well. Best of both worlds. I personally change it to AHCI, since I don'r RAID my NVMe drives (unless in business, when I mirror them for mission critical PCs).
Even laptops run controllers in RAID mode with a single drive with VMD driver installed.
Boot from network - probably because it had troubles with seeing the failing drive and was resetting the list.
With these, you do need to use a Dell-specific ISO, have the BIOS in AHCI mode, disable RAID, disable network boot. It's the same with my XPS 8910 - it's the same form factor, just in a different case.
I bought a $200 R9 on fb marketplace a few years ago, no cpu, gpu or storage. Had the factory AIO and 850w psu upgrade. I added a spare 980ti hybrid I had sitting around and put the aio and fan up where the top 3.5" drive sits. Added a 9700, another 16gb of ram for a total of 32, and a 512gb m.2 ssd and 1tb laptop hdd down below the gpu. For as much shit as people give these computers in the stock form, they can be modified to be pretty good and not overheat. Just have to find one cheap enough and be clever about solving some of Dell's idocies.
RTX 20,20 super series FE card still have DVI output.
To switch from RAID mode to AHCI,run command prompt in admin and type this command
bcdedit /set {current} safeboot minimal
to boot to safe mode ,run command prompt in admin and type this command
bcdedit /deletevalue {current} safeboot
to save boot setting.
I picked up a refurbed R8 in 2019 for 900 bucks. Only difference was mine had the 120mm AIO with a RTX 2070. Slammed in 32gigs of 3600 memory and all core overclocked the 9600k to a stable 5.4ghz. It was one heck of a budget gaming rig.
I always enjoy your videos.
Quite a few of the early revisions of the 2060 had that exact video out layout, even the EVGA RTX 2060 KO has that layout (I know this from having owned one not that long ago). And even if it only has 6gb vram, the 2060 regardless of the brand is still a great 1080p card, even in 2024 (dlss is definitely a life saver for that card).
I'd avoid it if possible because there's a batch of gpus with micron memory tend to crap out with non super models of 2060 to 2080.
I would put that cpu and gpu in a different rig and run those tests again. Alienware prebuilts are notorious for very bad thermals and they tend to be undervolted and locked in bios to save those thermals.
ur the best Plz Never Stop.
I think if your main target is 1080p, the 2060 will do just fine in 2024 with 6gb VRAM. It's on par with the 1080 non TI in raw performance, and you could turn on DLSS if needed.
6:02 Dell does this on probably all of their computers, RAID is enabled and windows is installed with RAID enabled, even if there’s only a single drive, I’ve seen this from Optiplexs from 2013 to a 2021 XPS 17
Because of this I always switch the setting to AHCI and then reinstall Windows, and it looks like this was the culprit for this computer
If you ever try to upgrade the CPU and need better cooling, the mounting mechanism should be the same as any Asetek Intel Lga 115x, so any Asetek-based 120mm AIO should work and should give a bit of a cooling boost despite the awful case
(Also single channel memory, this thing basically would win any Dell bingo)
Hate to admit that an R7 was my first venture into PC gaming. I learned my lesson from that thankfully.
The case looks pretty cool, Only thing I ever liked about Alienware was their unique case designs
(for the time) when most were just boxes lol.
Well aside from the non-standard cramming of stuff inside lol 🤣🤣
out of curiosity, what do you do with these ebay pc's you buy? resell them?
Haha thats funny the exact computer i had in my cart you bought
Great find and you certainly got lucky. It was a gamble for sure, but for someone knowing and ready to risk it, this would be a good buy.
I don't understand why you artificially amplified the CPU bottleneck in games though. The GPU was never utilised properly in your benchmarks because you had it set to much lower settings than necessary, causing frame drops due to CPU bottlenecking. If you increased the settings you could achieve slightly lower (though still very playable) and more consistent frame rates with better visual fidelity.
It doesn't make sense to sit at medium settings and 100fps with the GPU hovering around 30% and the CPU peaking at 98%. Turning the settings up nearer to max and with say 85fps and GPU at 98% and CPU at say 80% would be far superior.
I would be interested to see this comparison to be honest - how much does the gaming experience change when you force more of the load onto the GPU or the CPU with older or lower power hardware?
This info may benefit budget gamers who get these old prebuilds and don't know how to tweak settings relative to CPU/GPU loads to achieve balance ... and those who don't realise that it's far better for frame pacing consistency to have the GPU maxed out than the CPU maxed out (not to mention that the cpu has less breathing room for cooling than the gpu).
6:25 JUST FYI for Greg or anyone else. Idk why they chose it, but DELL has RAID instead of AHCI mode even back in the XP days. I guess it is because they chose this mode of IDE mode in the bios back then and just never switch, but every DELL we work on here n shop RAID is selected mode.
Mr. Su from this small PC hardware shop in that one small back alley in Shenzhen sells lots of RTX cards with a DVI port. He also sells RTX cards with VGA ports. When I was in his shop, he told me Dell is one of his loyal customers. 🙃
OK, seriously, my RTX 2060 Super "Dual" from ASUS has a DVI port too.
Congrats, Greg. Stay Safe.
Did you check the memory to see if no memory errors? Ya, I just bought a brand new system on last Black Friday and I was getting BSoD once and a while... like watching youtube or playing a game thru google chrome and it would crash.... Did that Windows Memory Diagnostic and on pass 2 reported errors. So yesterday finally went back to the computer store and they swapped out the DDR5 6000 ram and now works fine so far. So goes to show even brand new systems have these pesky problems.
Hi Greg, Great video salvaging 9th gen stuff, atleast it is windows 11 compatible. I wonder if you tried a sata ssd as a boot drive?
Yes, I believe we highlighted in the video that we had even tried a 2.5" SATA SSD :-)
The RTX 2060 doesn't get enough love, it's better than many people give it credit for. Being Alienware, I'm surprised the system even worked at all lol
First modern PC I built accidentally turned on Intel RAID [Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST)] instead of standard AHCI. It was not clear when setting up, and I’m honestly not sure how it happened. Took some searching, but was able to disable with command line a a year or so later when I realized there was an issue.
I wasn’t even half through this video and started commenting that this was maybe the issue, then saw you figured it out. I think I turned on Intel RST accidentally when trying to use an old version of Intel XTU. Still no idea. Command line worked to fix it all (thankfully).
Intel RST can be used with/without RAID, but I don’t know what the benefits are without RAID. Thanks for the video!!!
I'll take this rig for 300 $ all day . I am still running i7700 with 1060 -6 gb and 120 GB normal SSD sooooo , pretty good deal Greg.
I work in a Dell Shop. Dell does some goofy stuff in the bios. we always have to change from raid to AHCI on our systems we get.
I bought an HP way back in the day (around 2009) that ended up coming with two hard drives in it (a 300 GB and a 700 GB) with Windows installed to the smaller one, and RAID enabled by default in the BIOS. Turns out it was because the PC had an Easy Backup button on it that you could press and it would (to my knowledge) mirror the boot drive over to the second drive. When I later upgraded the drive to an SSD, I disabled RAID, and it didn’t like to boot without that.
That may be a OPTANE drive as opposed to a regular m.2 drive so you may just need drivers. There was a sata cable - is there not also an actual SATA HDD?
I bought an untested for parts GTX 970 on ebay for 15$, when I received it I disassembled it first thing to clean and test for shorts and it turned out to be a brand new card, clean and working great.
Greg, those dell powersupplys open up like a door
I had similar issue with my workstation. For me it was just the SATA ports dying. Only the one I used for a DVD drive was working. The windows and bios did recognize the drives while connected, but couldn't access them. I think turning the raid off would've fixed it.. But at least it gave me a good reason to downgrade to a tad smaller case with smaller motherboard. LOL
speccy or gpu z are great softwares to use to figure out all the hardware info
i would diffidently upgrade the cpu to i7 and the ram to max. you will get more out of it. I'm still on i7 2600k still running like champ for old outdated 2nd gen chip. It hasn't let me down yet i just can't leave it in the dust
I would like to point out that for earlier dell platforms like this, a simple cmos reset would have solved everything immediately most likely. The default for this model year is typically set to AHCI.
Perhaps they used it in as an enterprise pc for work. Those dells are always set on RAID by default. I have one that did the same.
So I deal with new Dell Laptops for the company I work for on a regular basis, when I tell you that “Raid On” setting is defaulted on ALL NEW DELLS is so annoying. You have to switch to AHCI every time you want to wipe and install a new boot of windows. Having an Alienware as my first PC, seeing this video really gave me a nostalgic battle of Dell’s bloatware and hardware design.
9th gen I5, and a 2060 should be a good pairing. They are both from around the same year. A lot of systems came with that config.
Another thing to watch out for with these is: If you chuck in a different SSD even if it has an OS on it, the bootloader on these OEM machines often wont show the drive if it wasn't installed with an intel VMD driver (Loaded during the Win 10 / 11 setup process)
Fun little thing is that my old 2060 super founders edition has a dvi port. I specifically had to find a card because my old monitor only supported 144hz through a dvi port so when i was upgrading my gpu i had to find one that had that and came across the 2060 super.
"I don't think that's the way we were supposed to open that..."
Meanwhile Steve at GN is like "Aaaaaand we don't need that" "This is, hah, not exactly optimal design"
(And Linus would've just dropped the entire thing and then blamed an employee)
My adult daughter bought the slightly older 7700/1060 version of this. It is not a great build with the air cooled option struggling for air, but it has been a reliable machine that she still uses today. It still plays minecraft and GW2 just fine after all - and she does a bit of Beat Saber as well. It works, but it's not a great one for upgrading and it's stuck with windows 10 for now. When it dies I'll build her a real PC. lol.
Oh man I just sold one of those with better specs for 400$
I wish you had bought it for this video. She had the water-cooled i7, 32 gb ram and a TB of storage. Plus the 2060 in mine was a MSI Ventus 12 gb.
Great video. Glad it ran fine for you. Nothing worse than buying a brick.
Raid is even setup in their sff optiplexes, its a dell board thing
I always liked the look of those Alienware cases, but the internals seem to be built for utility rather than performance. I think it would be kind of interesting to build a decent system inside one of those cases, but you'd probably need to do some fabrication to clear space for a decent CPU cooler.
i knew a guy who bought storage lockers. lots of bulk electronics. he just resells and doesnt test things.
I ran an i5 2500k with a GTX 570 for a number of years. When the 1660 Ti came out I replaced the 570. I later got a good deal on a 2060 from EVGA and ran it for 1080p gaming until 2021. I don't know too much about the i5 9th gen cpu, but with the longevity I got out of my 2500k it should still be viable for 1080 gaming.
i just ran a i5 2400 for about 7 years and it ran no problem until the power supply gave out
Sandy Bridge was legendary. I had an i7-2600s and even with a low power model like that it was good for years.
I've got a i7 2600k and gtx 1050
Just don't se a need for upgrading tbh
Nice snipe!
Sticking in a second stick of RAM for it to run in dual channel will speed things up considerably. (mostly on the 1% lows)
... where did the optical HDD drive go?? mounted on the front of the case.... that is how and why raid was enabled right??? was in there till bench marks the HDD after the bench marks the HDD was removed
Not an AlienWare fan. Basically paying twice the amount for a nameplate and an RGB alien head logo. As for untested I’ll buy it depending on two factors - seller feedback and whether or not I can repair it. Pc parts I’ll go for. An untested window actuator for my car? Not so much.
Thanks again for another great video! Love the series. 😊
why that psu isn't up top? That massive compartment is just sitting there such strange case design
It boots to network first as they is how they image them on they assembly line using a PXE server. Also if you have a dell management system it would be enabled for that same reason
I work at school district and we have around 40 of them in stock from our esports team just sitting around know because they got the new nicer models
That's great! Love this!
Device manager could also have told you which gpu you have in there
Is that mid 70 is normal for 2060? Seem rather hot.
Before the BSOD, the 'issue' I would conclude is, it was stolen. To give the seller a little flexibility, it was abandoned and they took it during a unit clean up or something.
yup. that would have been my thought too!
Nice score! Love the vids Greg
i like how the card says HDMI yet only has a DVI port.
look again. not just dvi
ASUS and MSI I know make a few RTX cards with DVI. MSI also has provided graphics cards for Dell in the past.