Was Alienware REALLY Better Before Dell?

I bought a 16 year old Alienware system to see if they were really better before Dell bought them.

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[aaronwlkr]

Production at Alienware main building was shut down in 2009. I was one of the last warehouse employee's to be let go. Also that was not the stock power supply. The cases came with a stock one from the case manufacturer. That black one is an upgrade, might have* been a seasonic. Now I want to see Dawid, use a modern system, CPU/MEM with the old card on the same games, and see what the bottleneck of the card looks like. Oh and you also murdered Alex last name :)

[LifeofBoris]

I always dreamed of having this... in my dreams

[nsf-]

3:20 Gotta give props to the seller for taking the shipping seriously

[fireshorts]

Dropping a Core 2 Quad into this thing would really bring it up to the next level. Those CPU's were absolutely beastly back then and I feel like that motherboard definitely would support them with a BIOS update.

[thosepixelstho]

this would get very interesting if Dawid decided to dump a Core 2 Quad Extreme into this relic, it would probably be way faster

[richardhessinger]

I would love to see you build a modern PC inside that Alienware case!

[MelodicMizeryPsVids]

man props to the guy who shipped it and put all that buffer inside so nothing would get messed up

[gildedlink]

I remember Alienware really well early on and being amazed by their designs- they were a dream machine in high school that only would've been surpassed by a Falcon Northwest build if I'd stood any chance of owning one.

This era of Alienware though, post Dell purchase.. the switchover might've been slow but the laptops felt it. I had a friend who got their laptop around this time. He had to RMA it, and the issue repeated and they refused to take it back the second time. This was past their prime by a bit. This is also around the time I fully built a system from scratch for the first time, a lot of EVGA and Gigabyte parts and a Q9550 paired with an nforce750i. Some thoughts on what would definitely have affected performance during your gauntlet:

1) Heat. That CPU almost certainly needed new thermal paste on it. Efficiency wasn't the game, raw clock multipliers were, because single thread performance was still dominating gaming in just about every way and it was a pretty recent phenomena that many builds could address more than 4GB ram due to 64 bit windows. Accordingly, that thing would've run *hot*. C2Q was very capable years beyond its time, especially overclocking, but it needed a good cooler.
2) Video. The 8800 was capable of PCIe 1.0. The board it's slotted into is capable of, at best, PCIe 2.0. PCIe 3.0 wasn't coming until 2010, and motherboard designs still centered around northbridge and southbridge. When it comes to performance with the 8800 as well, unified shader model was fairly recent at the time of the 8800. The 4090 was bound to oversaturate the hell out of that slot, and the 8800 was probably already the theoretical peak.
3) Digital Distribution. You're running 2023's Half Life 2. Bioshock would've challenged the system regardless, I remember how much that thing toasted PCs trying to run it hard with DirectX10 and Global Illumination, but even the older titles unfortunately have a long path of updates to adapt them to modern systems. GTA5....that's 2014, on a game that needed a 980 to stretch its legs in its release state alone. Not a chance.

In any case, it's a survivor no doubt. The fact that the system is still running is admirable and this has lifted my opinion of Alienware's desktops in that age just a bit. Love the case itself too.

[queden]

This proves that it's possible to have an exotic look and half decent ventilation at the same time

[-sasukesenju-]

making a sleeper build out of this would be pretty interesting

[Schnozinski]

Can confirm that I was running 1280 x 1024 until like 2011, depending on the game, I didn't even have it set that high. The switch to 1080p hit my system at the time like a truck.

[Bovafett]

so.... what was the answer? was it better before Dell?

[proscriptus]

This is such a blast from the past, I remember seeing these things 20 years ago. There was almost nobody else doing retail custom PCS like that.

[ericjodoin]

If you had any performance or stability issues, check the capacitors on the motherboard.
They seemed to be leaking from multiple shots in the video.

[zacktonature]

My biggest takeaway from this video was that HL2 was way ahead of its time with graphics because it still looks gorgeous nearly 20 YEARS later.

[hi_tech_reptiles]

Lot of people used VGA CRTs still in 2007, partially for motion clarity and refresh rate. 100hz was common in the FPS/Quake3/Unreal Tournament scene already, priming the demand for 120-144hz TN panels later on. Also could have used VMs to run older Windows versions. Could have helped that CPU massively, considering all the things it cant do compared to even low end modern CPUs, regardless of clock speed.

[herbertholland]

I've always built my own, but even I was tempted by Alienware back in the day. They were the best prebuilts you could get Once I found out Dell was buying them, I knew they would end up sucking.

[VaultF]

Damn, the memories. My first gaming PC had also a 8800 GTX, but sadly it only lasted me like 2 month. It literally caught on fire while playing Oblivion.

[needburn]

The 8800s were beasts, and I remember the 9800 GTXs going for only $100 and they were the best at the time. Built a lot of custom PCs for people with 9800s.

[sinephase]

I think you were right that the performance had a lot to do with the weak CPU rather than the GPU; that thing was decent up until around 2010 IIRC