WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.000 You know I've got a pretty heavy computer at home, it's got a 4090 in it, it's in a fractal torrent, 00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:09.120 it's got some hard drives, but when I saw that Alienware was sending us the Area 51 desktop 00:00:09.120 --> 00:00:15.120 and that it was 76 and a half pounds, I just knew that I had to unbox it. 00:00:15.120 --> 00:00:18.560 For the non-Americans out there, that's about 35 kilos. 00:00:22.880 --> 00:00:26.320 All in one giant computer. 00:00:27.840 --> 00:00:33.920 Oh boy let's get this thing out of the box. There's not too many markings on the box, but we've got this cool A51 logo on the front 00:00:33.920 --> 00:00:39.200 and then we've got four clips. Sorry about that, there's six clips, they've got one on each side 00:00:39.200 --> 00:00:47.200 here as well. Oh man, this thing's enormous. Okay, let's see if I can get it out. Well wow, 00:00:47.200 --> 00:00:50.400 there's like some extra foam too. Okay, we'll get to that in a sec. Let me see if I can 00:00:51.040 --> 00:00:55.280 lift it out of the foam. This is going to be the hard part because it's heavy, heavy because the foam. 00:01:00.480 --> 00:01:06.240 There's a 360 mil rad for the AIO that's hooked up to the CPU, so that's some of the weight. 00:01:06.240 --> 00:01:12.240 And then it's also got a 1500 watt platinum power supply because you know we've got the 00:01:12.240 --> 00:01:16.320 top of the line spec version that cost a pretty penny. We'll talk about the price later 00:01:16.960 --> 00:01:20.160 because right now we're actually, I want to finish unboxing it. We've got 00:01:21.680 --> 00:01:27.600 this giant accessories box. What's in the Alienware box? It's, you know, it's a minor thing, 00:01:27.600 --> 00:01:31.120 but I kind of wish this had the little Alienware logo on the box, just that you 00:01:31.120 --> 00:01:35.840 remembered that this is what it was for. Warranty car stickers, you could put one of these stickers 00:01:35.840 --> 00:01:41.280 on yourself and then you'd always know that it's your Alienware accessories box. As for cables, 00:01:41.280 --> 00:01:48.560 this looks like, oh no, you guys put a nice 1500 watt platinum power supply in and I know 00:01:48.560 --> 00:01:54.800 that this cable's fine. I get it, it is perfectly adequate, but there's something about it. When you 00:01:54.800 --> 00:02:01.680 put it into this configuration where it's all slim and flimsy, that it just doesn't feel as strong 00:02:01.680 --> 00:02:05.680 as like a big thick C13 power cable. What else we got? We got a mouse, 00:02:07.360 --> 00:02:12.080 little freebie cheap mouse that'll get you gaming. If you don't have a mouse already, 00:02:12.080 --> 00:02:16.960 they're fine. And then it looks like this is our Wi-Fi puck. So we got a little 00:02:17.680 --> 00:02:22.000 antenna adapters here. We got the puck there, sticking it back, popping on top, you're good 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:27.840 to go. And then, I bet you it's a keyboard. Please, please, please, please, please. It is. 00:02:28.800 --> 00:02:34.560 So to pair with your free mouse, you get a free keyboard. It's membrane. It's fine. It was free. 00:02:35.600 --> 00:02:40.480 You know, I kind of wish at this price point because this thing is expensive. I wish that it 00:02:40.480 --> 00:02:45.120 came with like one of their Alienware accessories, but it's better than nothing. At least we can 00:02:45.120 --> 00:02:49.600 turn this on. But let's take a look at the computer. This is one hell of a big computer. They got the 00:02:49.600 --> 00:02:56.880 cheese grater on top, kind of looks like the old Mac Pro. And then there's actually an absolute 00:02:56.880 --> 00:03:05.040 ton of IO on the front. We've got two USB-A ports, two USB type-C, a dedicated headphone and dedicated 00:03:05.040 --> 00:03:12.000 mic jack as well. And that's just on the front or top IO. On the back, it's funny because this is 00:03:12.000 --> 00:03:17.360 a proprietary Dell motherboard. And we'll talk about that more later. But it's actually really beefy. 00:03:17.360 --> 00:03:26.880 We've got two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-C ports, and then six more USB type-A at various speeds. 00:03:26.880 --> 00:03:33.040 We'll put those on screen for you. And then we've got Spediff, good old Spediff, line in and out, 00:03:33.040 --> 00:03:39.120 and then LAN. I think it's two and a half gig LAN as well. I really like the cool Area 51 designation 00:03:39.120 --> 00:03:44.720 along with the model ID. It does look admittedly pretty empty. I think that's just because I'm 00:03:44.720 --> 00:03:50.640 not used to seeing like four essentially USB type-C ports. We'd have probably HDMI. Oh, that's 00:03:50.640 --> 00:03:59.440 what's missing. Oh, there's no HDMI or DisplayPort. So, I mean, we have an Intel 285K, not the KF, 00:03:59.440 --> 00:04:06.400 so it should have integrated graphics. Alienware. Include my HDMI or DisplayPort ports so that I 00:04:06.400 --> 00:04:11.120 can get video out of my CPU that has onboard dedicated graphics, please. It's a minor complaint, 00:04:11.120 --> 00:04:18.960 but it's a complaint. And then we've got a full-fat 5090 in here. So, we've got three DP 2.1 ports, 00:04:18.960 --> 00:04:24.720 should be USB-R20 with DP 2.1B, and then we've got one HDMI 2.1 port. And then I actually missed 00:04:24.720 --> 00:04:29.120 our Wi-Fi antennas because they're all the way down here instead of integrated directly into the 00:04:29.120 --> 00:04:33.280 motherboard. There's probably some kind of like daughter board down here. We'll take a look later, 00:04:33.280 --> 00:04:39.600 but that's where you plug your Wi-Fi in. Very nice. Yo, and then there's some kind of... Okay, 00:04:39.600 --> 00:04:43.600 this is really... You probably have to undo the screw first to make this turn, 00:04:43.600 --> 00:04:46.800 but it looks like once you undo that screw, you can like... There's also a little lock here, 00:04:46.800 --> 00:04:50.320 and there's these guys too. I don't know what those are. I just got really excited about them 00:04:50.320 --> 00:04:55.200 after seeing the rest of the IO. All right, but next up, let's take the foam out, take the peel 00:04:55.200 --> 00:05:00.960 out. We got a GPU thing that we got to take out after shipment. How do we... All right, that just 00:05:00.960 --> 00:05:04.800 rips out of here. I want to open this lock. I really want to know what this lock does, so I'm 00:05:04.800 --> 00:05:08.960 going to unscrew it. As much as they might try to make it tool-less, and they do a good job, 00:05:08.960 --> 00:05:14.400 in some cases, it's clearly not... Okay, that worked fully tool-less because I needed... Oh, 00:05:14.400 --> 00:05:18.480 that was cool. That scared the hell out of me. I thought I... For sure, these were just going 00:05:18.480 --> 00:05:22.880 to like fall off, but they don't. So when you do that, don't worry about it. They just come out, 00:05:22.880 --> 00:05:27.200 and they just pull it off like that. That was great. Thanks, Alienware. That was actually really cool. 00:05:27.200 --> 00:05:30.320 No problem. You guys are going to love this or hate this. I don't know. 00:05:31.280 --> 00:05:44.080 Yeah. That's my best peel ever. The whole thing is positive pressure. Every single fan is intake, 00:05:44.640 --> 00:05:49.040 and I can't remember the exact sizes we've got, but we've got a 360-mil rad with, I think, 00:05:49.040 --> 00:05:54.320 3120s at the top, a couple of 180s at the front here, and then I think, yeah, there's a couple 00:05:54.320 --> 00:06:00.080 of 140s here for the power supply, feeding a bunch of air into our GPU. Now let's take a look at what 00:06:00.080 --> 00:06:05.680 else is on the inside of this bad boy. We got our... Yeah, there's our cooler. Apparently, it can do up 00:06:05.680 --> 00:06:11.280 to a 420-millimeter radiator, and I believe it because we've got a bunch of just kind of dead 00:06:11.280 --> 00:06:17.840 space over here. And then as for the rest of our system, we've got this crazy overbuilt anti-sag 00:06:17.840 --> 00:06:22.880 bracket, but I mean, it makes sense. Dell Alienware is sending this to people who they don't think 00:06:22.880 --> 00:06:26.640 we're ever going to take this thing apart as evidenced in our latest Secret Shopper, and so I 00:06:26.640 --> 00:06:31.360 can understand why they don't want you to touch the graphics card. They want this thing to arrive in 00:06:31.360 --> 00:06:36.080 one piece with zero issues, so they don't have to fix anything after the fact. Other than that, 00:06:36.080 --> 00:06:42.880 we've only got two slots in our motherboard for our DDR5 memory. It is running at like 6400 00:06:42.880 --> 00:06:50.560 megatransfer, which is good, but the cast latency is like 44 or 46, which is bad. But we'll talk more 00:06:50.560 --> 00:06:56.560 about that later. Underneath here, we've got our Intel Core Ultra 285K. I know AMD's kind of king 00:06:56.560 --> 00:07:02.800 of the scene right now, but the reality is at 4K with a 5090, a 285K will do you well enough. It's 00:07:02.800 --> 00:07:07.920 not CPU-bound, so it should be fine. And then as for the rest of the case, I kind of wish they routed 00:07:07.920 --> 00:07:14.880 this power a little differently, maybe go down and under. I don't know, maybe go over through here, 00:07:14.880 --> 00:07:19.520 so it's with the rest of the cables instead of down through the brace. It's not the end of the world, 00:07:19.520 --> 00:07:24.640 but like now the brace is connected and I don't like that. Other than that, we've got a very 00:07:24.640 --> 00:07:29.920 clearly, actually really like how labeled this is. We've got this SSD M.2 solid state drive 00:07:31.040 --> 00:07:36.880 label and slot. Our SSD is under there. It's a two terabyte Gen4 drive. We've got our little 00:07:36.880 --> 00:07:42.400 Wi-Fi card here that goes down to our antenna here that I found, so not, I mean it's kind of a 00:07:42.400 --> 00:07:47.360 daughterboard, I guess. It depends on how you think about it, but what else have we got? What 00:07:47.360 --> 00:07:51.920 secrets are you hiding? There's a lot of stuff plugged in. Like all of our, pretty much all of 00:07:51.920 --> 00:07:57.520 our headers here are full. End up here too, so there's a lot plugged in right now. So Alienware 00:07:57.520 --> 00:08:04.800 is going a lot more non-proprietary and just off-the-shelf parts. Like most of this looks very 00:08:04.800 --> 00:08:10.640 standard. The problem is they're still using 12 VO for their motherboards and so you don't get this, 00:08:10.640 --> 00:08:17.440 where's the ATX 24 pin? It's gone. And so the one problem, it is a standard, there's like 00:08:17.440 --> 00:08:23.200 two motherboards that use 12 VO, but if you want to ever replace, keep the graphic card, 00:08:23.200 --> 00:08:27.120 maybe the memory and some other stuff, but you want to replace the board and maybe the chip, 00:08:27.120 --> 00:08:32.640 you're going to either have to replace your power supply as well. And it's a 1500 watt platinum 00:08:32.640 --> 00:08:37.600 power supply, so I really don't want to do that. Or you have to specifically buy a board that uses 00:08:37.600 --> 00:08:44.720 12 VO instead of the ATX 24 pin. There are out there. There's not many of them, but technically 00:08:44.720 --> 00:08:47.360 you can find one. Let's take a look at the cable management in the back. 00:08:51.920 --> 00:08:55.440 Now the next thing I want to do is take a look at this power supply because it's huge and it's 00:08:55.440 --> 00:09:00.240 also got this giant bracket, like holding it in place. So we're going to remove this guy and 00:09:00.240 --> 00:09:05.040 take a look at the label just to make sure we're getting what we paid for. Hell yeah, look at 80 00:09:05.040 --> 00:09:10.720 plus platinum, maybe. And then looking at the back, yeah, looks pretty normal. Like I said, 00:09:10.720 --> 00:09:17.120 you're not going to find an ATX 24 pin power connector off of this guy. So I'm going to upgrade, 00:09:17.120 --> 00:09:20.320 you're going to have to upgrade that too, but at least it's easy enough to remove. You just take 00:09:20.320 --> 00:09:24.720 this bracket off and then you can take it out through the back. No problem. One neat feature 00:09:24.720 --> 00:09:31.280 I didn't really talk about is this kind of open air part because yeah, the front is solid, but then 00:09:31.280 --> 00:09:38.160 you get in here and you've just got these two big fans with a very easily removable filter. I might 00:09:38.160 --> 00:09:43.680 add. That's actually super easy. It also looks, I'm not sure if it's on the other side too. No, 00:09:43.680 --> 00:09:48.000 on this side though, it looks like there's a strip of diffused lighting. I'm not 100% sure, 00:09:48.000 --> 00:09:52.640 but we'll find out once we turn it on after a word from our sponsor, Saley. First thing 00:09:52.640 --> 00:09:57.280 I'd like to point out is I was right. This is some nice beautiful diffused lighting and yes, 00:09:57.280 --> 00:10:04.400 I absolutely did plug in our peripherals into the top USB ports because I'm crazy like that. 00:10:04.400 --> 00:10:10.640 Let's take a quick look and see if we're actually getting what we've paid for. CPU, 00:10:10.640 --> 00:10:15.920 there's our Core Ultra 285K. As for memory yet, we've got our memory running at 6400 00:10:15.920 --> 00:10:21.600 megatransferors per second. XMP was enabled by default. However, there were a couple of issues. 00:10:21.600 --> 00:10:28.240 One, rebar or a resizable bar was not enabled by default. If you reset your computer like a full 00:10:29.200 --> 00:10:35.680 wipe on the motherboard, you're going to also not have it enabled because it's not on by default. 00:10:35.680 --> 00:10:40.560 We're going to enable it because it's not going to care about it in too many games, but the ones 00:10:40.560 --> 00:10:45.440 that it does care about, you're going to look at like a 10 to maybe even 15 or 20% performance decrease. 00:10:46.160 --> 00:10:52.640 So definitely make sure to turn that on. And then, okay, what else do we want to add or 00:10:52.640 --> 00:10:56.480 remove programs? They've got, you know, they're pretty typical like Alienware command center. 00:10:56.480 --> 00:11:00.960 You know, I'm not going to fault them for that. That's fine. And while we've already uninstalled 00:11:00.960 --> 00:11:06.160 it, it did come with McAfee. So, you know, there's not a lot that I will highly recommend that you 00:11:06.160 --> 00:11:12.400 just uninstall and rip out of your computer as soon as it shows up, but McAfee is probably like the top 00:11:12.400 --> 00:11:17.920 like number one program to just absolutely get rid of. I'm part of the Adams family. 00:11:17.920 --> 00:11:24.480 I've got a $40.90 at home. It's a great card. I don't want to spend this much money on a $50.90. 00:11:24.480 --> 00:11:31.040 It's very expensive. This computer costs a lot, but a giant chunk of that price is at least at 00:11:31.040 --> 00:11:34.560 this price point, there's different configurations, but a giant chunk of that price is just going to 00:11:34.560 --> 00:11:40.240 this guy right here. So, you know, let's play some games on it and see, I mean, I got a 4k monitor 00:11:40.240 --> 00:11:47.120 right here. Let's hurt me a little bit and make me cry because I want a $50.90 level of performance. 00:11:47.120 --> 00:11:55.040 I just don't want to spend $2,000 US dollars on a graphics card. That's your whole computer should 00:11:55.040 --> 00:12:00.400 cost like two grand like hell. Yeah. What are our settings? What did it start me at? Custom. 00:12:00.400 --> 00:12:05.920 I don't know what custom is. Let's go to ray tracing overdrive. Sure. DLSS transformer model. I don't 00:12:05.920 --> 00:12:11.360 want to go to auto. I want to go to quality. That's good enough for me. Ray reconstruction. Ray 00:12:11.360 --> 00:12:18.560 reconstruction is on. Framegen off. I don't like it. I don't like Framegen, but all the RT stuff, 00:12:18.560 --> 00:12:23.600 except I'm not going to turn on actually, no, $50.90. Let's turn on path tracing. Why not? 00:12:23.600 --> 00:12:31.120 We've only got 80 field of view motion blur, always off. Oh, baby. The sub 60 frames a second, 00:12:31.120 --> 00:12:38.960 it's barely, it's like 53, 55. This is why they try to tell you to use Framegen and I'm not going 00:12:38.960 --> 00:12:42.960 to do that. But you know, the nice thing is our 1% lows are actually pretty solid. They're only a 00:12:42.960 --> 00:12:48.320 little bit behind our averages at like 50, high 40s. So as much as I'm poo pooing this, it's very 00:12:48.320 --> 00:12:52.880 playable and it looks incredible. So I'm just going to tweak settings a little bit to get us 00:12:52.880 --> 00:12:59.760 somewhere closer to 60 plus because I actually am a little disappointed that I do have DLSS on 00:13:00.400 --> 00:13:05.280 and I'm still sub 60. Honestly, I'm not going to touch anything else. I'm literally just turning 00:13:05.280 --> 00:13:12.240 the path tracing off and let's see how it does now. Let it settle down. Oh yeah, 85, 80 with 1% 00:13:12.240 --> 00:13:20.400 of like 80 to high 70s. So this is great. Path tracing looks incredible. Ray tracing in the right 00:13:20.400 --> 00:13:27.520 circumstances can also look really good. But the problem is this is on a 50.90. So I can guarantee 00:13:27.520 --> 00:13:33.120 to you that my 40.90 isn't going to be running Cyberpunk 4k Ultra. Now to be fair, while expectations 00:13:33.120 --> 00:13:38.160 from gamers have risen over the past few years when it comes to like playing at certain resolutions 00:13:38.160 --> 00:13:48.560 and certain frame rates, this computer costs $5,150. And so in my opinion, if you're paying over $5,000 00:13:48.560 --> 00:13:55.760 for your computer with about 2,000 of that, at least going to your graphics card, I think those 00:13:55.760 --> 00:13:59.520 expectations are a little fair. And then on top of all of that, because you're also getting like 00:13:59.520 --> 00:14:05.680 two terabytes of storage and some decent amount of RAM, you've got a pretty cool case. Like it's 00:14:05.680 --> 00:14:12.080 enormous. You're putting this down and you're not moving it like ever. It weighs like 80 pounds full. 00:14:13.200 --> 00:14:17.840 But it's pretty sick. I really like the tempered glass side panel. I like how easy it was to take 00:14:17.840 --> 00:14:23.600 the panels off. I really love this diffuse lighting. Is it on the other side? It's not on the other 00:14:23.600 --> 00:14:27.280 side. That's my only complaint. Alienware. Come on. I know people will probably never see it, 00:14:27.280 --> 00:14:33.040 but put it on the other side. I love that the Alienware logo is not only the power button, 00:14:33.040 --> 00:14:37.680 but it's lit up nicely in their classic like Alienware blue. And while I'm over here, one thing 00:14:37.680 --> 00:14:42.880 I completely forgot to mention is while most people probably aren't going to tinker with these, if you 00:14:42.880 --> 00:14:51.040 do want to, there's handy QR codes in pretty much every little spot where you might have to do something. 00:14:51.040 --> 00:14:56.160 And if you follow those, it'll give you detailed instructions on how to like undo that part or 00:14:56.160 --> 00:15:01.680 reinstall it or whatever, which is actually really cool in terms of customer support. 00:15:01.680 --> 00:15:05.840 And while you're paying a lot for this Alienware computer, and it might look sick and it might 00:15:05.840 --> 00:15:11.760 be what you want, take a look at these results from the lab. Overall, pretty solid. It cools 00:15:11.760 --> 00:15:17.360 decently fine with the 360 mil AIO. And in terms of gaming performance, we only tested three games, 00:15:17.360 --> 00:15:24.080 but the only one that wasn't like basically neck and neck with our 285k system was F one, 00:15:24.080 --> 00:15:29.200 which did not have rebar on. So like I said before, if you're buying one of these systems, 00:15:29.920 --> 00:15:34.320 perfectly valid decision, I'm happy for you that you have so much money to spend. 00:15:35.840 --> 00:15:41.200 But definitely, oh my God, enable rebar, please in the BIOS, make sure you do that. 00:15:42.160 --> 00:15:49.120 Please make sure you do that. I'm Ploof. This is ShortCircuit. This is Alienware's Area 51 00:15:49.840 --> 00:15:57.040 gaming desktop. And it is very cool. If you like it, there are many other configurations. 00:15:57.040 --> 00:16:01.200 It goes, it starts way lower than the price we looked at today. This is a top end spec. 00:16:01.760 --> 00:16:06.560 Go check it out and check out another ShortCircuit. Maybe what was the last one? You know, 00:16:06.560 --> 00:16:11.920 the Yggdrasil. That one was sick. That had like a tempered glass side panel. That had like this 00:16:11.920 --> 00:16:16.480 cool vinyl wrap on it that looked all stained glassy. It was really cool.