today's episode the moment has arrived
not the moment per se but uh the systems
have all arrived so we get to go through
and look at exactly what came out of
those cluster phone calls and evaluate both
the packaging the shipping and of course
the physical build unboxing experience
so come along for the ride oh by the way alienware is going first
this going good
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okay have an iphone uh no i actually don't have a knife on me
so first up is del alienware
thanks
all right so this
is our alienware
something or other ah here we go our alienware aurora system with
one times m.2 NVMe
clearly these guys are new to retail packaging that is going to mean so much
to the average consumer so dell's total was 20 days from the time of ordering to
the time of the system arriving and that is 20 real calendar days
not 20 business days so about two-thirds of a month
now the invoice they sent us was a really weird aspect of the aurora system
because it was full of a bunch of like jargony things and there wasn't really
we didn't have a clear idea of exactly what was coming or we wouldn't have if
they hadn't walked us through it on the phone in terms of accessories
did you know this thing comes with like nothing
like look at this so we get a warranty safety and
regulatory information pamphlet we get a quick start guide
which basically says connect the keyboard and mouse
which is not present as you can see connect the network cable optional
connect the display connect the power cable and press the power button okay
and we get a power cable
is that really it well they did try selling us a 10
keyboard and mouse i guess it's better to not include it and not have to pay
for it than to pay for stuff you don't need
in terms of the quality of the packaging job that they've done here there's
already something that i've noticed it was lose in size yeah it is not a good
thing to have a system loosely packed inside a box you want
everything closed up as tightly as possible so there's still a fairly good
chance that our system is just fine because at least dell is using a very
high quality closed cell foam here so you can see that it's it's strong
um but it's also not going to crumble and
crack if the whole box gets impacted by anything so that allows it to stay
strong and it has some it has some give to it which is really important when
it's sitting you know vibrating on the back of a truck or whatever else
i actually haven't seen an aurora system in a very long time
it's got some heft to it that's probably as much to do with it
being a steel case as anything else i guess we need a screwdriver hey
screw me yeah
that's good all right i don't really have any complaints about
the plastics i mean dell's done a pretty good job of
these kinds of things for a long time now get some of that peel action going on
here
oh interesting it's perforated it's perforated just in case you're like one
of those horrible people who leaves the
plastic on your electronics it still won't die
that's awesome it's like
actually an idiot proofing measure because it's
the same thing here at the back too it's all cheese gratered
that is freaking hilarious in terms of i
o not bad usb 3 usb 3.1 type c another usb 3.
audio can't take headphone jacks for granted these days
oh okay yeah there's a button here and then
there we go so our side panel does actually make use of
the chassis intrusion detection so we're probably going to get a notification
about that there's our RGB pcb for the
um lighting in this sort of
triangular doodad they got going on here we actually can't see a lot about the
internals of this machine so we've got
a 120 millimeter cooling fan sucking air in from the front here
we've got a very oem grade looking gtx
1060 that's with a rear blower design plastic shroud so it's not like a like a
high quality like founders edition metal shroud or anything like that but at this
price point i wouldn't have expected that this is nice to see so we've got
card support so even though there was some extra space in the box the chances
of this card coming out of that slot or breaking it off i've seen that very slim
i get a kick out of this is it the swing out i think so so i
think you unlock these and then yep
oh that's kind of cool so all the cabling stays in place for our state of
power our pci express all that good stuff
and this gets us our first look
at our motherboard so having reviewed a high-end alienware
desktop a little while ago back when AMD launched their threadripper processor
i'm not surprised by any of this but they are using a proprietary motherboard
this is the ipcfl-sc
got that little alien silkscreened on it so this is
definitely specific to alienware it's got a mirror 4-pin power connector for
what ended up being a this is an 8700k processor the one
that's 10 times faster remember 10 times faster very important to remember that
this is the auxiliary power to it and then this no this is GPU power
oh so that's weird hey
actually there's some weird stuff in here so look at this they use an adapter
here instead of just plugging their 24-pin connector directly into the board
and i have to assume that it's because they're actually using a proprietary
wire layout for this and you can you can actually see they are so orange orange
black red orange black wait no black red black black red black gray
purple ah yes white white orange yeah but
yellows might just be whites what is going on here what are we even
doing that's so weird what so just so you can't use a normal
power supply we should find out if this system runs without this plugged in
because i'd be willing to bet that it does also notable down here
is our nice robust thick cooling fan
wow actually that's really nice on our aio cooler and uh our 120 millimeter
radiators right up here in the top where it's got
clean access to exhaust there's actually this is a lot more open than it actually
looks like so i would expect cooling on this system to be quite strong
but check it out these are not cooled
that's true and then as usual dell's using just generic green pcb dimms like
you would get from well direct from micron overall
i am less disappointed than i was expecting as long as you have compatible
components and right now the motherboard and the power supply are big question
marks this is a standard atx-ish motherboard
standard atx-ish power supply and it is
easily user-serviceable if you wanted to add a hard drive or whatever the case
may be so the hp ordering experience
was a little bit unique
the invoice still didn't have a full spec list
it looks like yeah it looks like it is actually written on the side of the box
though so we're gonna get a better idea of what we're dealing with here very shortly um but was what was really
interesting is they put themselves at a disadvantage by canceling our order five
days after we placed it um and letting us know that the issue was that we used
hangouts to call and so the number didn't match our
credit card um after we resolved it though
the system was shipped the next day and so they still even with the five day
head start that they gave everybody else still managed to deliver the gaming
system to our door ready to be gamed on
first all right we get a
keyboard the mouse high quality the packing job they did
definitely gets extra points versus dell because while the quality of this
material is slightly lower like it's still a nice flexible foam
rather than the brittle kind it's packed in tight so once you close the flaps
there's no room for it to move around one
plug two push button
so our final spec 8th gen core i7 8700 non-k so it's going
to be about 1 10 the speed of the dell then 16 gigs RAM 256 gig NVMe SSD
a 2 terabyte hard drive uh
2x2 wi-fi and
holy crap hp
is putting themselves in a pretty good position here
to run away with this this is equipped with a gtx 1070
now the 1060 versus the 1070 is not a
small step up that k series processor that dell upsold
is going to have to have some serious performance benefits in order to
outweigh the improvement in GPU that we get with
our omen here oh that's nice
carbon fiber replica actually i'm liking their industrial design a little bit
better as well too so i don't know what the deal is with
the oh it's an optical drive includes an optical drive did the dell even include
an optical drive nope if we're not making other compromises
it's better to have it than to not have it this is a really interesting window
too they've got like this really dark tinting on the window
and i can actually just see through it i think we're going to get some nice illumination effects there
you can also see there's a couple of little extra steps they've taken with the chassis here
so powder coating now powder coating doesn't cost a lot but you can tell hp
spent the extra couple of bucks to make sure that even the back of their system
which you wouldn't normally look at is all black including the power supply
io's another strong point we've got an sd card reader uh two type c's
and two type a's along with our audio
the inside of the system looks a lot better too much more standard though so
there's no swing out and gain access to key components for upgrades or anything
like that and one place where hp is clearly behind
dell here is the case cooling configuration and CPU cooling so rather
than using a 120 millimeter exhaust to balance out the 120 millimeter intake at
the front uh hp is just using a mere 92
millimeter exhaust and what's really weird about that is
that it looks like it actually has
space for a 120 mil here they're using an adapter bracket
so that's a case of kind of spending 30 cents to save a
dollar from my experience because a 120 mil can doesn't cost that much more what
if they are going for positive case pressure on purpose that's possible but they could also just
order a case fan with a lower RPM that would solve the same problem
not weird hey mounting the adapter and then mounting a 92 mil fan to it
i've noticed that their graphics card while still an hp specific skew
i had an hp sticker here hp part number there
they've put a little bit of extra into making it more stylized so if you were
to ever open up your case you've got this graphic on the shroud you've got
this sort of like chromed GeForce gtx logo here and it uses a matte black pcb
which i'm always in favor of another interesting note is that the vrms again
have nice big heat sinks on them and in this case it's across all of them above
and to the side of the CPU socket still 16 gigs of RAM and there's our
NVMe SSD down there that looks like
another hp specific model it starts with an m and i see sec somewhere in there so
i'm guessing that's a samsung yeah it's a samsung model of some sort
and then there's our hard drive right there oh
yeah check that out damn we've got hot swap cages here
so you just well somehow presumably
really you guys ah there we go just slide it
very cool that's nice here there's your easy upgrades this is
just bonus dang hp
this is a good omen get it for the videos to come
okay so who's next ivan cyberpower yeah
very funny okay yeah so cyber power they wouldn't recommend a system so they were
booted from the running which means i know who's next it's going to be i buy power now this box
looks like it went through hell to get here this side really does look like
someone gave it a good quality side kick now did you notice that nobody asked us
like what kind of case we wanted i
don't think they actually had options though well normally isn't that kind of
like i buy power and cyber power stick well in this case
guy actually found the best system for
the budget and he'd never really asked about style because she didn't specify
either so the double-edged sword of having such
a wide variety of configs to offer your customers is that you have selection
but the disadvantage is that it's harder to
make a cohesive package out of your systems so we've just got
the box for the system in like a master carton that quite frankly
probably isn't giving it a much better chance of arriving intact
um than if it was just shipped without it because assuming that the shipper
adheres to the this side up sticker which you can see is right there then
yes this is actually quite a firm sort of eggshell carton style foam and it
would help with impact significantly but there's so much room for it to bang
around from side to side and i mean come on we've all seen the videos
let's see how our system did so we got a zeus e2 gaming mouse
and an aries e1 gaming keyboard with
spill resistance structure we've got a customer service line we can call and a
quick start guide well they already lied package includes
desktop tower gaming keyboard gaming mouse
nice high quality foam here though really soft but really strong
so our modular clearly evga power supply
that was included gets all the extra cables bundled up nicely for us in a
handy resealable bag little touches like that make a difference when you're
trying to upgrade your system three years down the line oh where did i
put all that stuff so we've clearly got an ASUS graphics
card MSI motherboard evga power supply they're all going to be brands that you
recognize again this is one of the challenges with having
any number of different case designs is you can't have custom packaging and you
can't have custom brackets to hold everything together in shipping so what
they've done is they've included this foam packaging material inside to
prevent your system from getting damaged and shipping you'll also notice that
these instructions are for this like ancient i think that's a raid max case
from like 15 years ago yeah they don't correspond to the way that you would
actually open this chassis it doesn't have screws at the back and you don't
need a screwdriver that's something that i really think they could do a better
job of for new users to their credit though we actually looked into using
these at ncix in the past and i had wanted to do it like if i recall
correctly these cost a couple bucks each about 450 450 there you go so that
adds a significant amount to the cost of a system but it's all about getting it
there in one piece for the buyer wow that is a very
bare bones looking system compared to our
our hp omen there so just like our alienware we've got better cooling for
the CPU but we've compromised on our cooling for
the CPU's vrm which may or may not matter because uh what CPU is actually
even in here this is actually a 9600 a 9600.
check whether it's kilo or not and remember they sold it to us before it
was launched so we actually reordered it that would probably explain why even
though this is a fairly simple build they still took what about 20 days to
deliver the final system now the thing is what happened in the middle is that
the psd were initially ordered was out of stock
so they gave us a free upgrade to the 750 unit really yeah
that's pretty good speaking of the power supply they've done a better job at the
back of making sure that you use the correct video port so alienware had
onboard video but didn't specify in their quick start guide where you should
plug your monitor into these guys say hey don't plug it in here and they've
got a sticker on the back to make sure that you don't plug in your system and
run it before you remove the foam insert because i've talked to sis before it's
like a big problem people just turning the system on and letting it cook
foam taking up the entire inside in spite of the kind of
bareness looking of it it's obviously modular and easily upgradable because it
uses all standard off the shelf components and they're all from quality
brands that i would trust so we've got MSI motherboard ASUS gtx 1070 graphics
card to go with that 9 series CPU data RAM
uh looks like 16 gigs of it Corsair liquid cooler evga power supply then
we've got a toshiba one terabyte drive for the back this thing is going to
shred when it comes to gaming performance and the processor is okay
the only drawback here is going to be that this is a SATA SSD
rather than an NVMe SSD and that might affect system responsiveness
but from my experience not much
okay i buy power's looking pretty good here
yeah that's a pretty poor application of that sticker
yeah i could have put a little more effort into that
uh i think it was origin before main gear right yes it's origin okay
so far the unboxing experience feels pretty special
but based on what i'm expecting about the specs of this machine it had better
be really special so they include what seems like a
reasonable quality mouse mat that's kind of nice to see
did they ask for shirt size yeah you get to pick you told them xl
that was janice
thanks janice so they actually benchmarked the system
some watsons in the bench yeah so they're assembled on one day qa
the next burning and ship on the third day interesting
450 watt silverstone power supply again recognizable brand names MSI motherboard
and this is interesting it's a core i5 8400 so what happened here was we've got
an 8 400 which they up sold us telling us it would be a lot better which of
course it would be but it didn't technically fit in our
budget so we resolved to benchmark this system both ways with what they upsold
us and with what they would have originally shipped and honestly given
that it they did send it with a gtx 1050 ti i'm not expecting it to improve much
remember this is a 1500 us dollar system
and this poster and what else you got over there uh scum
steam code a star trek vanguard starter pack
and shroud of the avatar steam code
along with call of duty black ops 4
still these better be some amazing games on that 1050 ti
very high quality foam credit to them for that and it was all
packed tightly within the outer box and
credit to origin their chronos is a sexy little machine
a sexy little machine that probably should have had some plastic peel stuff
on the front see that
oh boy origin pc
the thing with someone like origen is that we are paying a fair bit extra for
the custom chassis and it has some cool features so the chronos which we've
actually featured before has these magnetic feet so all you got to do is
move them and then you can have it in a tower configuration or a desktop configuration
and it is extremely compact so this is the smallest of the systems that we've
looked at today it looks like it has managed to stay in
position and because they're using a pci
express riser to install the graphics card
it doesn't seem to have come out yet
but given enough time this would cause a problem please tell
me we at least have 16 gigs of RAM all right
so cooling we've got an 80 ml in the front that goes directly over these
perforated two and a half inch cages for our solid state drive remember that is a
mere 120 gig solid state drive
quality components you got a silverstone sfx power supply here evga graphics MSI
motherboard kingston or hyperx memory with origin co-branding on it so this is
again your motherboard accessories your power cord your extra power supply
cables and any documentation that came with your parts also they throw in a usb
drive that's actually their recovery usb i believe okay that's a nice touch that
is a nice touch and it's 16 gigs and then you've got their own aio cooler
it's an asetek based unit though so it's just fine
to me the big disappointment was
that our unboxing experience was marred
by these these hand prints on our system
and that it seems like origin gave up a lot to have their custom chassis with
their fancy motherboard and ended up with a bit of a misspect system
like i would i wouldn't recommend this
to someone who's purely after gaming performance
this brings us finally to main gear pc
these guys were also right in that 20-ish day range
and they did a really excellent job of keeping us updated on the status of our
order throughout so after placing the order they said hey uh you know we've
got your order hey now your system's being kitted you know here's all the
parts that are picked hey it's assembled
hey it's shipped and bippity boppity here's our system so right now this is
kind of main gears competition to lose
because they definitely did the best job of the pre-sales experience and honestly
so far the packaging i'm feeling pretty good about as well this is a nice high
quality foam it's all packed nice and snugly within
the outer carton and there's a second
internal carton i think the odds of this getting damaged and shipping are quite
slim okay more solid packing materials really nice
foam wow these guys go all out
so they have also invested the uh what do you say it was about four dollars
into foaming up the inside of the system it's dangerous to go alone take this
cube
you can tell they actually used the actual system that i mean not the exact
one but the same configuration for their startup guide
also in here our invoice Windows recovery documents and accessories
resealable very nice got some motherboard
cables we've got case screws in case you ever want to upgrade then you've got a
pen and some sticker the keychain
coaster i'd say that's a b minus mouse pad it
doesn't have a stitched edge so it's going to fray more than the other one
abc plus they write you a little note on
the inside of your box enjoy Yvonne
all right before powering on you must first remove the packing foam inside
your computer no real instructions on how to do it though that's something
that i think i buy power for all the deficiencies in their instructions did a
better job of making clear so this seems mostly
designed to prevent the graphics card from moving around like clearly they
don't think the radiator is going to come off or anything like that so our
config in here is an interesting one we've got the best cooling for the CPU
out of any of our systems here we've got an overclockable CPU so that's a ryzen 5
2600x we've got 16 gigs of RAM non-expandable unfortunately but then
we've got a gtx 1060. Intel SSD and then
we've also got a seagate barracuda one terabyte drive for our games down in the
bottom i'm expecting the system to perform decently but any points that
main gear gained during the ordering process they are probably going to end
up losing in gaming performance nothing against AMD but this CPU is not going to
perform as well as our Intel based machines in that particular application
and our gtx 1060 well let's just say we
probably would have been better off spending our dual radiator money on a 1070 and
putting a stock cooler on it maybe the benchmarks will tell the whole
story so that's it then
ordering process and initial impressions complete
let us know in the comments below who you think is going to be coming out
ahead in our secret shopper showdown next up
is going to be customer support how do they handle it if the system doesn't
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