Was Alienware REALLY Better Before Dell?

[@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 :)

[@Yinzzy656]

Yes

[@Unpar_Guki]

I was shocked to see 1000w power supply. Thanks for the info!

[@aaronbrook]

You would be a very neat person to interview about your experience! Thanks for sharing!

[@marcogenovesi8570]

@@Unpar_Guki yeah not even servers had 1000w PSUs back then

[@hellmalm]

Yes, I want to see that as well!

[@nsf001-3]

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

[@darkhueman]

Better than dell shipping

[@SolidMikeP]

My thoughts exactly

[@CodeKokeshi]

Lmao 😂

[@Milan_M95]

@@darkhueman dell stuff just arrives with pcie slot broken off lol

[@puzl3r_ttv]

no doubt

[@richardhessinger4933]

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

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Standard ATX case and even decent airflow. Lets do it!

[@patpatboy2]

I've wanted to do that for years, but those old Alienware cases are both expensive, and huge. I can't justify the price, and I don't have anywhere to put it 😭😭😭

[@Neonflame]

Yea! that sounds awesome, and it would actually be awesome! It would be a true to its nature modern alienware, and not whatever Dell is doing

[@Zebra_Paw]

same

[@gamamew]

Also not forget to upgrade that DVD for BluRay one

[@MelodicMizeryPs3Vids]

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

[@raven4k998]

Dell Ruined Alienware rest in peace Alienware rest in peace😭😭😭😭😭

[@Bovafett]

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

[@DawidDoesTechStuff]

Yeah, way better. 👍

[@AimingAtYou]

@@DawidDoesTechStuff They were never worth the price tag.

[@kiillabytez]

@@AimingAtYou I always thought they were Apple level of overpriced.

[@FlipLoLz]

Literally nothing but overpriced parts you could get anywhere with a tacky looking case. If you showed up to a LAN with one, you got dogged on pretty harsh. But I grew up working-class, so maybe the rich kids had a different perspective on them.

[@kiillabytez]

@@FlipLoLz Personally, I always thought they were overpriced, and to make matters worse, they had ONLY the best parts in them so even if they weren't overpriced, you'd still have to fork over a lot of money to own one. No budget builds from Alienware back then.

[@LifeofBoris]

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

[@LuciusVulpes]

For Post-Soviet eastern bloc countries this Alienware was probably considered top of the line technology in the mid 2010's.

[@he1di_]

​@@LuciusVulpes 💀💀💀

[@Aaron48219]

BORIS! Stay cheeki breeki!

[@Shawn_the_Protogen]

I remember seeing these back in the day, begging my dad to buy me one for my birthday. Sadly, I was stuck with my Toshiba Satellite A20 until about 2009 when I got a new desktop that I ran until 2021 when I finally got enough money saved up to buy a Xidax prebuilt.

[@fantomlimbs]

Me too, but at the end of the day I built a better computer for half the price and couldn't justify spending double on a case and a name.

[@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

[@chinesepopsongs00]

Even a Q6600 would have been a huge upgrade and probely enough for the gt8800 i used my Q6600 up to the gtx660ti.

[@scvic2006]

I was going to suggest that but you beat me to it.

[@matthewjbauer1990]

You'd need to check if the motherboard can support a C2 Quad Extreme. It might not be worth it on this system. I'd still like to see a system utilizing a C2 Quad Extreme though.

[@Mirra2003-f9s]

A Q9400 and a 750ti would be enough for this. If he were to get a Quad Extreme he would probably end up paying way more than it's worth because people tend to overprice the extreme series knowing collectors and enthusiasts are looking for them

[@thadoggma]

A qx6700 is about 40 bucks these days. I'm sure it would help enough to justify the cost.

[@queden1841]

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

[@tv321123]

The 'dell' generation 1 Area 51; the successor to this. was one of the best case designs in terms of airflow, the design, build quality.

[@SolidMikeP]

Great vid, had a pc like this in highscool after an entire summer of working about 200 hrs mixing concrete in the hot sun …it showed up and it was dead, completely fried by something..after a break down on the level of losing a loved one, I got one 3 weeks later and never looked back. Yesterday I bought the Alienware aurora 16…just to have for some casual gaming….loved this vid

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

Dawids having adult feelings for a computer again🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[@Lurker1222]

I worked for Alienware from 03 through 04, before the Dell take over. This was before the big building opened and we had 2 smaller warehouses. I worked for the RMA department. We had good times and I can honestly say that at THAT time, pretty much everyone was a gamer/nerd. Even in manufacturing. They were trained well and from everything I saw every computer was made with care. I can't speak for anything after 04. I dismantled so many of those old heavy AW towers and I can't really saw I ever saw any defects in the manufacturing of them PCs. All in all it was good times. We worked hard but it was normal for a small company.

[@fireshorts5789]

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.

[@euanroy4673]

Core 2 quads are still amazingly useable for light computing even on windows 11, I run an old Fujitsu SFF pc with a Q6600, 8gb DDR2 and a 128gb SSD and it breezes through day to day computing

[@Romess1]

Intel Skulltrail called

[@Snakeplisskin440]

And they could be overclocked so far.

[@TurboVisBits]

i had a qx6850? something obsecure like that and it was an incredible chip. Got it like 3-4 years after release in some dell precision workstation.

[@therealnambro]

@@euanroy4673 Hmmm I have an old Q6600 laying around, maybe I should pair it with a few GPUs and see what the limitations are in 2023/2024! Perhaps paired with a GT 730, Radeon 5670, and RX 570 for the top end

[@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.

[@Gatorade69]

Falcon Northwest. They were the two big names, and then VoodooPC.

[@proscriptus]

@@Gatorade69 oh wow, Falcon!

[@hydrobud89]

iBuyPower was around back then too

[@WayStedYou]

Ibuypower falcon northwest, a bunch of other ones that have since gone defunct, alienware just spent big on advertising and flashy cases to make them stand out

[@Staren01]

@@Gatorade69 Yeah Falcon was the dream, but you could almost afford an Alienware.

[@ericjodoin7682]

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.

[@BoPunk]

Any voltage discrepancies would have resulted in crashes immediately. I'm with you though... the 680i SLI boards of the era had leaky caps. Good looking out!

[@DawidDoesTechStuff]

Oh dayum, nice spot. The mobo ram like a champ but it’s good to be aware of. 👍

[@aaldrich1982]

​@@DawidDoesTechStuffjust to recap, you should recap

[@Lampe2020]

@@aaldrich1982XD

[@atlasfugged9044]

yeah im surprised that thing even posted lmao

[@EpicATrain]

You can't just slam a modern graphics card in an old system and expect it to have the Jesus Effect (walk on water). The motherboard uses an older PCIe protocol that won't even remotely make use of the graphics card's performance.

[@chrisy2617]

blah blah blah its still funny to see the big funny gtx 69420 gpu in ur grandpas gaming rig

[@XTRLFX]

Depends on your expectations. I placed an RX 6500 XT with only 4 PCIe lanes in a PC with an i7 3770 replacing a cheap ass Radeon Pro. This thing is perfect for light games now. Way better than what most people would say. The GPU might perform better with more recent PCIe interfaces, but for the games my kid plays that doesn't matter. The PC in this video is simply limited too much by the dual core CPU. Doen't really matter much what GPU you pair it with.

[@acev3521]

There’s literally no difference between pcie 1.0 and 4.0 when it comes to gaming performance

[@Swarm509]

I remember playing with a guy (adult) as a teen that got some of the first Alienware machines. He was a pilot in real life and could afford them, and has bought nothing else since (I keep up with him on social media). Him getting an Alienware and playing at max settings, and hosting games for us, was such a flex.

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

at what point do I give up I love it🤣🤣

[@Fk-403]

making a sleeper build out of this would be pretty interesting

[@guczy]

If Dawid doesn't do this I'm unsubbing

[@thecaybob1]

You can't make a sleeper out of an old Alienware.....I'm sorry, those are still great cases....

[@--_DJ_--]

I don't think anyone looking at that case is going to expect anything but a performance PC of some sort.

[@robertkeaney9905]

@@thecaybob1 With an Dremel, and some super glue you can make a sleeper out of anything. If you can sleeper an toilet. Then you can sure as hell sleeper that.

[@CaveyMoth]

It would be..wouldn't you say..out of this world?

[@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.

[@Swarm509]

Falcon Northwest is a name I haven't heard in an age. I remember going through the PC Gamer mags lusting over them and the Alienware's. Had to look them up and it seems they still build PC's which is crazy.

[@anonymous5401]

last good case they even had was the aurora r4

[@Soniti1324]

Falcon Northwest... God...! It felt like such an important company as a kid, but I don't see ANYTHING about them anymore..!

[@DanielSzweda]

@@Soniti1324 JayzTwoCents did a video about them recently called: Prebuilt PC companies should take notes...

[@robd6090]

Their laptops pre-dell were trash. I RMA'd a $3,800 laptop and the graphics card was shot. They replaced it and 5 months later it was dead again. They refused to warranty it and offered to sell me just the graphics card for $1,800. The laptop bag was super nice though, and I still use it almost 20 years later.

[@herbertholland924]

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.

[@lucasrem]

on Area 51x still some upgrades only i found a good Alienware build again, intel 14700 F RTX 4070 Ti Just a water block in a normal PC, that is on ATX parts. Found the Case, DELL Vostro model, good !

[@drek9k2]

In fairness Dell actually *used to* not completely and totally suck; that was HP. It may not have been Gateway, which was some of the best mainstream consumer family PCs, but it actually at least didn't suck mostly until later. Like I can still actually slot stuff around my 2012 era XPS, it's not a great build but you can actually still reuse each piece of that PC in something else, from the PSU to RAM to GPU the only part that was proprietary was the shitty ass BIOS which was locked down and the install locked to BIOS so you pretty much had to reinstall Windows with a new key to pray you could find a hacked BIOS that didn't brick it, otherwise the Dell motherboard while not proprietary connectors did indeed still fucking suck, and I can well imagine if even if you do find a way of overclocking on that crap board you'd have just blown the VRMs. After saying that, i am however still SHOCKED at how bad the fucking trash fire that "alienware" Dell gaming PCs are which are quite literally the same build quality as my old family PC from 12 years ago, right down to the fan and VRMs. I can't fucking believe they even use those VRMs. And everything is so much worse now. I mean, Dell used to make ok stuff on XPS, but made it so much worse garbage over the previous decade it's literally ewaste that's not nearly worth it even for scalped parts. The sole remaining pieces of a Dell worth a damn is CPU and sort of GPU and even then "repurposed Dell GPU" is absolute bottom of the fuckin barrel, like if I'd buy a used xx80ti on ebay for $800, I would refuse to pay more for it than like $650 if it's a Dell. So you're not even gonna be able to part out your old Dell PC. The only reason these companies keep getting away with this shit is literally consumer ignorance, stupidity, and complacency. I would not buy most new laptop due to soldered on RAM and soldered on SSD. But back in that day you could get not just ball soldered but actually replaceable CPUs on laptops. It was amazing, and Dell used to be those. Now? Yeah Dell laptops are absolute garbage. Ironically, the shit you find on craigslist is probably worth about the same as an old af Inspiron vs a brand new shittop just because that old ass quadro 3000 probably games fine and can be tinkered with and is reliable, the new Dell is NOT going to be reliable in fact if you bought it used it's probably gonna die in about 3 months, even though the 10 yo Dell Inspiron still works fine.

[@TheCanadianGuy56]

God I wish they still did cases like this, honestly absolutely love the look, it's almost like a futuristic helmet for an alien, proper sci-fi type armor, so much charm and character.

[@GenDrag1]

13:06 “today we’re gonna drop a twin turbo hellcat motor in a fisher price kiddy cart”

[@theshadowking3198]

CPUs probably like WTF ‼️

[@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.

[@jponz85]

How? Lol...

[@KafarekMarek]

probably some noname PSU @@jponz85

[@bligh1156]

Probably blame Todd.

[@jesusbarrera6916]

It just works

[@Mirra2003-f9s]

Nvidia cards from that series/period used to fail a lot

[@tommyrockstar100]

I picked up a 2004/2005 model Alienware desktop from a charity shop for only £40 and getting it home and opening it up i found out it was factory water cooled from Alienware with a AMD Athlon 64 FX-57, The fastest single core CPU to be released and stupidly rare. It was also in SLI mode with 2 8800GT's. The best find ive ever had and king of my collection

[@HenrySomeone]

The 88000 GTs must have been a later upgrade, they only came out in late 2007.

[@tommyrockstar100]

@@HenrySomeone oh good to know thank you, yeah came with two of them both with green goblins on them haha

[@marcusellby]

@@HenrySomeone And in 2007/2008 that FX-57 must've bottlenecked that system so hard.

[@DenverStarkey]

@@marcusellby taht's what i'm thinking mysef , in 2007 the core duo and the amd dual cores were king cpu's single cores were choking unles you played 2006 and earlier games . by 2008 intela dn amd were both rolling out quad cores.

[@edmac1090]

I had an Alienware in 2005, and a girl I was interested in at the time walked into my room, saw it, and said, and I quote: “oh you’re not a gamer, right? Gamers are groady.” I said that I bought the PC for photo editing and went out with her for a month. It wasn’t worth it.

[@LordSchnoz]

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.

[@nahventure3873]

I was using something similar to you too for a good while, but at some point I think 2012-2013 I grabbed a samsung syncmaster that had DVI and it was 1080p so there went my stuff. I wasn't into gaming and half the time used on board GPU for this.

[@Whyteeford]

I remember when i got that feeling going from a Geforce 2 GTS, to the MX480... For reference, shaders only started in the Geforce 3 series...so from the G2 GTS to a 4 series was INSANE. The use of shaders was the biggest leap in graphics ive ever experienced

[@Agm1995gamer]

I had a 720p monitor at least until 2015

[@FakieFSflip]

​@Agm1995gamer what u up grade to? Been on 720 for so long never thought much of it until I started playing halo infinite pvp. As of last week iv been using 1080p but still getting only 60fps & sniping became so much easier. Once i get my hands on some precious 120fps I'll b the best player in the game. Literally.

[@Whyteeford]

@@FakieFSflip you've been on 720p....in 2024?

[@estebansevilla2229]

When the first 1000watts PSUs were used, 3 of them caused a partial site blackout because the call center was in an old warehouse in Costa Rica. They used to have the best intuitive tech support agents and could guide anyone through anything. After Dell bought it, well, that changed over time. There were a lot of geniuses working back then. I remember when this one came out, there was a water cooled version I think, and it was amazing, we would just leave them open at the fishtank for everyone to see. Never managed to play with an ALX tho, there was only one at R&D. I'd still go for a self assembled, prices were too steep to just buy any AW.

[@krullexneo]

I used to have a E6600 & Gainward 1GB 8800GT. That machine was incredible at the time. Most 8800GT had 512mb but having the 1GB version really made a difference. I miss that PC. Still got the CPU, GPU and RAM somewhere...

[@vash_dakari]

I have an Alienware circa 2000-something PD (pre Dell). The case is exactly the same as this one, but in black; just another steel box with a fancy facade. Sadly, the motherboard died on me when one of the resisters popped while playing heavily modded Skyrim. I've kept it around as sweet decor though, because let's be honest, it was always about the case design. Edit: Working from home today, and after looking at other responses, I decided to pull out ye old Alienware binder (iykyk) to look at my original invoice. The year was 2006, I had just graduated college and had my first REAL job. Pay off loans? Naaaaah.... Buy stupid PC you've drooled over for too many years? YES! Specs: Aurora 7500-R4 NForce 590 SLI board Athlon 64 FX-62 (AM2) CPU (1 MB of L2 cache per core at 2.8 GHz) 1GB DDR2 PC-6400 (800mhz) RAM 2x250GB Raid-0 HDDs Soundblaster X-Fi (you gotta have a sound card, right?) Dual eVGA GeForce 7950 GT's in SLI (combining for 1GB of VRAM!) 700-watt PSU Total: $3,615 To this day, it remains the most expensive PC I've ever owned, and my last pre-built too. Survived until 2012, so cost breakdown came to about $1.65 per day; could have been worse. It's okay to be young and dumb kids, just learn from your mistakes!

[@gowron277a]

Probably wouldn't be to hard to replace a resistor.

[@Rippedyanu1]

sounds like the case would be worth making a sleeper out of

[@Pasi123]

And in late 2006 the 8800 GTX was released and was faster than your two 7950 GT's in SLI. It's crazy how big generational improvements in CPUs and GPUs there was in the mid to late 2000s. Nowadays a 6 year old GTX 1080 Ti can still compete with cards like the RTX 3060 and RTX 4060

[@wisico640]

Those old specs god me drooling with the dual HDD & GPU 😂 But please build a sleeper out of this, itx standard hardware, it shouldn't be hard. Just make sure ti get a fitting heatsink for the cpu not to kill the PSU with the classic psu at the top 😊

[@michaelwalsh3474]

Try to save it. It's a antique at this point. Even if for the aesthetic alone.

[@MlemDotaPersonal]

Would have very much enjoyed seeing a Core 2 Quad dropped in to see how much it helped performance. Q9450 has a slightly more modern instruction set on top of the extra cores I believe :)

[@knerduno5942]

Can get Q9650s for dirt cheap now. They ran over $100 until maybe couple of years ago.

[@dazzlernator]

Would a Q9450 even run in this system? The Q6600/Q6700 sounds more like it would work in this machine.

[@knerduno5942]

The BIOS would probably need an update to run. On my HP system I had to do that,

[@ReelBigMike]

0:04 That might be the single worst butchering of the last name Aguila I've ever seen.

[@DOSESR1]

Aguilia **

[@AndrewPrinster]

Nice to see this video on the old Alienware. I've got that same case in blue next to me with all new guts. I bought it in 2008 and still love it.

[@joester4life]

I loved my Alienware Aurora DDR. The year Doom 3 came out with the Radeon 9700 Pro?

[@sephirotic87]

You should disable spectre and meltdown mitigations when testing old cpus, that gives a lot of performance back to those old cpu. Kudos to making that 4090 work in that old CPU, when I tried modern gpus on a c2q before I had all sort of weird issues with the motherboard.

[@BadMothaKalashnikov]

Alienware usually used high end Motherboards from ASUS. Most of the issues with using newer GPUs on older systems stems from OEM Motherboards like crap Dell uses today and has been using for 20 years, junk.

[@savagej4y241]

@@BadMothaKalashnikov Back when I used to refurbish computers, the company got a donation of a GTX 570 circa 2016, and we got it running on an OEM Dell mobo from 2011 no problem with Win10. They ran in-era GPU's better than most think.

[@ZeroEight]

I had a black case of this Alienware, and used the case for several builds after wards, very upgradable. I can attest to the car paint finish on it.

[@Dtr146]

I miss my 7500 case. When I was younger I found a 7500 missing the motherboard side panel out on the road and the components in it were completely trashed. I spent months trying to get that thing to work as my daily driver. I just wasn't experienced enough back then

[@crowse3200]

I had one of these for years. Those pre-dell systems are just nostalgic af. I still have the gutted case next to me right now and the original confirmation email with the original components :D

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

so start a new Alienware company to make epic cool computers learn from Alienware there is that niche market for you to make and sell cool computers

[@reptilez13]

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.

[@n646n]

How would running two OSs at the same time help the CPU??? Just install an older OS lol wtf

[@reptilez13]

@@n646n I think thought there was a reason he couldn't just run a single install of XP or something. Like the games list not having a single version of windows he could use, but idfk it was a month ago.

[@Slamraptor]

The most common resolution was 1280x1024 back then.

[@hoerthproductions2521]

Didn't Alienware also come up with a concept curved CRT monitor?

[@justanotheryoutubechannel]

@@hoerthproductions2521I believe they showed off a DLP rear-projection curved monitor that used 4 projected screens to form a curved monitor. They didn’t actually make the monitor, but licensed it and showed it off. It was very thick so everyone thought it was a CRT but it was actually DLP rear projection.

[@seanripperger]

That beautiful old case deserves new internals. Rebuild it like an old hot rod, everything that made it neat then with everything that makes it powerful now. Loved the video.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

There are RTX 4090 models with under 250mm length, and the system uses standard ATX parts and has decent airflow. So getting new parts in shouldn't be an issue. probably a 5800X3D with a 4080 or 6750 XT or something like that.

[@Sirikiller]

This guy deserves a Core 2 quad for its effort to run GTA 5

[@kytoober5137]

For what little I knew... Yes! I bought a custom build Xeon box from them pre- Dell and the thing was a monster. I wasn't using it for gaming but 3D animation. It sounded like a jet engine but handled just about everything I could throw at it... Near million Poly scene with simulated water rendering with raytracing and running another instance of Maya at the same time? Wouldn't slow down from what I could recall... I will say the hard drives mine had were 10,000rpm drives.

[@Phishsamich]

I have that case and it's running its 4th internals. Also there is a board with DIP switches that you can change the LED colors that are intergraded into the case.

[@J03130]

i wanna see what happens if you put something like a Q6600 in there with the 8800gtx. that was the dream setup in like 2007.

[@BoPunk]

Q6600 overclocked to 3.6ghz was easy back then lol 👍

[@EvilTurkeySlices]

two 8800 gtx

[@406Steven]

I had a Q6600 OC'ed to 3.4 (air cooled) and an 8800 GT, I thought I was hot stuff for about 6 months before it all got completely obsoleted. I ran that system albeit with a newer GPU until 2016 and threw it out a little over a year ago. All the retro stuff I've been watching lately has me really kicking myself for that!

[@singledad1313]

@@406Steven That is almost the same setup I ran at the time except I had a 8800 GTX. I never could get my Q6600 to be stable above 3.6 so I backed it down to 3.5 and left it there. That PC, The Beast, was in an Antec 900 case, used a Gigabyte GA-965P motherboard, and had 8GB of DDR 2 RAM. I thought about trying out two 8800 GTS in SLI but for some reason I never did. Originally I built that rig to play Crysis.

[@406Steven]

@@singledad1313 Awesome! I had mine in my old Chenming full tower (chieftec dragon wannabe) and put it together because I was finally making some money and was excited about multicore CPUs. I wanted to build something "buy once cry once" and, aside from the GPU and storage, I got 9 years out of it! SLI was cool but expensive for the cards, expensive for a board that could handle it well, and back then power supplies that could keep up we're also spendy. It was cool seeing 6600 GT and 7600 GT setups as giant killers but each game had to be written specifically to take advantage of SLI--as lazy as game companies are now it'll unfortunately never come back.

[@doodskie999]

I remember I was a 14 year old nerd and crying to my parents to buy me this model. Short story, they didnt. Now I have my own job and family and gaming pc, this model still brings me memories lol

[@peanutbutterdijonnaise]

It was absolutely worth the hype but ultimately it was just like any other PC : even if it’s faster it will be obsolete sooner than you can imagine.

[@doodskie999]

@@peanutbutterdijonnaise ikr? Im still grateful though they didnt spoil me. I had to work my ass off to build my dream build what I have today

[@peanutbutterdijonnaise]

@@doodskie999 lol I can attest it was fun but not as fun as building your own for sure

[@atomiq911]

That's psychological damage, we all have a little bit of that, and because of those things that didn't materialize we buy things like crazy, i've spent $3K on a Sony Vaio now collector's machine that i couldn't get back in 2003.

[@doodskie999]

@@atomiq911 that might be true, but I take it as a valuable lesson that we cant have everything we want when we want it. Now that I got adult money, I can buy what I want lol. Now the only problem is finding enough time to play my damn games 🙁

[@fanta7266]

I think why stuff was taking so long to load (even with a SSD) is that system using IDE instead of AHCI. AHCI was launched on 2004 and became standard by most MOBOs (newer MOBOs doesn't even have IDE option). It can be changed on the BIOS (need to boot on Safe Mode on Windows after enableing it, then disabling Safe Mode), but I'm not sure if that system does support it or not.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Transfer rate in IDE mode shouldn't be any lower than in AHCI mode. Some features will be missing, but those aren't really relevant for SSDs as OS drive anyway.

[@olnnn]

6GB RAM may also be a bit borderline.

[@NascarRacingFan5]

I wonder if running native OS would improve the performance. Since windows 10 is a much heavier os than Vista and 7 were

[@kevinmonzel]

Would replacing vintage thermal paste fix cpu bottle neck?

[@Napostriouf]

Hi! At that era, CPU were more heavily dependant to RAM than they are today. So, if you overclock your CPU, I highly recommend to take a OCZ Gold ram kit with very low latency and normal speed (1066 mhz). You'll have about almost no stutter, despite getting a similar amount of FPS. The reason is because at that time, RAM had disastrous time response at high speed.

[@alanhaigh9682]

Ocz memory was so tricky to get working sometimes. Often having to put other memory in first to increase voltage etc. Just madness.

[@AlfaPro1337]

Intel P4D and C2 are basically today's Zen. They were glued (according to AMD), and higher latency. AMD has 0 innovation.

[@spaceli0n]

cool story bro @@AlfaPro1337

[@aleks138]

gotta get them d9gmh chips

[@nothingelse1520]

Back in the day I had a friend who went through 3 different sets of bad OCZ RAM till he just asked for a refund and never used their products ever again. His horror story scared me off of ever giving them my money.

[@derangel9143]

I loved that era of hardware so much. Everything felt so exciting, everyone competing on even footing and making huge strides year-to-year. The C2Ds (and C2Qs, of course) were incredible CPUs and, in my opinion, it was the greatest era of Intel processors. The 8800 GTX was such a beast of a card for when it came out and worth every penny.

[@savagej4y241]

I used to refurbish computers, IMO the later Athlon 64 X2's and dual/quad core Phenoms tended to proportionally be snappier after fresh installs, even on Windows 7. Any singular reason across hundreds of systems eluded me, but my guess- going sans overclocking gimped this era of Intel processors. 1st gen Core i was the greatest leap IMO, those are still usable processors even today and set the stage for total domination until Ryzen released.

[@Mycatisinapiano]

This is my favorite channel right now! I'm not sure why but your videos are just so well made!

[@cosminmilitaru9920]

Yup! This and Underground Gaming in HD are the most satisfying to watch channels. And for more advanced tech stuff AdamantIT.

[@thesingingchild]

​@@cosminmilitaru9920you mean random gaming in hd?

[@captante9889]

Same here .... I like that I always seem to be in a better mood after watching one as well! 🙂

[@techknowIogic]

He's just a neat guy

[@RE4PER]

His videos are the perfect combination of funny, informative, and nerdy.

[@batsai]

Love the trip down memory lane. It makes me sad what happened to Alienware- these machines were the stuff of my dreams back in the day. Great video as always Dawid!

[@jeffstrains4014]

I agree! That was a HL2 playing machine there ha

[@tmb5120]

the joy that hearing the words, 8 pin to arson connector, brought me, is simply not comprehensible. INCONCIEVEABLE

[@Sgt_SealCluber]

That case has downright amazing airflow for the time, especially for a prebuilt. I mean the front fan actually has places to pull air from! 🤣

[@HearthingTV]

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.

[@BadMothaKalashnikov]

Yes it scaled very well over time. When I first played it at launch, it ran fine on the systems we had, however we could only run it on Monitors using 1280x1024.

[@CoolKoon]

Indeed it was, most games didn't come even close to that for many years in fact.

[@TheApatheticGuy]

It's hard to overstate how much of a technical marvel HL2 was when it came out. My mind was blown left and right when I played it in 2004.

[@DuBstep115]

@@TheApatheticGuy Same as half life alyx, now 4 years has passed and nothing comes close. I recon another 4 years will pass at will feel and look just as astonishing

[@need2burn]

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.

[@oldschooldude8370]

I still use a 9800gtx+ It was a gts250 for less. The 1gb 250 got a board redesign. All specs the same aside from power consumption on the 1gb 250

[@ManicMaximus]

Thanks for the nostalgia. I was definitely reading PC Gamer at the time, speccing out my own first build; a Core 2 Duo and Dual GTX260s!

[@alexkindl861]

Since you were looking at the alienware build, I noticed the cpu temps were always around 62C - 64C. Was afterburner bugging out, or was the cooling very good?

[@jamafett]

I've missed your humor, glad you're back and hope you enjoyed your holiday

[@Oblivion48]

I really missed your classic prebuild videos. Just from the thumbnail I knew this was going to be an instant classic

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

I wonder how cool would a gtx 8800 run with an RTX 4090's cooler🤣🤣

[@Halterung01]

- buys 16 year old PC - installs Windows 10 - could not have seen CPU bottleneck coming

[@adsr14]

I’m 1,000,000,000,000% sure he saw that coming

[@Halterung01]

@@adsr14 and I am positive he semi-successfully chickened out of installing a proper OS for that setup because Windows 10 is all he knows how to handle :P

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

@@Halterung01While that was prime Vista time, more people would've been on XP. And 7 would be more appropriate as well.

[@TravisPeterson-s1k]

@@Halterung01 In 2011-2012 I had a Compaq Presario with 4GB of ram that came with windows 7. I used to play league of legends and raid on WoW. On WoW I had to install Windows XP on it and disable explorer.exe and basically every service that I didn't need even disabling audio. I had around 13-15 processes running before opening anything total and even on 800x600 lowest possible custom config files leveling up I'd rarely get above 30 FPS. 25 man garrosh I'd get 2-5 screenshots constantly. Ended up beating all of Normal raids for the expansion and up until the Juggernaut right after the flying grasshoppers near the boat dock I don't remember their names. 10 man DPS I'd have to stay in goofy spots and rarely got above 15 FPS =( I wasn't carried either I did the most in my guild every raid boss basically with a BM hunter. Yeah he should have honestly installed Windows 7 or something maybe even XP if it supported it.

[@matthewjbauer1990]

He knew what was coming. That said, He probably should have installed Vista on that system to be more period correct. If he wanted to save on resources, should have installed XP as that was offered as a downgrade on these systems.

[@DaGaJbmKojJe]

I remember downloading Alienware windows 7 theme as a kid thinking it'll make my PC as fast as those Alienware PCs

[@joester4life]

I loved their wallpapers.

[@HexMagmus]

My first alienware Desktop was one of these but in Black. It looked amazing. I hated the power button location considering id accidentally bump into it all the time. It also had some power issues and gave me trouble after a little over a year. Since then I’ve owned an alienware laptop and currently an R12 while I wait for my R15 to arrive. My first was my worst experience but every one after has been excellent.

[@GreenCthulhu]

Awesome video. We won an Aeon Flux Alienware laptop. I played devil may cry 2 on it all the time and it lasted for years before biting the dust. I remember seeing this exact pc you reviewed at circuit city back in the day. I wanted to take out a small loan to buy it but, wasn't allowed. Alas, the nostalgia here is palpable. Cheers 🍻

[@cueball981]

Yay! You guys are back! Hope you had a nice time off for holiday!

[@macross101292]

It would have been fun to try the tests with a core 2 Quad to see what it could do.

[@noizephaser]

03:51 I see 4 blown electrolytic capacitors on motherboard (that round black things with leaked electrolyte on top near nvidia cooler) that should be replaced with same mF values and slightly bigger Voltage. In this state (if not being replaced) CPU is slower if You turn this on risking potencial damage to other components.

[@Catonzo]

Maybe my lack of understanding is shining through.. but wouldn't things like the memory also matter in the performance? The CPU may be running at 100%, but is it truly chewing through data optimally if it is being fed in slow latency?

[@Sokenro]

I’d love to see you upgrading the cpu in that build.

[@sly_botts1189]

I think running this system on vista and testing games from 2004 to 2009 would give you the best performance accuracy for the time. Especially when overclocking. Nice video

[@sly_botts1189]

Also at 1280x1024 or 1024x768 resolution.

[@nukedathlonman]

Well, sure the CPU is struggling - but you're also dealing with PCIe 1.0 and SATA 2 (1.5mbit, or roughly a max peak of 300mb/s), etc. So it did quite well for a 16 year old system - a little better than I thought it would do. But it's a nice piece of history, and very nice to see how good of shape it is in. So now you have a choice - leave it as is, that is as a nice collectable relic from the forgotten past. Or you need to hot rod it (which looks easy to do) - nice modern mobo, insane CPU, etc - keep it looking like a relic, but give it the chops of a modern system. I say hot rod it! 😁

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

He will miss out on hotplug and NCQ, but that shouldn't be an issue for SSDs anyway. There are no rotating platters with heads that need to be aligned smart for higher transfer rates and he isn't planning to unplug the SSD while the system is running. The thing that would help it the most (besides SSD) is probably a faster CPU. Optimally a quad core. A Q6600 should be each to find, but the 45nm quads will be faster and oc higher. Or even better, LGA771 Xeons. They can be found for much cheaper than the Q9000 chips and clock just as well. If he gets a X5450 or X5460 he should be able to get 4 GHz as long as the board can drive the FSB high enough.

[@frank234561]

​@@HappyBeezerStudios​Just slap a modern board in it. 😂

[@nukedathlonman]

@elcactuar3354 Fixed... Thanks!

[@Pasi123]

@@frank234561 That would be extremely boring.

[@TheBattleRabbit860]

I had one of those big green machines, and this brought back a lot of memories. Loved that thing.

[@Geoffwhite18]

those cases were so cool. i wonder if someone could do a modern build in one. they are big enough.

[@benedeklippai0203]

Instead of upgrading the gpu, what can you do by upgrading the cpu?

[@TubaraoCK6]

i’m 28 & have owned 2 laptops & an ipad. I don’t even know how to work a PC but I watch dawid & nod along to all the tech lingo

[@randomcrap7682]

Fun fact about those old EVGA cards (or at least the one I had) : You can just sort of peel off the EVGA branding and just have a basic nvidia card.

[@justanotheryoutubechannel]

I’m flabbergasted that the RTX4090 even worked, I kinda figured the rest of the computer just wouldn’t support it since it’s so ancient.

[@SeeDIfRiT]

I still have the old green beast . Currently it’s set up as living room pc to just stream stuff on the tv easier

[@altguardian]

What a blast from the past! I used to have an Alienware Aurora from the same year with that same case in the same color; it was my first ever gaming PC before I started building them myself. The Aurora was the AMD variant of the Area51 - mine had a Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (3GHz), 4GB DDR2 (everyone told me 4GB was total overkill back in the day, ha), and two 512MB 8800GT in SLI. I also had the same all-black 1000W PSU - opting for the dual 8800GT forced that 1000W PSU option when building it. Just like this system, the CPU was the bottleneck for pretty much everything. Some games I played on it back in the day (like Aion and WoW) ended up running better with SLI disabled on a single card due to the extra CPU overhead and SLI microstutter anyways, haha. Crysis at max settings with that system was a sight to behold at the time though, especially at 1080P. At least, it was until I ran out of VRAM and everything devolved into a slideshow, which didn't take too long. haha. Good times.

[@carlosesturain3831]

That’s a beast of a system.

[@toast180]

You should try finding a Q6600 G0 stepping, these were overclocking beasts back in the day and modern games might actually utilize those extra cores well. A good one of those puppies would OC to a good 3.4-3.8 Ghz easily and compete with the high end Q9450 and Q9550. Core2Duo OC'ing was so much fun.

[@hoffman5982]

Q6600 was the only c2q cpu compatible with my Dell XPS 410 which came with a c2d. What a huge upgrade that was, plus some super rigged way of allowing me to overlock made that system super fast at the time.

[@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

[@skivvywaver]

I have a core 2 quad 6600 that I think would fit right in that board. I wonder what it would cost to mail it to you?

[@boostergold9160]

Looks like a shiny old Buick. BTW is that case configuration ATX or BTX?

[@real_drops]

I bought one with an i7 950, tri-chanel RAM and a HD 5870 - still can remember that I was really impressed at the time by the massive monster which got delivered on a pallet ;) Funny thing is that I now kind of would be interested in buying it back just to see how it performs 14 years later - or even to just use the case and add modern hardware to it

[@Pasi123]

X58 systems still perform decently in many games but the CPUs don't have AVX or AVX2 so some modern games won't start. And the HD 5870 has DX11 so it can still run some modern games that don't require DX12. My main PC is still a custom built X58 system with a X5670 6c/12t @ 4.4GHz, 24GB RAM, GTX 1080. I already have a X299 motherboard and i9-10900X waiting to replace it as my daily system but I still need to order more parts. It's a bit sad to leave X58 after a bit over 10 years of daily driving the platform

[@V8Power5300]

@@Pasi123 X299 is fun. I'm running a 7980XE@4.5 all core. Holds up great in anything pretty much.

[@tsdobbi]

Ah the first i7 Gen. I remember when I got a new CPU and mobo in 2013 upgrading from a i7 920 to a i7 4770k the performance jump in some games was insane. Didn't change my video card, was still using my 580GTX. Shogun Total war was like a night and day difference.

[@Pasi123]

@@tsdobbi Were you running the i7-920 at stock? In most GPU intensive games the difference between the i7-920 and i7-4770K should be quite small with the GTX 580. But of course in old single threaded CPU intensive games the 4770K is faster

[@thewayback_playback]

@@Pasi123Living in a parallel reality. I have the exact X58 set up as my daily use PC. The non AVX2 games all run fine (which are the majority of the AAA titles).

[@infinitelybanta]

Seen comments about swapping out the CPU, which would be interesting, but I am a little surprised you didn’t upgrade the RAM at some point.

[@AnnaDoes]

He’s back baby 👽

[@MostGenericUser]

My friend has one of these when we we were in middle school. His dad was a big pc gamer and gave it to him when he upgraded. Some of them costed over $2,000 when new depending on how they were speced and that was in early 2000s money. That thing had drinks spilled on it, never had dust cleaned off, and my friend would leave it on for weeks at a time but it never faultered. It played mw2 and World of Warcraft just fine which is what we used it for mostly. A lot of fond memories on the old Alienware. He gave it to me when we were a bit older and I continued to use it until there was a lighting storm that caused a power surge and since I didnt have it plugged into a surge protector the motherboard got fried. I ended up rebuilding it completely with modern components and gave it back to my friend as a gift years later. Unfortunately he had to sell it when he was having financial troubles. I really miss that old Alienware and wish I could have bought back from him. These cases are heavy as hell but I love the design of them. All the Leds and fans still worked even after around 20 years of use.

[@WhiteoutSnowy]

Great video , brought back memories, had area alx 51 all white like a strom trooper

[@wakcedout]

Always wanted an Alienware back when they were on the market in early 2000s. Marketing was eye catching and seemed if I was going to do hardcore gaming then that it was the way to go. Options were rather minimal back in the pc gaming dark ages lol.

[@HWandW]

It was a step up from DOS games.

[@wakcedout]

@@HWandWat that time my only gaming experience at been consoles during the 90s. i dabbled into pc gaming at that time with rts games, mainly command and conquer series and the first game i got a gpu for was renegade. which led me to play black and white. so from a console gamer to pc at that time, alienware seemed like the best out there.

[@RobertKliethermes]

I would love to see this running Windows XP like it did originally and do some period correct performance benchmarks.

[@robinkeep6611]

Be cool to see how the 8800 holds up with a modern cpu

[@arahman56]

Probably not that great compared to even a 1660 Super. Or even the Van Gogh APU in the Steam Deck/any RDNA2 APU with adequate CUs.

[@yasu_red]

​@@arahman56I doubt it'll even launch many modern games given it only supports DirectX 11 to a very limited degree.

[@Pasi123]

The 8800 GTX was a good card for many years but by around 2014 it was pretty much outdated due to not having proper DirectX 11 support. Even cards like GTX 650 are quite a bit faster than the 8800 GTX

[@robinkeep6611]

@@Pasi123 I'd just be cool to see, in the video it's really heavily cpu bottlenecked so I'm just curious how it holds up. Considering he used a high end card it be funny if he hooked it up to a i9 or something

[@chrunchyhobo]

Before Warframe required DX11, I put a pair of 8800 GTX cards in my 6700k system. Running them in SLi I was getting performance almost identical to a GTX 750 Ti Black Edition (+14% Factory OC, plus 6pin power) at 1080p minimum.

[@codygrayson3676]

Was that a BTX Motherboard. I noticed the PSU was on the top instead of the bottom

[@AFellowDoktuh]

Wouldn't mismatched Memory cause issues with texture loading in improperly as in the case of GTAV?

[@Satyv1]

Doing a sleeper build inside that case would be cool

[@CybershamanX]

(4:48) I remember Maximum PC magazine featured an origami expert who they hired to do their ribbon cables much like this. I dabbled with that myself, and I think I even still have some rolled disk drive cables, as well. This was right before SATA came out. Anyway, very cool to see Alienware doing a bit of origami. 😉

[@anumeon]

Ahh, the days when the brand was something that was trustworthy and amazing

[@raccoons_finest]

4:46 The cable management is incredibly clean! Never achieved such a level 😅

[@Rock-Bottem1982]

1.25x speed...You're welcome

[@seniorchonkza997]

No likes, no replies, somehow top comment on my end

[@dookie771]

so real

[@ThatOneValk]

?????

[@lord_haven1114]

“RGB was rare back then” and thank god for that. Ugh

[@josephmills9031]

Dawid, if the motherboard supports it as it should try a Core 2 Quad. I have a q6600 and overclocked it to 1333mhz fsb and it ran amazing.

[@TheLuckymod13]

ALSO LOL @ the Crysis footage, the ole "yeah but will it run Crysis" meme still alive I take it? XD Honestly though, the 4090 not improving performance is also bandwidth limitations of the old PCIE bus of that MB, which was probably already near to busting with that 8800 no doubt. I mean, you pushed the total CPU clock, but it's not gaining much without frequency parity on the memory and without a higher bus. Even if it were, the CPU utilization is limited by architecture. The CPU cannot handle the instruction set, even if pushed to 4Ghz it could simply not do it. Loved this fun video overall, good stuff mate.

[@Shotblur]

Great video, but the captions aren't the best. You may want to look into that. Thanks in advance!

[@strangestecho5088]

My first system was an Intel Q6600 and a BFG GTX 8800 Ultra, which was more or less the fastest config you could buy back then (after overclocking the CPU). I remember cranking up the settings in Crysis and getting single-digit framerates. Really puts the modern complaints about 'optimization' into perspective. Back then games were regularly launching with the expectation that it would take multiple new hardware generations to max them out a playable performance.

[@saron95662]

I would love to cases like that make a comeback. Didn’t even know that they used to have cases like that. Wonder what other crazy looking cases existed