Well, power requirements have been increasing over the years, haven’t they, despite die shrinks. If not for cpus, then surely for gpus. I think it is possible that the design was both great before but still in need of an update at some point. But that’s simply conjecture.
Hope it works great for you. I am curious how loud it is under Load.
Well, Alienware has been consistently positioned as a high end gaming / performance brand. In a sense, that brand is actually an appeal to elitism; you sir, don’t want an ordinary PC. Not when you can “Unleash new levels of intensity with powerful Alienware desktops, featuring groundbreaking components expertly designed to give serious gamers everything they desire.” Because you, sir, are a serious gamer, not some filthy casual.
So, that video points out that the brand promise is a lie. What Alienware are actually selling is bog-standard lowest bidder OEM case and components hidden inside a pretty plastic wrapper. That strikes me as a valid critique, even if it stings a bit to those who bought into the brand.
And the discovery of the stock Intel cooler jury-rigged onto the Ryzen CPU is absolutely a big deal. It tells me that Dell are willing to rip off their Alienware customers by permanently throttling the second-most expensive component in the box. Yes, @stusser is probably right in saying it doesn’t matter, in the sense that the vast majority of gaming customers bought a high end Ryzen CPU that they didn’t really need. Still, they are paying Dell for that CPU and Dell are crippling it for them. In pursuit of what is almost certainly a single digit dollar saving for Dell.
Neither of those two points strike me as elitism or dunking for dunking’s sake. It’s valid consumer journalism.
It matters, it just doesn’t really matter. In that I mean I would never get one myself, barring pandemic/supply-related constraints making it the only way to buy a GPU without going insane, but I would never buy a prebuilt anyway. Of the prebuilts I would never buy, this is near the bottom, if that’s a meaningful distinction. Which it isn’t.
Like that piece of shit Gigabyte 3080 I bought. All 3080s really perform basically identically, but the MSI one has a plastic backplate, the Zotac clocks ever so slightly slower, and the Gigabyte has that design flaw with the power plugs. I would never have bought that model if I had a choice, I wanted the EVGA. But given constraints, I got what I got. And (after I RMA’d the goddamn thing) it was fine.
Of course I managed to get an EVGA later on anyway by sitting in that queue for 9 months, so it all worked out.
