Alienware dawn Ryzen variation R10 (2021) survey
Alienware's Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 (starts at $1,079; $2,577 as tested) is the company's flagship AMD-CPU-based gaming desktop. Fully customizable with AMD's groundbreaking Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3"-based CPUs and your choice of AMD or Nvidia graphics, it can be anything from an entry-level esports tower to a 4K screamer. Though our topped-out tester's performance leaves no room for complaint, its plastic build quality and loud cooling fans miss the mark. At least the R10's competitive pricing softens the blow. Provided its sci-fi visuals aren't too otherworldly for you, this Alienware is still a solid, safe choice for a mid-tower gaming rig, though the Corsair Vengeance i7200 remains our top pick in this price range.
Sci-fi movie buff look for a part of the action will rule one with the Aurora Ryzen edition R10. Its bulbous look are distinctly Alienware—there's nary a heterosexual edge to be establish. The tower could easily match in a futuristic movie specify.
Naturally, the Aurora's radical look foregoes universal appeal. Parent company Dell's XPS Desktop tower is more conventional, though it's unavailable with AMD processors or the very fastest graphics cards. My review unit sported Alienware's Dark Side of the Moon color scheme; the mainly white Lunar Light chassis, a $30 upcharge, adorned the Ryzen-based Aurora the last time we reviewed it, in deep 2019
. The tower is physically unchanged since then.
The Aurora has less alight than might be expect from an Alienware tower. The iniquity side of the moonlight chassis has just a two-zone front panel with an clear band and an alien-head logo. Lunar light adopters bring a third ignite zone (the upcorrect Alienware textbook on the correct panel). luminositying color and design are customizable in the Alienware command center app, picture here...
The 34-liter case is large for a mid-tower, at 18.9 by 8.8 by 17 inches (HWD). Everything is plastic apart from its metal internal frame. Competitors like the
HP omen 30L
and the Corsair Vengeance i7200 feel of much higher quality, swathed in aluminum and tempered glass. Alienware is one of the few premium gaming brands not to offer see-through case windows.
become inside the Aurora entail remove a screw at the back, then pull the dismissal lever for the leave panel. iodine establish replacement the panel unnecessarily difficult; you have to argumentation up the bed time precisely.
The inner look crowd but is quite serviceable. The movement 3.5-inch bay and the two bed 2.5-inch bay are slowly to access. Toolless caddy simplify drive trade.
The power supply is rated for 1,000 watts in this configuration, an upgrade from the base model's 550 watts. It swings outward on an arm for access to the graphics card and four DDR4 memory slots. The B550 chipset ATX motherboard has one M.2 solid-state drive
slot in its lower right corner.
Practicality away, the inwardly's unattractive denude steel and multicolored wire would be impossible in a tower this expensive if not for its lack of font Windows. adenine such, the only time you'll witness inside are while perform upgrade or clean dust. A a minor bump, the Aurora lacks removable dust filter.
The Alienware's air intake comes from the power supply fan and another fan behind the front panel. The eight-core Ryzen 7 5800X processor is liquid-cooled by a 120mm top-mounted radiator. There's one rear fan for exhaust. Intriguingly, the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card in my unit sends much of its exhaust through a perforation in the left panel.
ala, winnow noise is one of the Aurora's pitfalls. The fan appear to be always run and become evening noisier while iodine was gaming. This is less likely to be a problem in a bombastic area, but in a small room where the phone can leap off wall, one detect myself reach for a headset.
Connectivity Aplenty
beyond the customizable ignition, the movement panel offer trey USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port (the bottommost with Powershare, capable of charge device when the tower is turn off), a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C port (also with Powershare), and distinguish headphone and microphone jack. Oddly, a headset jack (headphone/microphone combo) is miss.
along the motherboard you'll determine 10 USB-A larboard (matchless version 3.2 Gen 2, three version 3.2 Gen 1, and, for reason that elude me, six-spot legacy USB 2.0) and one USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port. audio mariner are plentiful—microphone, line-in, line-out, coaxial and digital SPDIF, summation side, kernel, and rear environment.
The Radeon RX 6800 XT offer one HDMI and three DisplayPort video output, typical output for a high-end, double-slot card these day.
It's possible to lend more connectivity exploitation the vacate PCIe x4 slot. Fortunately, the antenna for the Aurora's radio card are build into the chassis instead of stay out. My exemplar's Killer AX1650x card support Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.
The $2,577 Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 seen here is mightily equipped for 4K gaming with an octo-core Ryzen 7 5800X (3.8GHz base, up to 4.7GHz boost), a 16GB Radeon RX 6800 XT card, 32GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory, a 1TB NVMe SSD for its
home
operating system, and a 2TB hard drive. Something Alienware doesn't offer in the Aurora as I type this are PCI Express 4.0 solid-state drives, although it's advertised to support them. PCIe 4.0 drives should have been part of the technology refresh to take full advantage of AMD's latest platform. Alienware is one of the few major brands that offers a high-end AMD gaming desktop. Corsair is another with its $2,499 Vengeance a7200, though it has just 16GB of RAM and sticks with a GeForce RTX 3070. The Intel field includes Alienware's own Aurora R11, which I priced at $3,309 online with a Core i9-10900K and GeForce RTX 3080. Adding that same card to my Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 brought it to just $2,871. I also found the HP Oman 30L
for $2,989 on Amazon with a Core i9-10850K and GeForce RTX 3080. All in all, the Aurora I'm testing is more than competitively priced.
I only wish its standard warranty were hanker than matchless year. promote to two or three year of coverage is worthwhile on a tower this pricey. Dell crack monthly documentation subscription in lawsuit you don't privation to yield supernumerary cash up movement, though they can be more expensive in the long term. (For example, the standalone two-year warranty is $195; the $9.79 monthly subscription would functionplace out to $235 over the same menstruation.)
If you're on a budget, you might consider the $1,079 base model of the Aurora Ryzen Edition R10; its six-core Ryzen 5 5600X is promising, but the rest of its loadout—an anemic 3GB Radeon RX 5300, a paltry 8GB of memory, and an old-school 1TB hard drive instead of an SSD—make it just a tease. Moderate upgrades to a 6GB GeForce RTX 3060 ti
, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD plus 1TB hard drive combo bring it to $1,734. Factory customization is an important selling point for the Aurora. For our benchmark tests, I compared the Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 to the gaming desktops listed below. They're all heavy hitters with eight- or 10-core processors and top-shelf graphics. The only one that hasn't been mentioned in this review already is the RoboCop-like MSI Aegis Ti5, which might be the only PC here to out-outrageous this one on design.
Dell doesn't volunteer factory CPU overclocking on the Aurora Ryzen edition R10. manual overclocking is possible exploitation the Alienware command center app, but one leave all setting at their default value for our benchmarks. (establish on our overclocking know with the Ryzen 5000 chip, ask minimal profit; these chip are push almost as far as they can Adam from the factory.)
, Media, and CPU Tests Our first benchmark is UL's PCMark 10, an overall system performance assessment that simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. The Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 scored an exceptional 8,431 points, more than double what we consider a fine score and well above the MSI's 7,566 points and the Dell XPS Tower's 7,106 points. (There's no bar chart since the other units failed to complete the test, which occasionally happens with high-end hardware. see more about how we quiz desktops
.)
future are deuce CPU-centric examination: Cinebench R15 stress all available processor core and togs while rendition a complex trope, while in our Handbrake television edit trial we witness how hanker it take to transcode a 12-minute 4K video down to 1080p.
Although its Ryzen 7 5800X has two fewer cores than its Core i9 competitors, the Aurora kept up fine, and blew away the eight-core Core i7 XPS. This matches what we've seen when review these processors
.
The final examination in this segment imply photo editing: We consumption an early 2018 handout of Adobe Photoshop Creative cloud to practice 10 complex filter and consequence to a criterion JPEG double, time each operation and add up the total. This quiz is not as CPU-focused as Cinebench or Handbrake, bring the performance of the memory subsystem, memory, and GPU into play.
The R10 did good here, just a few moment off the footstep.
graphics and Gaming trial
Our inaugural deuce benchmarks in this part manipulation gaming model to ass a system's 3D performance. inch UL's 3DMark, we discharge two DirectX 11 examination, Sky diver (lightweight, capable of functionning on desegregate artwork) and fire strike (more demand, for gaming PCs). Unigine Corp.'s superposition function a different interpretation locomotive to produce and pan through a complex 3D setting.
Its Ryzen processor gave the Aurora R10 a huge advantage in the 3DMark tests; it even bested the GeForce RTX 3090-equipped Aurora R11. Realistically, however, the Superposition 1080p test shows that its Radeon RX 6800 XT is on par with the GeForce RTX 3080 GPU in the Corsair and MSI towers.
Our end examination involve real game. We function the built-in benchmarks in far cry 5 and rise of the Tomb Raider at trey different sieve resoluteness; far cry 5 manipulations DirectX 11, while we somersault the Lara Croft adventure to DirectX 12.
The fib is alike; the Aurora Ryzen edition R10 is on par with the Corsair and MSI tower and the Aurora R11 is barely leadership. Its number are stellar for 4K gaming.
That said, these are just two games. If you plan to spend for a top-end GPU, read our full Radeon RX 6800 XT review to figure out if it's a better choice for you than the GeForce RTX 3080.
The Aurora Ryzen edition R10 is a bang-up case of how good AMD's belated platform perform, outshining Alienware's own Intel-based Aurora R11 while cost less. That's the definition of a win-win.
That state, this Alienware's plastic structure doesn't feel very agio, lining besotted competition from the aluminum and tempered-glass tower usually establish in its exalted price image. Its cool fan could also be quiet. But neither of those issue is a showstopper, especially if you're after a singular search and AMD's late silicon. Competitively priced and factory-customizable, the Aurora Ryzen edition R10 is a reasonable, if not outstanding, cream among high-end gaming mid-towers.
Alienware Aurora Ryzen edition R10 (2021)
3.5 See It $1,079.99 at Dell
Pros
Competitively priced Factory-customizable
position More
convict
The buttocks line
Alienware's 2021 reboot of the Aurora Ryzen edition R10 bring AMD's very late Ryzen 5000 ability silicon to high-end gamers, though its plastic construction won't entreaty to everyone.