I thought the price seemed exceptionally high, even for an Alienware, and I realized that they packed a 1500W PSU into that little case. Goodness.
$390 - Intel Core i7-5820K
$89 - 16GB Quad Channel DDR4 at 2133MHz
$500 - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 with 4GB GDDR5
$40 - 128GB Mobility Solid State Drive
$80 - 1TB SATA 5400RPM
$10 - SuperMulti DVD±RW
$230 - 1500W PSU
$151 - Motherboard
$1490
You’re paying $460 for a weird case and branding, and it’s a refurb; not actually as inflated as these usually are, but I didn’t shop around at all.
EDIT: But who would want this combination anyway? Way unnecessary PSU and a tiny SSD.
You would need to put in another GTX980 running SLI and watercool them both to even start to use any of that power and you would still be way over what you need. I was going to SLI two GTX980s in my new machine and I put in a 1300 PSU which was quite a bit more than I truly needed…You’re just paying a premium for headroom you don’t need with a 1500 PSU and only one GPU.
Also, if someone actually considered buying a pre built machine at this cost, they’re probably not going to open up the case and do much work themselves. Agreed, the PSU is overkill and the case is ugly
What’s good about this deal?
Slow/small drive combo - 5400RPM??? Tiny SSD? At least 2x more power than needed and a case meant for 2 graphics cards but only has one. The price is also way too high.
Who would buy this? For $1900, one could buy a LOT more machine than this, and do a much better job balancing hardware resources.
A more reasonable price on a refurb like this would be $900.
You are paying a premium for design but some of the items should have been upgraded.
This is a socket 2011 chip which should have 8 RAM slots instead of 4. So your Max Memory is 64gb instead of 128gb.
The 1500 watt PSU could be nice if you ran three 980ti cards in SLI. This is a regular 980.
There is no mention of how many slots for hard drives there are. If you could cram 4 HDD in a RAID10 with the SSD for caching it would be a nasty little beast.
That said, this is perfect if you just want a pre-built hardcore gaming PC with no worries about upgrading parts out of the box.
Yes you could build the same spec for $1500 but some people would rather not.
Anyone else notice the title for it says 128GB SSD + 2TB HDD, while the specs tab says its a 128 SSD and a 1TB HDD.
So which HDD is it?
Yeah, this is a joke. At first, from the photos, I thought there were three graphics cards in SLI but no that’s just a stock photo. For the specs of this refurb I wouldn’t pay more than $1000. They aren’t going to sell even one of these.
You forgot to add the price for AC wireless card
Bluetooth
Slot Load DVD
And a year warranty
Also these come with 2tb drives.
Slot load DVD $15.00 - 20.00
AC card with Bluetooth $80.00 - 100.00
Warranty…
Every component I’ve ever purchased for one of my builds come with a minimum one year warranty if not a 2-5 year warranty on some of the bigger ticket items.
IMHO Alienware has always been about the looks and image so it’s similar to Apple in some regards. They just pander to a different group.
Says 180 day warranty on the listing.
Title and key features tells us 3.8GHz, but Specs tab tells us 3.3GHz (turbo up to 3.6GHz).
Make up your mind, check your facts, get back to us on this. Intel’s page on the processor agrees with the 3.3/3.6 figure, and there is no mention of overclocking.
Also, yeah, the PSU is a bit OP for this build, and the drive combo can be superseded for cheap. Yesterday’s price on yesterday’s PC?
Honestly if you are after an Alienware refurb then you should just camp the Dell Outlet and wait for the 40-45% coupon that shows up from time to time to clear out the backlog of Alienware refurbs. They do this roughly every quarter.
There is a HDD spec discrepancy between the title (2TB) and the specs (1TB)
found the non refurb: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883156772
seems the 2TB is the correct number
The offer has been changed to reflect 2TB HDD instead of the previously listed 1TB HDD.
Thanks for the input!
That also cannot be the correct non-refurb. The link above has 2 980 GTX cards, not 1 (one). That’s a $500 difference at first glance. Could be other different specs as well.
To add to this.
Pictures from http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883156772 show:
Room for Three 3.5" SATA drives and Two 2.5" SATA drives.
The PSU is standard form factor and can be replaced. It is also Modular.
This should have included a 2nd GTX 980 for the price.
Also forgot tax, keyboard, mouse, any cables you may need, artic silver, shipping, etc…
I built my own but many people quote the MB, processor, RAM, HDD and case and say “See, its like $3209420349 cheaper to build you own”. At least quote EVERYTHING in the build, tax, shipping, etc… all count.