Alienware Aurora R14 Liquid Cooled Gaming Desktop - AMD Ryzen 9 5900, 32GB 3466MHz RAM, 1TB SDD + 2TB HDD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 10GB GDDR6X Graphics, VR Ready, USB-C, Windows 11 Home – Black

I have had this PC for four days now and it sits here with the “Blue screen of death” on the screen. A very long sad story, but I will greatly condense. Day one - I followed on screen prompts including doing a system restore where I had to reload all programs. Day two - After about an hour on phone with Amazon tech support, which elevated all the way up to “Check to be sure the USB cables are plugged in”, I was actually connected to a Dell Alienware Aurora Tech who stated that they were well aware of my problem and he knew how to fix it. After several hours of remote access and upgrades, he went away and the Blue Screen came back. Day three - Dell service tech would not respond to my email asking for help. I called the extended warranty group, and after reading him the actual details of the warranty, he connected me to another tech. After several hours of remote access, he went away and the Blue Screen came back. Day four - I email both techs and get no response. I called warranty company and this time the contact person did not want to help me beyond telling me to send it back. After I read the warranty to him two or three times, he transferred me to a medical facility. I called Amazon and asked that a replacement be sent and I would verify it worked before returning the first PC. Delivery is one week. Nothing takes Amazon a week. Tonight I finally get a reply from Dell tech wanting to know what day and time would be good to work on the PC. I replied that I had asked Amazon for a replacement. The extended warranty may be a good thing, but all the help it says they will extend during installation is mostly words on a piece of paper. I will update this review when something happens. I have purchased several Dell computers, never having this much trouble. UPDATE: I received the replacement R14 per Amazon’s promise date. I loaded the same programs I had loaded on the faulty R14 and it has been running over the weekend as a new Dell should.

If you get this computer be prepared to run the alienware command center computer support checkup 10x in the first week. It needs updates to fix alot of reasons people have been complaining for the last year+. I got a bootup blue screen when it didnt process my game correctly and had to hardboot the system ran the alienware command center asap and yep another driver needed to be updated. Basically everytime I hit an issue I would rinse repeatedly this process. It now works fine. I however dont like its sleep mode it will Rev up slightly and make a click noise every hour or so. I sleep with it in my room super annoying I just shut it down completely now. It does not like some modding programs specifically wemod + gta. It will black screen for a couple minutes after exiting a game and give you a horror show feeling when you worry it wont leave the black screen. If I would have known all these issues probably wouldnt have bought it but it runs great when playing games so its a trade off. *update* I ended up returning this before it was to late to return it after it started shutting down randomly on sims 4 game. At this point I was checking for updates every 2-3 days and the glitches continued. Never had so many issues with an alienware this would have been my 3rd. Decided I wasnt going to have a new computer that was to high maintenance. Kinda thinking I may try a different brand after this experience.

this has been an amazing PC since i got it, i had a little issue with Windows 11 but was able to fix that by jumping back down to windows 10. Overall, everything i throw at this thing has worked with no issues at all. I mainly play GTA RP, COD, Fortnite and right now i picked up sea of thieves. I play on high settings and get around 90-120 FPS. I do think the ram could be upgraded a little bit and would look into getting 32GBs right away.

Bought this in July of 2022 ... and now its October and Ive reformatted this computer 2 times and even installed Windows 10 on it ... Why you ask? Because - about a month ago, there just seems to be one glitch after another. Whether its a game freezing up mid-frame for a few seconds, or a YouTube clip stuttering while streaming or simply doing remedial tasks and the processor just maxes out for no reason causing a resource freeze up for the system ... just seems to be one thing after another. Im starting to think that AMD is nothing like an Intel processor. This is my first and quite possibly my last purchase of anything AMD related because its just not performing like I had hoped. Be WARNED - this is probably not the computer you should buy, no matter how good the deal seems.

I think its very important to first say that since addressing the issues the PC has been an absolute dream outside of some crackling from certain Audio Interfaces. Dell should really focus on the first impressions when building/working on these PCs as mine almost drove me to return it immediately. On first startup, the PC lagged, stuttered and bluescreened multiple times. It was absolutely terrifying considering the almost $2,500 price-point. Although after uninstalling all of the bloatware that comes preinstalled with Windows 11 and these Alienware PCs, as well as updating the BIOs. I have yet to experience any of these problems again. But if someone with less tech knowledge were to buy this, in my opinion: DONT. It takes too much extra work to get it to run well, too much fine tuning. If you do have more experience, Id recommend just building one yourself because the experience that I had to go through to just get it to run right was just as much effort as building a PC yourself.

Update: will not update MSFS 2020 files. What I have to do is uninstall MSFS and reinstall it. This has happened three times. Dell computers are garbage. When I wrote review below I had only had the computer a couple of weeks. When it works it’s great but it doesn’t work great for long. DONT BUY THIS COMPUTER! This computer has been amazing right out of the box. I use it mainly for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and it is amazing. No glitches in the frame rates and it is quick to upload and download the files. Updates dont take 2 days to complete now so that is an added bonus! I have not had any reason to call tech support so cannot really talk about them. If you are a gamer and you enjoy simulation, I truly recommend this computer. There are plenty of USB Ports and I have some left over.

Not sure what the deal was, but this PC had a corrupted Windows installation right off the bat. It would give blue screen after blue screen when attempting to boot into Windows. Fortunately, I was able to factory reset the Windows installation via the Alienware image in OS recovery. After that, everything has been working wonderfully. Hell of a deal on Prime Day, too; about $1k off the usual list price.

I purchased a used version from Amazon as Acceptable. It runs fine, but came with some nice Chinese Malware on it. Always run updated Defender in safe mode and wouldnt hurt to run Malwarebytes, but most importantly, always reinstall Windows yourself after getting pre-built systems.

Ive had several gaming laptops from Lenova and Acer and was excited to see the power of a Alienware desktop. Too bad Alienware is partnered with Dell. Beautiful design and the hardware and specs seems high end but a hour after getting set up with steam and game pass, Dell sent a software update. The audio for the games wasnt working so the update was mandatory. Almost immediately after the update, the computer went into a perpetual loop between a blue screen of death restarting itself and the Alienware logo. It was impossible to boot even into safe recovery mode no matter what. I spent a whole day working with Dell techs, who didnt know much more than me, I created several live flashdrive with windows updates and recovery systems on it to no avail. Ive worked around computers for over 15 years and have never seen anything of the sort. Dell literally bricked my desktop with their update.

Beautiful design and gaming features galore - and problems started the first day. The most irritating was Windows wouldnt always load. Id get the error message: Recovery, it looks like Windows didnt load correctly. Tried startup repair, got the message Startup repair couldnt repair your PC. In addition it would randomly power up for a few seconds in sleep mode, then power down again. It also wouldnt restart when updating drivers, and when gaming would freeze occasionally. I liked the PC so I spent an hour on the phone with Dell support. Checked multiple solutions, then had me do a system reset. If that didnt work (which it didnt), he wanted me to buy a 16gig USB stick, do a complete wipe, and download from the internet. I didnt spend that kind of money to also have to spend additional time and money on trying to make it work properly - sent it back.