{EU} 2021 Aurora R10 for 1361.25 EUR

[masiton]

During December 2022 my local refurb shop carried offer for these Auroras. The spec: Ryzen 5800X, AIO cooler, RTX3080 (!) and 2x8GB HyperX RAM. I went in to check it out, they opened one up for me and the GPU is full length PCB with metal backplate, 2.5 slot cooler and 2 fans. Price: 1361 EUR with a 2 year warranty and a 1 year Dell NBD warranty. I bought one for kids and waited for a review - two weeks later nothing but praises. So I bought one for myself (first time in my life I bought a prebuild). In my country, the 3080 alone goes for about 700 bucks - used with no warranty. Also notice the warranty - 2 years full warranty even if bought on business (only 1 year mandatory by law if bought with VAT deduction) and 1 year NBD warranty with a normal and valid Service Tag.

 

I wonder if US/Canada folks get these deals also?

 

Update: Included a techpowerup link for the GPU model.

Edited January 2, 2023 by masiton
Included a techpowerup link for the GPU model.

[PDifolco]

Price is as good as the prebuilt is bad  

 

If I'd get one I'd dismantle it and reinstall CPU RAM SSD and GPU to a real case !

 

[masiton]

17 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Price is as good as the prebuilt is bad  

 

If I'd get one I'd dismantle it and reinstall CPU RAM SSD and GPU to a real case !

 

Then the price wouldn't be as good, since you would need to buy PSU/MOBO/CASE combo and you would lose the warranty, which I think is equally important here as the HW. I did see the GN video (who hasn't) but they made their claims on a PC that was like 5k USD or something. This is 1360 EUR shipped and with very nice warranty. To support my claim, I built number of PCs over xmass period for family and friends. One of them chose this prebuild, as I was always mentioning it - I can build a PC for you, but for this budget, it will have significantly worse spec and worse warranty options than this prebuild, just so they knew their options before pulling the trigger. One friend chose the prebuild. The played for a day and then tootled around in the Aurora software, triggering all of their overclock profiles and what not. Then he restarted and got into a bootloop of BSODs. Contacted Dell support, next day someone showed up and got him fixed. 

 

Like, I am actually impressed. To this day I can only speculate how does the refurb shop make any money on this.

Edited January 2, 2023 by masiton
typo

[jaslion]

The gn video was in the middle of the gpu mining craze so prices were EXTREMELY different.

 

The alienwares you are mentioning here are also 2-3 generations older than theirs and had less bad cooling resulting in them being not as bad. Still not great and depending on the cpu you got coolable.

 

HOWEVER yours has been altered. That ram was 1000% added after the fact as hyperx memory is not what dell uses. These aurora's came with a single stick up to 32gb of ram with dell branded memory (adata stuff). So that is a massive fix.

 

You also recieved the "fixed" 3080. So you got lucky there

 

As to how does the refurb shop make money?

 

These are returns and alienware tends to have quite a few as they sell pretty cruddy quality products with multiple issues. Most likely all these were defective and basically a container of dead goods that got fixed. Hence why you have consumer ram in them and a 3080 revision that is newer than these systems.

 

 

[masiton]

59 minutes ago, jaslion said:

The gn video was in the middle of the gpu mining craze so prices were EXTREMELY different.

 

The alienwares you are mentioning here are also 2-3 generations older than theirs and had less bad cooling resulting in them being not as bad. Still not great and depending on the cpu you got coolable.

 

HOWEVER yours has been altered. That ram was 1000% added after the fact as hyperx memory is not what dell uses. These aurora's came with a single stick up to 32gb of ram with dell branded memory (adata stuff). So that is a massive fix.

 

You also recieved the "fixed" 3080. So you got lucky there

 

As to how does the refurb shop make money?

 

These are returns and alienware tends to have quite a few as they sell pretty cruddy quality products with multiple issues. Most likely all these were defective and basically a container of dead goods that got fixed. Hence why you have consumer ram in them and a 3080 revision that is newer than these systems.

 

 

Thanks for the explanation. I asked about the RAM about a month ago, because these are sold with 2x8 sticks and I wanted more. I was worried about warranty if I supply my own modules. This is what the shop said (paraphrasing):

 

"You can supply your own modules, the warranty (either ours or Dell's) won't be affected. We did try using different modules we bought and we would get random crashes during benchmarks on in certain games. When we changed these modules for Dell's official modules, the crashes went away. We sold many of these builds and since many customers wanted upgrade, we tried upgrading them with cheaper off the shelf memory (still on AMD QVL) and this is the result we found every single time."

 

So I asked about the official Dell RAM modules (paraphrasing):

 

"To be fair, we have no way of obtaining them, that's why we don't offer upgrade. We can only sell you spare modules we have left from our refurbs, but we guarantee those will work."

 

I bought a pair of additional 2x8 sticks. I only learned at this point they are HyperX. The sticker says XW21KG-HYD-NX, 8GB 1Rx8 XMP4-3200-UA2-11. I asked at this point if this is, in fact, official Dell memory. They said resolute yes, this is what Dell uses in all of these builds. I asked again that I actually thought it used to be 1x16 module and I'm surprised it's a 2x8 and they said no, all of those came in with 2x8 of those. I asked why can't I buy the same model from anywhere else, and they reiterated the same answer - you absolutely can, but we found that no matter what we did, we always had trouble with benchmarks and games afterwards, the thing wouldn't run several hour burn in test successfully. If we used these sticks, that originally came in with those builds from Dell, it would pass every single time.

 

We also discussed their memtest runs and everything. I bought repeatedly from these guys, they have no reason to scam me and they repeatedly said I can totally try upgrading myself, so I'm just selling here as I bought.

 

To add to your monetization story, that sounds super plausible. I originally thought they are machines that came in from all those pay-as-you-go schemes where you basically lease the thing and you keep paying monthly fee and every year you just get a new model. I came up with this only because all of those PCs were exactly 13 months old when they came up with the offer. Their entire stock was out in about 3 weeks or so. They then restocked the black ones and those disappeared similarly quickly. Half way through the second sale, they raised the price by 500 bucks. It did not affect their sales I am told.

[jaslion]

4 minutes ago, masiton said:

Thanks for the explanation. I asked about the RAM about a month ago, because these are sold with 2x8 sticks and I wanted more. I was worried about warranty if I supply my own modules. This is what the shop said (paraphrasing):

 

"You can supply your own modules, the warranty (either ours or Dell's) won't be affected. We did try using different modules we bought and we would get random crashes during benchmarks on in certain games. When we changed these modules for Dell's official modules, the crashes went away. We sold many of these builds and since many customers wanted upgrade, we tried upgrading them with cheaper off the shelf memory (still on AMD QVL) and this is the result we found every single time."

 

So I asked about the official Dell RAM modules (paraphrasing):

 

"To be fair, we have no way of obtaining them, that's why we don't offer upgrade. We can only sell you spare modules we have left from our refurbs, but we guarantee those will work."

 

I bought a pair of additional 2x8 sticks. I only learned at this point they are HyperX. The sticker says XW21KG-HYD-NX, 8GB 1Rx8 XMP4-3200-UA2-11. I asked at this point if this is, in fact, official Dell memory. They said resolute yes, this is what Dell uses in all of these builds. I asked again that I actually thought it used to be 1x16 module and I'm surprised it's a 2x8 and they said no, all of those came in with 2x8 of those. I asked why can't I buy the same model from anywhere else, and they reiterated the same answer - you absolutely can, but we found that no matter what we did, we always had trouble with benchmarks and games afterwards, the thing wouldn't run several hour burn in test successfully. If we used these sticks, that originally came in with those builds from Dell, it would pass every single time.

 

We also discussed their memtest runs and everything. I bought repeatedly from these guys, they have no reason to scam me and they repeatedly said I can totally try upgrading myself, so I'm just selling here as I bought.

 

To add to your monetization story, that sounds super plausible. I originally thought they are machines that came in from all those pay-as-you-go schemes where you basically lease the thing and you keep paying monthly fee and every year you just get a new model. I came up with this only because all of those PCs were exactly 13 months old when they came up with the offer. Their entire stock was out in about 3 weeks or so. They then restocked the black ones and those disappeared similarly quickly. Half way through the second sale, they raised the price by 500 bucks. It did not affect their sales I am told.

 

Basically that store was protecting their information as dell does NOT offer hyperx that is very clear.

 

These systems could have come in mosified and you saying 13months means these are written off or expired returns/overstock.

 

Which makes sense thats the stuff that often comes in. Them having the fixed 3080 is also normal then as that started about 1,5 years ago.

 

So basically these were most likely customized systems from a company, got returned after the 1 year contracted and then sold on to a 3rd party that renewed the 1 year extra warranty contract with dell including potential modifications to memory as this is also covered by dell in a lot of cases.

 

As for ram upgrades there are plenty compatible sticks. Their issues were probably fabricated as to stop you from doing things to the machine that could lead to a warranty claim.

 

 

Honestly all they did was standard corporate runaround stuff, get contract expired systems/overtime refund or extra stocks, potentially modified them with ram so they dont suck and sold them for a chunk of profit as these things are sold as defective by the bunch.