 Oh man Linus, you're in for an absolute treat here today. This is the Alienware Aurora R11 and has one of the weirdest GPU coolers I've ever seen. Cool. And you know what's like the best part? What? Apparently it has 69% less noise. So do you want to open it up? Wait, we're gonna miss that opportunity? Nice. Okay. So we're gonna open it up. So we're gonna open it up. So we're gonna open it up. So we're gonna open it up. Okay. I still have no idea what's going on. Do I just open it or like? Yeah, just open it. Okay. You know how to do this. I know how to open a box. Just need a knifey knife. Scissors. They're just two knives. As though I need more reminders that Alienware is just a Dell in alien clothes. I remember when they used to at least put a little alien on the cheap mouse that was included. Can you imagine spending the amount of money that an Alienware machine costs and then using the included mouse? Like the keyboard, I don't even care that much. You can be a very competitive gamer with a cheap keyboard, but like the mouse, it's fundamental. Hopefully the packing material is good. Aurora R11 you say. That's not a bad looking little machine. And the specs are interesting too. So this is a Core i9-10900K. It's got 32 gigs of RAM, but we don't know what speed it's running at yet. We're gonna have to figure that out once we fire it up. Two terabytes of NVMe storage for boot with an additional two terabyte hard drive and an RTX 2080 Super. So this thing should be a gaming powerhouse. It's got so much plastic on it. This is gonna take forever. Oh, can I do a peel? Yeah, you can do a peel. Sweet. There you go, you even got a little peely tab there. Oh, right at the end. Really Alex? I saved the best peel for myself. Honestly though, it's hard to tell exactly what I'm looking at from the outside here. So the front seems to be kind of like a turbine style of intake. You've got a couple USB 3s. Ooh, you got a type C there. That's pretty nice to see, alien shaped power button. On the top, you've got that vent that I showed you guys before. On the side here, you've got what seems to be a power supply intake, given that our power supply is right there, as well as another big intake. And at the back, you've got Dell still not bothering to powder coat their chassis or power supplies to make them match the black aesthetic of the rest of the case for whatever reason. So I was talking to a power supply manufacturer about this at one point. I think it costs about 40 cents to coat the power supply black, something like that. Less than a dollar though. While most people's instinct might be to plug the computer into the wall and fire it up, mine is to open it up and have a look at this supposedly crazy graphics cooling solution that you've got there. I can't quite figure out how to do it. There's like multiple unlocking tabs back here. I have no idea what I'm looking at. Do you want me to tell you, or do you just want to figure it out? I want to figure it out. Okay. I'm gonna assume this screw has something to do with it. How do they manage to make the case so expensive? Like, do you guys have any idea how much the molding costs for a case like this would be? Like we're talking deep into six figures, right? Oh yeah, easy. And yet, so cheap. It's shocking. As we saw from the outside, the 120 millimeter intake for the power supply is right up against the side panel there. So it's gonna be able to pull that nice fresh air in. Oh, hey, look at it go. That's pretty cool. Why is this power supply so big? It's modular and everything. Hey, since when does Alienware care about modular power supplies? Maybe since the cost savings of the copper cabling outweighed the additional expense of the modular PCB inside. Hey, got him. I don't actually know that for sure though. But enough teasing Dell about that. Oh, for real? The eight pin is a six pin. Did you notice that? It's missing two conductors. Like really guys? I know you don't actually need, you know, however many watts that connector carries for a mainstream CPU, like a 10900K, but like really? Just, would the board run if you put an eight pin in it? Here's what I wanna know. If I plug just six pins into a regular eight pin connector, would it work? Cause I know that four pins will also work in most cases. Yeah, the motherboard has the pins there. What the heck? What I wanna do now though, is take a closer look at this cooler solution. This is real interesting. What they've effectively done is just about quadruple. The total amount of chassis space dedicated to graphics card cooling. One thing that surprises me though, is how light it is. Like, it feels like this is just made of plastic. I was expecting, looking at it from the outside, I thought this was like aluminum fins or something. I mean, the radiator is definitely made of aluminum, but the other thing that surprises me is that the graphics card still seems to have, not just a shroud, but actual cooling in it. Have we disassembled this yet? Yes, but you can do it now. Are there fins in here? Let's take it apart. Okay. Well, that's basically what I expected to find inside. That is a surprisingly small radiator. One advantage that wasn't immediately obvious though, is that the backside has access to fresh air, as well as the front. So this fan is going to be a little bit more efficient than it would normally be able to be on a graphics card. Except in cases like the, was it the 480 that had like vents in the back of the PCB so it could draw in more air? What a monster that thing was. This is the Asetek Rad Card. And you might've never heard of Asetek, but if you've ever used an AIO water cooler, the internals were probably designed by Asetek. Their designs are used by the likes of Intel, ASUS, Corsair, NZXT, VGA, Thermaltake, HP, Lenovo, MSI, and many more. The Rad Card was created when Alienware came to Asetek and was like, hey guys, we need a GPU cooler that's super quiet, really cool. Oh, and by the way, you've got to make it fit easily into a tiny case. And what they came up with is this. It's got six tiny heat exchangers in series in here. And this does run into a similar problem as our stacking radiators video, which you guys can check out over here, where as the air goes through this series of heat exchangers, it actually heats up and its cooling effectiveness goes down. But the good news is that Asetek did set this up in the correct way, as we also found in that video, so that the hottest air and the hottest water meet here at the back of the case, and the coolest air and the coolest water meet right here. So in terms of raw performance, this is not expected to actually even perform as well as a traditional radiator, where the coolest air is gonna be hitting all of the water. But the main benefit is that in a small chassis where it's hard to get fresh air to a traditional radiator anyway, the performance hit here shouldn't be that big. Surprisingly, one of the biggest issues with designing this was air. In a traditional AIO, like on the CPU here, if there are any air bubbles trapped in the system, they just rise to the top and get stuck in the radiator rather than running through the pump and making a bunch of noise. So it's no big deal. In this configuration, however, if the air is allowed to just rise to the top, it will get trapped in the pump, not the radiator, which can not only add noise, but can actually reduce the effectiveness of the pump or in a worst case scenario, kill it. So to overcome this, the outlet of the radiator is placed at the bottom, and the internals of the heat exchanger by the outlet is designed to trap the air. Oh, that's pretty cool. Okay. Enough theory though. Let's close this puppy back up and see if it actually performs. Okay, David, you're a PlayStation fanboy. This versus PS5. I can't tell the difference. Whoa. It's supposed to be kind of like a theremin kind of sounding thing. Don't worry about it. G-Sync display connected. All right. Everything's working all dandy. So what, like fire up some Doom Eternal? Sure. That's running pretty good. Oh, get the stats up there. Oh yeah, right. It has the best stats. Hold on. I'm playing the game right now. Okay. Blah, blah. All right. There's our performance metrics. You happy? Yeah. Doing actual work now. All right. So how are we doing? We're getting 90 FPS running freaking Doom Eternal at 4K. That's a pretty good gaming experience, I would say. We got no GPU temps in here though. That's fine though, because I'm gonna let you guys in on a little secret. Movie magic. We already ran all the performance benchmarks against a more typically cooled RTX 2080 Super anyway. And the results are pretty impressive. For our air cooler, we reached a maximum temperature of 80 degrees, at which point the GPU clock speed dropped to 1890 megahertz, which is slightly below the maximum clock speed it reached of 1950. So on its own, that's very impressive. But the PCI Express radiator is the gift that kept on giving, managing to keep our GPU at a maximum temperature of 69 degrees. Nice. With the clock speed dropping to just 1920 at its lowest. So this means the actual gaming performance of these two cards is very similar, but the PCI Express rad has way more headroom before it's going to start throttling. These tests were done with the AC set to 22 degrees Celsius, and the air cooler was just on the edge of thermal throttling. But it's summer now, and chances are, you have a hard time keeping your computer room at 22 degrees. So as the temperature of your room increases, so too will the performance impact of having this PCI Express radiator design. You shouldn't see a significant drop until your room is a sweltering 33 degrees, at which point you might as well just go outside. But temps aren't the whole story here. Unfortunately, the PCI Express rad was actually slightly louder, something that you guys can probably actually hear through my microphone if I get too close to this machine. So chances are the 69% reduction in noise that Asetek was talking about was compared to a blower style cooler on a GPU with, well, a blower cooler, but given that reference designs now use a more expensive dual fan setup, I don't really see the value in comparing to that. With all of that said, it's not like under normal circumstances, you would be choosing between a cooler like this and one like this, because either you're buying a GPU from a website like Memory Express or Newegg or Micro Center, or you're buying a pre-done computer from a company like Delalienware. Actually, with that said, oh, it is possible that they would be using a blower style cooler in a case like this because it's so small and there's so little room to dissipate all the air that this would just be recirculating. They probably would be using a blower styler. So that does make sense, they're 69%. So it's 69% quieter compared to their low end solution that they would normally use. But if you're an aftermarket buyer, I don't think you should be too choked that you can't get your hands on one of these. Hey, Linus. Yes, sir. How much do you think that the PCI-RAD costs? Like the whole thing, including the block and everything? Like as an add-on to this computer? I would say that's gonna cost you about 149.99. 200 bucks, not a bad guess. 200, that's too much. I guess they gotta make back those molding costs somehow. If you guys enjoyed this video where we, you know, experimented with Helianware's products, why not the one where we tried to overclock one of their laptops with sub-zero cooling? Hey, they didn't skimp on the packing material, so this is good sh-