 Today's episode, the moment has arrived. Not the moment per se, but the systems have all arrived. So we get to go through and look at exactly what came out of those cluster phone calls and evaluate both the packaging, the shipping, and of course, the physical build unboxing experience. So come along for the ride. Oh, by the way, Alienware is going first. Let's go. A With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, you can detect malware, and you can block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Here's offer code Linus to get 25% off at the link below. Okay, no I actually don't have a knife on me. So first up is Dell Alienware. Thanks. Alright so this is our Alienware something or other. Ah here we go. Our Alienware Aurora system with 1x M.2 NVMe. Clearly these guys are new to retail packaging. That is going to mean so much to the average consumer. So Dell's total was 20 days from the time of ordering to the time of the system arriving. And that is 20 real calendar days, not 20 business days. So about two thirds of a month. Now the invoice they sent us was a really weird aspect of the Aurora system because it was full of a bunch of like jargony things and there wasn't really, we didn't have a clear idea of exactly what was coming or we wouldn't have if they hadn't walked us through it on the phone. In terms of accessories, did you know this thing comes with like nothing? Like look at this. So we get a warranty safety and regulatory information pamphlet. We get a quick start guide which basically says connect the keyboard and mouse. Which is not present as you can see. Connect the network cable optional. Connect the display. Connect the power cable and press the power button. And we get a power cable. Is that really it? Well, they did try selling us a $10 keyboard and mouse. I guess it's better to not include it and not have to pay for it than to pay for stuff you don't need. In terms of the quality of the packaging job that they've done here, there's already something that I've noticed. It was loose inside. Yeah, it is not a good thing to have a system loosely packed inside a box. You want everything closed up as tightly as possible. So there's still a fairly good chance that our system is just fine because at least Dell is using a very high quality closed cell phone here. So you can see that it's strong. But it's also not going to crumble and crack if the whole box gets impacted by anything. So that allows it to stay strong and it has some give to it which is really important when it's sitting, you know, vibrating on the back of a truck or whatever else. I actually haven't seen an Aurora system in a very long time. It's got some heft to it. That's probably as much to do with it being a steel case as anything else. I guess we need a screwdriver, hey? Screw me. Yeah. That's good. All right. I don't really have any complaints about the plastics. I mean, Dell's done a pretty good job of these kinds of things for a long time now. Get some of that peel action going on here. Oh, interesting. It's perforated just in case you're like one of those horrible people who leaves the plastic on your electronics, it still won't die. That's awesome. It's like actually an idiot proofing measure because it's the same thing here at the back too. It's all cheese grater. That is freaking hilarious. In terms of IO, not bad, USB 3, USB 3.1, Type-C, another USB 3, audio. Can't take headphone jacks for granted these days. Oh, okay. Yeah, there's the button here. And then there we go. So our side panel does actually make use of the chassis intrusion detection. So we're probably going to get a notification about that. This is our RGB PCB for the lighting in this sort of triangular doodad they got going on here. We actually can't see a lot about the internals of this machine. So we've got a 120 millimeter cooling fan sucking air in from the front here. We've got a very OEM grade looking GTX 1060. That's with a rear blower design plastic shroud. So it's not like a high quality like founders edition metal shroud or anything like that. But at this price point, I wouldn't have expected that. This is nice to see. So we've got card support. So even though there was some extra space in the box, the chances of this card coming out of that slot or breaking it off, I've seen that. Very slim. I get a kick out of this. Is it the swing out? I think so. So I think you unlock these and then, yep. Oh, that's kind of cool. So all the cabling stays in place for our SATA power, our PCI Express, all that good stuff. And this gets us our first look at our motherboard. So having reviewed a high end Alienware desktop a little while ago, back when AMD launched their Threadripper processor, I'm not surprised by any of this, but they are using a proprietary motherboard. This is the IPCFL-SC. It's got that little alien silk screened on it. So this is definitely specific to Alienware. It's got a mere four pin power connector for what ended up being a, this is an 8700K processor. The one that's 10 times faster. Remember 10 times faster. Very important to remember that. This is the auxiliary power to it. And then this, no, this is GPU power. So that's weird. Hey, actually there's some weird stuff in here. So look at this. They used an adapter here instead of just plugging their 24 pin connector directly into the board. And I have to assume that it's because they're actually using a proprietary wire layout for this and you can actually see they are. So orange, orange, black, red, orange, orange, black, wait, no. Black, red, black, black, black, black, gray, purple. Ah yes, white, white, orange. Yeah, but yellows might just be whites. What is going on here? What are you even doing? That's so weird. What, so just so you can't use a normal power supply, we should find out if this system runs without this plugged in. Cause I'd be willing to bet that it does. Also notable down here is our nice robust thick cooling fan. Wow, actually that's really nice on our AIO cooler and our 120 millimeter radiator is right up here in the top where it's got clean access to exhaust. There's actually, this is a lot more open than it actually looks like. So I would expect cooling on this system to be quite strong. But check it out, these are not cooled. That's true. And then as usual, Dell's using just generic green PCB dims like you would get from, well, direct from Micron. Overall, I am less disappointed than I was expecting. As long as you have compatible components and right now the motherboard and the power supplier, big question marks, this is a standard ATX ish motherboard, standard ATX ish power supply and it is easily user serviceable if you wanted to add a hard drive or whatever the case may be. So the HP ordering experience was a little bit unique. The invoice still didn't have a full spec list. It looks like, yeah, it looks like it is actually written on the side of the box though. So we're going to get a better idea of what we're dealing with here very shortly. But what was really interesting is they put themselves at a disadvantage by canceling our order five days after we placed it and letting us know that the issue was that we used Hangouts to call and so the number didn't match our credit card. After we resolved it though, the system was shipped the next day and so they still, even with the five day head start that they gave everybody else, still managed to deliver the gaming system to our door ready to be gamed on first. All right, we get a keyboard, a mouse, high quality. The packing job they did definitely gets extra points versus Dell because while the quality of this material is slightly lower, like it's still a nice flexible foam rather than the brittle kind, it's packed in tight. So once you close the flaps, there's no room for it to move around. One, plug, two, push button. So our final spec, 8th gen Core i7-8700, non-K, so it's going to be about one tenth the speed of the Dell then. 16 gigs RAM, 256 gig NVMe SSD, a two terabyte hard drive, two by two WiFi, and holy crap, HP is putting themselves in a pretty good position here to run away with this. This is equipped with a GTX 1070. Now the 1060 versus the 1070 is not a small step up. That K series processor that Dell upsold is going to have to have some serious performance benefits in order to outweigh the improvement in GPU that we get with our Omen here. That's nice. Carbon fiber replica. Actually, I'm liking their industrial design a little bit better as well too. So I don't know what the deal is with the, oh, it's an optical drive, includes an optical drive. Did the Dell even include an optical drive? Nope. If we're not making other compromises, it's better to have it than to not have it. This is a really interesting window too. They've got like this really dark tinting on the window. And I can actually just see through it. I think we're going to get some nice illumination effects there. You can also see there's a couple of little extra steps they've taken with the chassis here. So powder coating. Now powder coating doesn't cost a lot, but you can tell HP spent the extra couple of bucks to make sure that even the back of their system, which you wouldn't normally look at, is all black, including the power supply. IOS another strong point. We've got an SD card reader, two type Cs, and two type A's along with our audio. Ooh, the inside of the system looks a lot better too. Much more standard though. So there's no swing out and gain access to key components for upgrades or anything like that. And one place where HP is clearly behind Dell here is the case cooling configuration and CPU cooling. So rather than using a 120 millimeter exhaust to balance out the 120 millimeter intake at the front, HP is just using a mere 92 millimeter exhaust. And what's really weird about that is that it looks like it actually has space for a 120 mil here. They're using an adapter bracket. So that's a case of kind of spending 30 cents to save a dollar from my experience because a 120 mil can doesn't cost that much more. What if they're going for positive case pressure on purpose? That's possible, but they could also just order a case fan with a lower RPM. That would solve the same problem. Isn't that weird, hey? Mounting the adapter and then mounting a 92 mil fan to it. I've noticed that their graphics card, while still an HP specific skew, got an HP sticker here, HP part number there, they've put a little bit of extra into making it more stylized. So if you were to ever open up your case, you've got this graphic on the shroud, you've got this sort of like chromed GeForce GTX logo here and it uses a matte black PCB, which I'm always in favor of. Another interesting note is that the VRMs again have nice big heat sinks on them. And in this case, it's across all of them above and to the side of the CPU socket. Still 16 gigs of RAM and there's our NVMe SSD down there. That looks like another HP specific model. It starts with an M and I see SEC somewhere in there, so I'm guessing that's a Samsung. Yeah, it's a Samsung model of some sort. And then there's our hard drive right there. Oh, yeah, check that out. We've got hot swab cages here. So you just, well, somehow presumably. Really you guys? Ah, there we go. Just slide it. Very cool. That's nice. There's your easy upgrades. This is just bonus. Dang, HP. This is a good Omen. Get it for the videos to come. Okay, so who's next, Ivan? Cyberpower. Yeah, very funny. Okay, yeah, so Cyberpower, they wouldn't recommend a system. So they were booted from the running, which means I know who's next. It's going to be iBuyPower. Now this box looks like it went through hell to get here. This side really does look like someone gave it a good quality sidekick. Now did you notice that nobody asked us like what kind of case we wanted? I don't think they actually had options to offer. Well normally isn't that kind of like iBuyPower and Cyberpower stick? Well in this case, guy actually found the best system for the budget. And he'd never really asked about style because she didn't specify either. So the double-edged sword of having such a wide variety of configs to offer your customers is that you have selection, but the disadvantage is that it's harder to make a cohesive package out of your systems. So we've just got the box for the system in like a master carton that quite frankly probably isn't giving it a much better chance of arriving intact than if it was just shipped without it. Because assuming that the shipper adheres to the this side up sticker, which you can see is right there, then yes this is actually quite a firm sort of eggshell carton style foam and it would help with impact significantly. But there's so much room for it to bang around from side to side and I mean come on we've all seen the videos. Let's see how our system did. So we got a Zeus E2 gaming mouse and an Ares E1 gaming keyboard with spill resistance structure. We've got a customer service line we can call and a quick start guide. Well they already lied. Package includes desktop tower gaming keyboard gaming mouse. Nice high quality foam here though. Really soft but really strong. So our modular clearly EVGA power supply that was included gets all the extra cables bundled up nicely for us in a handy resealable bag. Little touches like that make a difference when you're trying to upgrade your system three years down the line and you're like oh where did I put all that stuff. So we've clearly got an Asus graphics card MSI motherboard EVGA power supply. They're all going to be brands that you recognize. Again this is one of the challenges with having any number of different case designs is you can't have custom packaging and you can't have custom brackets to hold everything together in shipping. So what they've done is they've included this foam packaging material inside to prevent your system from getting damaged in shipping. You'll also notice that these instructions are for this like ancient I think that's a raid max case from like 15 years ago. Yeah they don't correspond to the way that you would actually open this chassis. It doesn't have screws at the back and you don't need a screwdriver. That's something that I really think they could do a better job of for new users. To their credit though we actually looked into using these at NCIX in the past and I had wanted to do it. Like if I recall correctly these cost a couple bucks each. About 450 actually. 450? There you go. So that adds a significant amount to the cost of a system. But it's all about getting it there in one piece for the buyer. Wow that is a very bare bones looking system compared to our HP Omen there. So just like our Alienware we've got better cooling for the CPU but we've compromised on our cooling for the CPU's VRM which may or may not matter because what CPU is actually even in here? This is actually a 9600. A 9600? We'll check whether it's Kilo or not and remember they sold it to us before it was launched so we actually pre-ordered it. That would probably explain why even though this is a fairly simple build they still took what about 20 days to deliver the final system? Now the thing is what happened in the middle is that the PSU we initially ordered was out of stock so they gave us a free upgrade to the 750 unit. Really? Yeah. That's pretty good. Speaking of the power supply they've done a better job at the back of making sure that you use the correct video port so Alienware had onboard video but didn't specify in their quick start guide where you should plug your monitor into. These guys say hey don't plug it in here and they've got a sticker on the back to make sure that you don't plug in your system and run it before you remove the foam insert. Because I've talked to SI's before it's like a big problem people just turning the system on and letting it cook. Foam taking up the entire inside. In spite of the kind of bareness looking of it it's obviously modular and easily upgradeable because it uses all standard off the shelf components and they're all from quality brands that I would trust so we've got MSI motherboard, ASUS GTX 1070 graphics card to go with that 9 series CPU. ADATA RAM looks like 16 gigs of it, Corsair liquid cooler, EVGA power supply and then we've got a Toshiba 1TB drive for the back. This thing is going to shred when it comes to gaming performance. And the processor is a cake. The only drawback here is going to be that this is a SATA SSD rather than an NVMe SSD and that might affect system responsiveness but from my experience not much. I buy power is looking pretty good here. Yeah that's a pretty poor application of that sticker. Yeah they could have put a little more effort into that. I think it was origin before main gear right? Yes it's origin. So far the unboxing experience feels pretty special but based on what I'm expecting about the specs of this machine it had better be really special. So they include what seems like a reasonable quality mouse mat. That's kind of nice to see. Did they ask for shirt size? Yeah you get to pick. You told them XL? That was Janice. Thanks Janice. So they actually benchmarked the system somewhat in Cinebench. Yeah so they're assembled on one day, QA the next, burning and shipped on the third day. Interesting. 450 watt Silverstone power supply again recognizable brand names MSI motherboard and this is interesting. It's a Core i5-8400. So what happened here was we've got an 8400 which they upsold us telling us it would be a lot better which of course it would be but it didn't technically fit in our budget so we resolved to benchmark this system both ways with what they upsold us and with what they would have originally shipped and honestly given that they did send it with a GTX 1050TI I'm not expecting it to improve much. Remember this is a $1500 US dollar system and this poster and what else you got over there? A Scum Steam Code, a Star Trek Vanguard Starter Pack and Shroud of the Avatar Steam Code along with Call of Duty Black Ops 4. Still these better be some amazing games on that 1050TI. Very high quality foam credit to them for that and it was all packed tightly within the outer box and credit to Origin their Kronos is a sexy little machine. A sexy little machine that probably should have had some plastic peel stuff on the front. See that? Oh boy Origin PC. The thing with someone like Origin is that we are paying a fair bit extra for the custom chassis and it has some cool features so the Kronos which we've actually featured before has these magnetic feet so all you got to do is move them and then you can have it in a tower configuration or a desktop configuration and it is extremely compact so this is the smallest of the systems that we've looked at today. It looks like it has managed to stay in position and because they're using a PCI Express riser to install the graphics card it doesn't seem to have come out yet but given enough time this would cause a problem. Please tell me you at least have 16 gigs in round. So cooling we've got an 80 mil in the front that goes directly over these perforated 2.5 inch cages for our solid state drive. Remember that is a mere 120 gig solid state drive. Quality components you got a Silverstone SFX power supply here, UVGA graphics, MSI motherboard, Kingston or HyperX memory with Origin co-branding on it. So this is again your motherboard accessories, your power cord, your extra power supply cables and any documentation that came with your parts. Also they throw in a USB drive. That's actually the recovery USB I believe. That's a nice touch. It is a nice touch and it's 16 gigs. And then you've got their own AIO cooler. It's an Asetek based unit though so it's just fine. To me the big disappointment was that our unboxing experience was marred by these handprints on our system and that it seems like Origin gave up a lot to have their custom chassis with their fancy motherboard and ended up with a bit of a misspecced system. Like I wouldn't recommend this to someone who's purely after gaming performance. This brings us finally to Manegear PC. These guys were also right in that 20ish day range and they did a really excellent job of keeping us updated on the status of our order throughout. So after placing the order they said, hey, you know, we've got your order. Hey, now your system's being kitted. You know, here's all the parts that are picked. Hey, it's assembled. Hey, it's shipped. And bippity boppity, here's our system. So right now this is kind of Manegear's competition to lose because they definitely did the best job of the pre-sales experience and honestly so far the packaging I'm feeling pretty good about as well. This is a nice high quality foam. It's all packed nice and snugly within the outer carton and there's a second internal carton. The terms of this getting damaged in shipping are quite slim. Okay, more solid packing materials, really nice foam. Wow, these guys go all out. So they have also invested the, what did you say it was about $4? Into foaming up the inside of the system. It's dangerous to go alone and take this cute. You can tell they actually use the actual system that I mean not the exact one, but the same configuration for their startup guide. Also in here, our invoice, windows recovery, documents and accessories, resealable, very nice. Got some other board cables, we've got case screws in case you ever want to upgrade. And then you got a pen and some sticker, the key chain, coaster. I'd say that's a B minus mouse pad, it doesn't have a stitched edge. So it's going to frame more than the other one, C plus. They write you a little note on the inside of your box. Enjoy Yvonne. All right, before powering on, you must first remove the packing foam inside your computer. No real instructions on how to do it though. That's something that I think I buy power for all the deficiencies in their instructions, did a better job of making clear. So this seems mostly designed to prevent the graphics card from moving around. Like clearly they don't think the radiator is going to come off or anything like that. So our config in here is an interesting one. We've got the best cooling for the CPU out of any of our systems here. We've got an overclockable CPU, so that's a Ryzen 5 2600X. We've got 16 gigs of RAM, non-expandable unfortunately. But then we've got a GTX 1060. LSSD and then we've also got a Seagate Barracuda one terabyte drive for our games down in the bottom. I'm expecting the system to perform decently, but any points that main gear gained during the ordering process, they are probably going to end up losing in gaming performance. Nothing against AMD, but this CPU is not going to perform as well as our Intel based machines in that particular application. And our GTX 1060, well, let's just say we probably would have been better off spending our dual radiator money on a 1070 and putting a stock cooler on it. Maybe the benchmarks will tell the whole story. So that's it then. Ordering process and initial impressions complete. Let us know in the comments below who you think is going to be coming out ahead in our secret shopper showdown. Next up is going to be customer support. How do they handle it if the system doesn't work 100% right out of the box? Affordable and stylish, the new force be live to checks these categories off while still offering a comfortable listening experience. It's Bluetooth wireless keeps you wire free as you might expect and the magnets at the end of the earbuds clasp together while not in use to keep these babies on your neck. They offer 10 hours of continuous listening on the go and can be fully charged within one and a half hours. They're IPX5 rated making them weather and sweat resistant and the inline microphone is compatible with both the Google assistant and Siri allowing you to pick up calls, skip and pause tracks. Check out the link below to learn more and get a pair for yourself or for someone else. Tis the season. 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