If you missed my other thread - I haven't been a gamer since the late 1970s so I don't know anything about this stuff.

I'm going to buy an Alienware Aurora R16 next week. The only PSU options seem to be 500W or 1000W. The PSU is proprietary. I'm going to buy my PC from one of the following...

  1. New from dell.com. Both PSU options are available.

  2. Refurbished from Amazon Renewed. There are no power supply details. That's even true if I use plain old amazon.com and look at new models.

  3. Refurbished from outlet.us.dell.com. Both PSU options are available.

Amazon Renewed might be cheaper but it annoys me they won't give the info. Even if 500W is fine for me - I'll like to have that "in writing" before I buy anything.

I'm going a PC at least this powerful...

  • Processor: Intel Core i7 14700F (61 MB cache, 20 cores, up to 5.4 GHz Turbo)

  • Videocard: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER 12GB GDDR6X

  • Memory: 32 GB: 2 x 16 GB, DDR5, 5600 MT/s

  • Harddrive: 2 TB, M.2, PCIe NVMe, SSD

I don't know if I'll ever upgrade. Is 500W good enough?

    • Roonerino [they/them]
      ·
      2 days ago

      Correct. The PSU is going to be shitty regardless of capacity, and with a weird proprietary design to make upgrading very difficult.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        2 days ago

        Third the motion. Alienare is notorious overpriced, too.

        How is Asus these days? They also tend to me expensive but have a better rep.

        • Roonerino [they/them]
          ·
          2 days ago

          Check out Gamers Nexus on YouTube if you want details, but ASUS has an atrocious reputation now, and deservedly so.

        • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]
          ·
          2 days ago

          How is Asus these days?

          Somewhere between "dog shit" and "fire hazard." Their enthusiast-grade boards have been burning holes in CPU dies at "safe" default settings, and they released a string of faulty BIOS updates that made the issue worse. Gigabyte had some similar problems last year.

          Strangely enough, Asrock Taichi [including Taichi-lite] boards are probably the best you can get for AM5 right now. I have a pair of older Asrock Velocita boards that I used for AM4 builds for my family last year, and those worked out pretty well as a budget-ish option. Either way, "Asrock" and "reliable" in the same sentence is still a little jarring when I think back to stuff I built in the 00s.

    • CommCat [none/use name]
      ·
      2 days ago

      Ventilation/Cooling is a major problem with a lot of these prebuilt gaming pcs from the bigger brands. But if you can get them for a good price on sale, it's worth it and then swap the case and add more fans. I bought an Acer gaming pc on sale a few years ago, swapping the case wasn't difficult since motherboards are pretty standard size. I'm happy with my purchase, I'm not a big gamer but it runs all the games I've tried smoothly.