HARDWARE REVIEW

Alienware Aurora R6 Gaming PC Review

by Luke Walsh, October 31st, 2017

What is the Alienware Aurora?

Alienware has a reputation for high-end, powerful gaming laptops but not always for their desktop machines which can go under the radar. The Alienware Aurora is the combination of power, compact design but also price with it not looking to break the bank too much. The Alienware Aurora R6 which we review below looks to live up to the range’s ethos.

Aurora R6 sits right in the middle of the Alienware Alpha range their more affordable micro-PC and the Alienware Area 51 which is their highest level of PC you can buy with human money. It’s the balance between the two, it’s a little bigger than the Alpha but more powerful and smaller than the Area 51 but takes some hits on high specifications to save gamers some cash.

What is the price and configuration options Alienware Aurora??

There are a couple different options to choose from like the other Alienware and Dell products, with the lowest current configuration on the Dell website being an i5 8400 with 8GB of Ram and an AMD Radeon RX 560 graphics card costing £849. If you want the Nvidia equivalent of the lowest spec it will cost an extra £100 bring it to £949 for a Nvidia GeForce 1050Ti card.

Their most expensive R6 costs £3,099 and comes with an i7K 8700K processor, 32GB of DDR RAM and two Nvidia GTX 1080Ti with 11GB of GDDR5x RAM each. If you only want one 1080Ti card you can also opt for the cheaper I7K 8700K version with just 16GB RAM for £1999.99.

If none of those configurations is what you’re looking for, there is also the option to tweak different components within the PC before you buy which gives you a massive amount of flexibility. Creating your perfect Aurora R6 shaped around your gaming needs and budget is completely possible.

Design

I’m not going to lie when Dell first asked me to review an Alienware PC in my mind I envisioned a giant towering beast of a machine, something which would have a warning for two people to lift on the box. This is not uncommon for gaming PC, which usually comes in full APX cases, packed with water cooling and more space means better air circulation and heat dissipation.

Surprisingly though, my brain was wrong and the Aurora R6 is made to be a mid-tower with a height of 472mm and a depth of 360mm with a width of only 212mm. The size has been kept to the bare minimum thanks to Alienware’s “zero-fat” design which uses all the space in the best possible way. What this means is the smarter use of space allows for airflow to keep all the parts cool, achieved through air vents, intake fans and an exhaust fan near the top of the chassis.

Like other high-end cases, it is a tool-less design which means, in theory, you should be able to install components such as graphics cards, streaming cards and more without the need of any tools such as a screwdriver. This makes the layout inside of the machine quite complex such as the power supply being mounted on an arm and the hard drive spaces being at the bottom of the unit for easy mounting and unmounting.

At the front of the case, you’ll find your usual assortment of USB ports with two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports with a headphone jack and microphone jack. On the back you’ll find some more USB ports including a USB Type-C, Ethernet port, optical digital out and the video ports which can vary depending on which card you purchase, ours included 3 Display Ports and 1 HDMI for the Nvidia GeForce 1080 Ti.

RGB lighting is also present on the Aurora R6 much like their Alienware 17 R4 Laptop, hints of blue lines in an X shaped appear on the side casing as well as the power button which is the Alienware logo. This really is to be expected for anything “made for gamers” there will always be some lighting, thankfully like their other devices, Alienware have kept it minimal only using optics to highlight the case rather than drown in it.

Managing to fit everything inside the casing is impressive, with the graphics card (bear in mind you can also get two in there if you choose for the top spec model), the cooling, power supply and all the other components. What this does mean though is it is much heavier than it looks, although small it is still not a carry round PC, what it is, however, is an attractive and powerful tower with space to allow you to upgrade.

Aurora R6 Features

When your spending £800+ on a gaming machine there are some bits you think should be included and one of them is most certainly a keyboard and mouse. Dell does include a set with the machine but they are your standard run of the mill peripherals and although it is nice to have them, they cant beat mechanical alternatives. We did not get a chance to check out the included set as they clearly replaced them with a demo set of Roccat gear.

We talk about how well the rig deals with games in a little bit but before you play any games on the thing, swap out the free gear for your own gaming keyboard and mouse. If you wanted to get a matching set up, Alienware has also recently released their own gaming keyboard and mouse which does look nice alongside the tower.

Built into the pre-installed software is the different Alienware programs that handle all the little tweaks you can make to the unit from lighting, cooling, power management and game management. There are options to change the lighting colour with AlienFX for the side panels and logo and what I did not expect was to be able to change the colour independently for each panel. It might not be something most gamers will do, as we can be a bit funny with our matching colours but it’s nice to have the flexibility.

Thermal controls as the name suggests allows you to tweak what speeds the fans run at and check what your current temperatures are for CPU, Ambient temps, GPU sensor, the CPU pump and GPU fan. There’s an option to allow it to continue to run in the auto mode based on the current performance requirements or manual which lets you set the fan speeds. If you do choose manual, there’s a neat little tweak to set a fan speed curve based on one of the sensors for each fan.

AlienFusion sets up the different power management options for the Aurora R6 and is separated between basic options or advanced options. In basic, you can tweak simple things like power button action, require a password on startup to sleep times and turning off the display. Advanced mode enables you to get more granular with your tweaks, setting hard drive off times, USB suspension settings and much more.

Finally, AlienAdrenaline is a macro program which lets you set up shortcuts that perform a set of tasks while launching a game. The cool thing about this, you can launch Overwatch and at the same time tell it to launch Twitch.tv in browser, fire up Discord and run Fraps. For gamers who always perform the same actions in certain games, this will surely be useful.

Other than the pre-install Alienware software, there is not too much bloatware apart from McAfee and some smaller programs. Alienware’s software has some usual features in it but it could use a refresh as the UI is very dated, reminding me of a mid-2000’s graphics overclocking program.

Aurora R6 Performance & Benchmarks

Seeing as the Aurora R6 can be customised to your liking on the Dell website there are many different specifications to choose from which will mean difference performance ranges for each. However, regardless of what options are chosen you should get a decent experience form all of the even with the base model that costs £849 with the AMD Radeon RX 560 card or the £949 spec with the Nvidia 1060 Ti card.

The benchmarks and performance tests we show below for the Alienware Aurora R6 are going to be based on our review model which has an Intel i7-7700K processor, 16GB RAM and a single Nvidia GeForce 1080 Ti card with 11GB of RAM. Every specification you choose comes with Windows 10 64-bit Home preinstalled. We used 3D Mark for the benchmark tests as well as Geekbench 3 for some processor testing and overall performance.

3D Mark and Geekbench 3 Benchmark Results

We used the various Firestrike tests within 3D Mark to compare what they are like with other devices we have looked at in the past. For the Aurora R6, the Standard Firestrike mode scored a massive 19,517 which is easily the biggest score we have seen so far. It beats the Alienware 17 R4 by 3609 points. Take a look at some of the other result below.

Fire Strike – 19,517

Fire Stike Ultra – 11,842

Fire Strike 4K – 6,492

Geekbench 3 Single-core – 4,033

Geekbench 3 Multi-core – 16,501

Video Game Benchmark Results

Bioshock Infinite

Ultra 1920 x 1080 – 106 Min, 306 Max, 223 Avg

Very High 1920 x 1080 – Min 116, Max 400, Avg 297

High 1920 x 1080 – 119 Min, 396 Max, 265 Avg

Medium 1920 x 1080 – Min 160, 412 Max, 263 Avg

Dishonored 2

Ultra 1920 x 1080 – Min 67, Max 101, Avg 82

Very High 1920 x 1080 – Min 62, Max 120, Avg 84

High 1920 x 1080 – Min 101, Max 120, Avg 117

Medium 1920 x 1080 – Min 66 ,Max 120, Avg 100

Fallout 4

Ultra 1920 x 1080 – Min 225, Max 321, Avg 262

High 1920 x 1080 – Min 231, Max 311, Avg 277

Medium 1920 x 1080 – Min 232, Max 320, Avg 280

As you can see from the video games testing, the Aurora R6 handles itself very well in any situation we could throw at it. For 1080p gaming, it will and should last you a decent 4-5 years I reckon based on the test results. If you do decide to head onto 4K streaming, then the model we looked at is a good shout for some more high-end powerful gaming task, VR included.

Running all the games at their default settings was fine but there is definitely more frames you can squeeze out of this beast of a machine by tweaking them yourself. Taking away unnecessary bits such as bloom, knocking back antialiasing and tweaking rendering settings and texture details you can sometimes almost double what you’re getting.

If you really want to see the raw power of it, just put everything to low and see how many numbers you can conjure up when the Nvidia 1080 Ti is able to throw everything it has got as your game. I tried more games than on our list of benchmarks and really, anything I threw at it worked like a champ. Everything from Overwatch, The Evil Within 2, Battlefield 1 and Black Desert Online and Guild Wars 2. The damn thing is much better than my gaming PC which makes me very sad to have to return it.

What’s even better is the cooling is brilliant and very quiet, probably because of the powerful graphics card but the Alienware Aurora R6 never really felt like it was being pushed to the limit and did not need to cool itself down like my home gaming PC. I’ve got decent cooling inside my home PC, with Corsair water cooling but even with that, the card likes to power up and the additional fan on the water cooling likes to boot up when playing games like Battlefield 1. The Aurora on other hand it hardly ever felt like it was pumping in air to cool down the inner workings and when it was, it was fairly quiet.

If cooling is something you are big on, this is a decent PC to consider and the same goes for gamers who like to not have to worry about too much noise when in game worlds that are a little demanding. The one word of caution I’d mention is the lower end specs might not be as forgiving. So it is something to bear in mind.

Verdict

There’s really not much wrong with this machine, it has been very thought out in terms of design by looking at how well arranged the internals are. There’s a lot of power packed into the small frame and can be very deceiving how Dell has managed to fit it in while still keeping the cooling and airflow substantially good. Just as much care has been taken with the external, making it look like an Alienware branded machine without going too over the top with lighting and crazy angles.

If something has to be “wrong” I’d have to say the accessories should be better for the price your forking out for the machine when spending potentially thousands of pounds. Yes, Alienware has their separate keyboard and mouse but I think it would be a good shout to include a sub-variant of them. They don’t have to be as expensive to make but mechanical would be a good shout considering gamers are buying a gaming PC. Now the counter argument could be, they expect someone to have their own such as Razer or SteelSeries but if you also do PC gaming peripherals at least offer a bundle discount.

Really though, the Alienware Aurora R6 is bloody brilliant, the unit we reviewed is an excellent gaming desktop. For people who don’t want to spend massive amounts of cash, there’s a lot to tweak thanks to the wide range of configuration options. At the same time, there is also a lot of room to grow with space inside the machine to update at a later date really giving you longevity out of your purchase.

This is mainly down to the bespoke chassis Dell have designed that keeps a lot of powerful hardware in a compact but air friendly tower. It can easily be on top a desk instead of underneath and not look out of place or you could take it LAN as the size is easier to travel with but do bear in mind it is heavy.

Overall, there’s not much reason not to buy the Aurora gaming PC and thanks to Alienware’s well-known reputation for build quality, it should be a purchase to last you the next few years.