Hey all, I'm in the market for a used Alienware Alpha, with the intention of using GoG as my primary games outlet(not using Steam at all) and I have a few questions about general usage for those that have an Alpha

Before I get too much into it, I'd like to say that, while I appreciate advice about PC's in general, please don't try and convert me or tell me to build my own. I don't have time to explain it all, but the Alpha form factor and overall design suits my personal situation perfectly.

Now that we have that out of the way, my intention is to get a used R1 or R2 model with an i3 processor. I tend to play a lot of indie games, which I know this can handle fine, here are the main things I want to know:

1: I'm not a graphics snob and don't need the best Fidelity settings, but what kind of GoG games could I expect the base model Alpha to run *acceptably*, beyond indie games? Some of my current interests include the Witcher series, Dragon's Dogma, Assassin's Creed and Dead Space, although I want to know more about other games in general as well

2: How do DRM free games or even the GoG Galaxy client work with the Hivemind UI of the Alpha? Once everything has been installed, will accessing my GoG games with a gamepad/controller be viable?

I appreciate any help you can give me. Thus far, my experience with the GoG community has been amazing!

so I'm looking at the stats on that thing.

the gpu for starters is weak. it has an implementation of gm107, otherwise known as the 750 ti. while is a full gm107, the gpuz screenshot I saw

here https://hardforum.com/threads/fs-t-alienware-alpha-r1-upgraded-i3.1907709/

shows it as having no boost clock of about 1070-1080 mhz, and shows it as having 6 or gpbs less bandwidth due to that lower memory clock.

something older like dead space, you'll be fine with. dragon's dogma, no idea. but this pc would struggle with witcher 3. how much I'm not sure. look at reviews of the 750 ti, preferably with an i3 (youtube is a good place to find weird hardware combinations. review sites generally pair whatever is being reviewed to a top-level environment for different reasons), to get a general ballpark idea. if the specs of this machine match what I found in that link, then it's also got an 8~% drop in memory performance and a 3-5% drop in gpu core performance than a 750 ti.

basically, this machine has no future proofing whatsoever. it's constructed of lower-end mainstream stuff from 2014. and while there isn't a lot of movement in CPUs and a haswell CPU is a piece of technology people purchase with a pretty long timeframe in mind, a 750ti is not like that.

I checked one youtube video right now with an i3 4150 and 750ti and on a mix of medium-high settings it was running W3 at 30fps~ with regular drops below down to 27ish. not really good.

you see because nvidia has the videogames hardware space by the throat outside of consoles, there's been a lot of margins. nvidia is of course nvidia, so there's also this constant goings on of payola behind the scenes garbage, and so there is a massive disparity, just fucking massive, right now with the kind of machines these games are being developed on. the people that have that stuff is really niche, and people are continuously locking in on stuff that's actually a fair bit behind, even though artificially in market terms it's not being presented this way.

anyway, W3 will be kind of bad. also I just checked on dragons and it seems at high settings you're gonna get 40~ fps usually. apparently it runs 60+ with medium settings. newer indie and midlevel games are a crapshoot see because although they won't have AAA engines or assets, they won't have AAA optimization (optimization in 2017 amirite) done either. and usually they'll use newer shaders and things that something older than the games isn't as efficient with.

so anyhoo. anything old or blatantly indie it'll do fine. anything new, don't expect anything better than middling settings.

I have an R1 I3 with 8gb of RAM. I can confirm that it runs Witcher 3 (and 2) at fairly high settings - on Witcher 3, you'll have to tinker a bit to get best results, of course. Dragon's Dogma, no problem. Dead Space, no problem. Haven't played Assassin's Creed beyond the first one but I see no reason it can't run it even though Ass1 was very poorly optimized. Basically, every relatively high end game I've tried on it has run on at least decent graphical settings. Usually you just turn off something like the advanced hair effects and you're good.

I can't really tell you about the Hivemind UI because I never use it - I use my Alpha as a really tiny desktop PC instead of a living room PC. I think I tried messing around with it at one point, just to see if it would recognize my GOG games and some of my other stuff, but for some reason it didn't work and I wasn't motivated to unlock the secret. Sorry about that. Maybe it would be easier now, with the R2's out, since Galaxy has been out for a bit?

Alienware, the name in overpriced hardware, macs aside. Me, I would recommend pcspecialist, but that's a uk company I think.

Ah, this is the kind of first hand info I want to know. Thank you! I'll have to keep looking into the Hivemind stuff, but the performance you mentioned is definitely on the higher end of what I was expecting.

As of now, I can find your model for cheap, hence why I'm debating getting one. I also have a PS4 to supplement my "AAA" fix for most titles (I'm only getting Witcher series for the alpha as direct support for CDPR/GoG, cuz they're amazing!). This will mostly be used for indies, classic games and last gen console ports, so the power seems to be fine for that... For now. If I end up loving the Alpha, I'm sure I'll end up getting a higher end model later down the line, depending.

And @johnnygoging I appreciate the detailed reply, truly. First hand experience is more useful to me, but don't think that means your reply was wasted.

Okey I won't.
Just buy an used PC already built by someone else and name it ALPHA instead of buying overpriced crap.

Yeah, my playing habits are similar, which is why I'm not too bothered about being able to run bleeding edge stuff. I've uninstalled W3 for a while now but IIRC I ended up keeping many settings at high and then dropping the resolution down to 16x9, and I was happy with the results, although you might prefer something different (lower detail/higher framerate or what have you). A couple of other recent-ish big games I've played without issue: Shadow of Mordor ran well; Alien Isolation runs very well (ultra settings!); the new Doom was surprisingly good...Sleeping Dogs, Arkham City, Mirror's Edge, Darksiders, Alan Wake, and Binary Domain ran fine although I guess those are getting old now :) I don't recall playing any major indie games that have given it much problem... Good luck!

Yay :3

Thank you again. I think the R1/i3 will suit my purposes just fine then! Well, unless I can find an R2 for super cheap during holiday sales... But that's a different story haha

Also, I hear most Alpha owners up the RAM and get a SSD to help with performance/speed. I'm sure I'll do that, but did you end up going that route as well?

I got 8 gb of RAM instead of the 4 that was standard, but I stuck with a regular 1 tb hard drive. I have read that a lot of people with the system go for the SSD to speed things up.