Alienware Aurous R11 3080 i9 10900k (advice on moving to new case/mobo/cooling)

[treepop]

Hey all. I ended up getting an Alienware because of the graphics card shortage.

I9 10900K
3080
Aoruos R11

I just realized this stupid motherboard doesn't support 16x PCIE

I'm thinking of replacing the motherboard. I don't need more than 5ghz (what Im getting now)

I've upgraded the cooling to use 3 corsair ML 120 pro fans. It's quieter but not that cool.

I'm also thinking of upgrading the cooling, but doubt I can do that in this case, so I'm thinking of a new case as well. I'm trying to save as much money as possible and salvage all the parts I can, so plan to reuse the PSU. Would love the communities feedback on this.

So in short. What's the cheapest way I can get out of this config and into a rig that's cooler and has at least PCIE 16x?

*EDIT*
Cheapest 2 mother boards I could find were ASUS Prime Z490-P and GIGABYTE Z490 UD

 

[EarthDog]

There's this...
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-pci-express-scaling/27.html

...very little difference in the first place. After seeing that, do you think it's worth it? Especially choosing the cheapest mobo you can find?

Edit: I'm not sure what size mobo those Alienware fit in the first place... is it matx inside that weird chassis?

 

[Joe88]

How did a mb that shipped with a 10900k not support pcie 16x? According to this only the bottom slot is 16x
https://www.dell.com/support/manual...8b8297-1691-4f29-a8cc-156cf0892e7a&lang=en-us

Edit so its an 8x slot but its 3.0
https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware-Desktops/PCIe-slot-running-at-x8/td-p/6102468

According to that same bandwidth as 16x 2.0
You would have to test if the 3080 would get bottlenecked though, I knew the older 1000 series were fine but no idea if the 3000 series are fine

 

[EarthDog]

How did a mb that shipped with a 10900k not support pcie 16x? According to this only the bottom slot is 16x
https://www.dell.com/support/manual...8b8297-1691-4f29-a8cc-156cf0892e7a&lang=en-us

Both slots are full-length (x16). Both slots are wired electrically as x8. There are no x16 (electrical) slots on that board.

I also mis-spoke above. With your 10th gen CPU, the top slot is PCIe 3.0. You'd need an 11th gen CPU for PCIe 4.0 on that top slot.


EDIT: You ninja edited after my post, Joe. I already linked to testing on this with a 3080.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-pci-express-scaling/27.html

 

[Joe88]

Yeah sorry, I saw after I made a mistake, didnt see you replied.
Considering the price of these machines, its ridiculous how much they cheap out with the mobo.



So theoretically you are at 96% performance of the card per the charts in earthdog's link
Using the top pcie 8x slot which is gen 3.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Check for odd connections from the motherboard to the case and case fans before buying one. Alienware/Dell in the past have done that.

 

[EarthDog]

Great point! The first thing I looked at. All connectors are standard. 24-pin, 8-pin EPS, fans, etc.

 

[treepop]

Okay. I don’t see any weird connectors. Reading the other comments, it looks like I’m losing out on around 4% Performace. Which is pretty frustrating.

Another frustrating thing is this motherboard doesn’t allow the CPU to run like a normal 10900k. 3.6ghz to boost up to 5.3ghz when needed. It comes default at 4.8ghz all the time or I can alter the overclock to overclock all cores to another speed. So I settled at 5ghz. Which is the highest I can get with it. Throttling. Would rather it act normal and boost to 5.3 when needed.

I guess my question is. Should I just leave it at all alone and not upgrade. Leaving all cores locked at 5ghz pushing high 80c under load and run my 3080 at 96% of its potential?

 

[EarthDog]

4% is nothing, really...you'd be hardpressed to notice without a FPS counter honestly...

4.8 GHz is the all core/thread stock speed. Maybe load optimized defaults from the bios and Hwinfo... let it run in the background and then look at the max clocks.

Again 96% of a 3080 is still better than 99% of cards out there. If 4% loss is frustrating, then your option is to buy another motherboard. Is that 4% worth it? Not to me......but, I'm not asking the question either, lol.

 

[Janus67]

Agreed with Joe. 4%, depending on resolution and total fps may be 2-3 fps. If that is worth essentially rebuilding your whole machine then that's up to you. I personally wouldn't bother

 

[treepop]

Maybe a dumb question, but would it be worth it if I could just replace the mobo and put in a ASUS PRIME Z590M-PLUS? For PCIE 4.0 16x. Sell my 10900k and buy a 11900k? Total out of pocket $200?

 

[EarthDog]

That's not up to us. If you can use the IPC increase and don't care about the core/thread loss (10c/20t to 8c/16t) and the 4% you get with 4.0 x16 is worth your $200. Go for it.

That said, I wonder about buying (almost) the cheapest board possible for the job. I wouldn't do that... but you can get away with it at stock speeds. Not sure about that board and overclocking.