I am looking into the black friday Alienware R16 deals and I am extremely tempted to buy their RTX 4080 package with the i9 14900F CPU (they don't offer the Ryzen CPUs). All the reviews I have seen when it comes to these new Alienware desktops have been primarily positive. People speak of good cooling, however, I don't know how many of them use it for flight sim. 

I was wondering if anybody had an R16 and what your cooling is like? When you look under the hood with these desktops, everything seems so crammed in that it seems impossible there would be any efficient cooling and that makes me nervous when using it for the purpose of FS which takes a lot of CPU/GPU power. 

Thanks for the help!

Hey there.  Just so you know,  reddit has an unofficial alienware page with lots of folks who are sporting the r16 and are very happy with it.    

R16 4080 would be a great package,  not with the i9 though,  you don't need it,  the i7-kf variant will run cooler and still more then loads of power for the 4080,  even a 4090.     

Note:  ensure you update the bios to the latest to repair the CPU issue,   most likely this will come updated out of the box,  but check anyway, after that your solid    

Personally speaking,   i would go with the  i714700kF with 4080,   I would also avail of dells fantastic accident insurance,  its expensive but well worth it and i have used it in the past,  its at the bottom of the list called "premium support"

Edited November 12, 20241 yr by Poppet

1 hour ago, Poppet said:

Hey there.  Just so you know,  reddit has an unofficial alienware page with lots of folks who are sporting the r16 and are very happy with it.    

R16 4080 would be a great package,  not with the i9 though,  you don't need it,  the i7-kf variant will run cooler and still more then loads of power for the 4080,  even a 4090.     

Note:  ensure you update the bios to the latest to repair the CPU issue,   most likely this will come updated out of the box,  but check anyway, after that your solid    

Personally speaking,   i would go with the  i714700kF with 4080,   I would also avail of dells fantastic accident insurance,  its expensive but well worth it and i have used it in the past,  its at the bottom of the list called "premium support"

Thanks for your reply. 

Unfortunately, I cannt get the i7 config on their website, they only offer the i9 for the higher series GPUs. However, i did read more into the CPU issue and it seems as if the problems only lie with the "K" variant. Do you know if this is correct as well?