SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Fire / ignition

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20250808-82195-2147328824. Severity: Incident, No Injury. Product: Alienware (Dell) Aurora R10 (Alienware Aurora R10 desktop PC). Incident: While gaming in November 2024, my Alienware Aurora R10 desktop PC froze, then went black and became unresponsive. I was forced to cut power at the surge protector. Upon restarting, white smoke poured out of the PC. I opened the case and found a burnt capacitor and blackened PCB on the RTX 3080 GPU. Dell replaced the GPU and retrieved the failed one. However, the replacement GPU is now showing the same symptoms (freezing, black screens, requires emergency shutdown) and occurs 2-3 times per hour in August 2025. I believe this is a repeat safety hazard tied to Dell's OEM RTX 3080 design. This defect poses a risk of fire or electrical damage inside the home. I am requesting Dell to escalate this as a systemic issue and not just replace it again with the same model. When the incident first happened white smoke FILLED my house. I had to evacuate my fianc and our dog and crawl back in to cut the power. Our home smelled like burnt plastic for MONTHS. When Dell responded so promptly telling me they would send a new graphics card and send a out a specialist to install it I figured it was a one off thing and I was happy they resolved it. Now that it is happening again and I am seeing some people online report a similar experience I have reason to believe that they have sold thousands of graphics cards with the wrong capacitor which, under load, bursts and turns into an arc welder starting an electrical fire. If you [REDACTED] "White cloud of smoke coming out of aurora alienware" you will see someone else's experience. They had him ship the entire computer in to replace his card. Dell