I must be getting old. Alienware, to my mind at least, are known for two things. One, making some excellent gaming gear, and two, often pricing said gaming gear so high that it's difficult to recommend in the face of cheaper alternatives. But knock me down with a feather, because the cheapest RTX 50-series gaming laptop we can find this Prime Day is this Alienware RTX 5060 machine for $1,100, and it's causing a bit of a stir.
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Let's have a closer look at the specs, then, and see if we can figure out why this particular Alienware lappy is so reasonably priced. Well, for a start, it's got the 85 W version of the RTX 5060, which is going to be down on power compared to some of its more high-wattage competition.
And it's also got a 1600p display. Now, while that might sound grand on paper, it's worth mentioning that the mobile RTX 5060 (particularly a low-wattage variant) is likely to struggle to push lots of pixels at such a resolution in demanding games, at least at native.
That being said, we now live in a world of DLSS 4 upscaling and Multi Frame Generation, two things all RTX 50-series GPUs support that can boost frame rates massively. We've seen a lot of interest around this particular lappy on our best Amazon Prime Day gaming laptop deals page, so is this a sign that MFG's AI-boosted frame rates are beginning to sway buyers into considering more budget machines?
Certainly, it's going to be required to get the most out of this laptop. Not that that's a bad thing. For what it's worth, I don't buy into the "fake frames, boo" narrative that seems to be pervasive in certain parts of the community at the moment. DLSS and AI frame generation work well, for the most part, although latency does become an issue when you're this far down the stack. It's something to be aware of with RTX 5060 machines, at least.
Or, is it the idea of owning an Alienware machine for budget prices that's captivating interest? Or perhaps it's as simple as gaming laptops are expensive in general at the moment, and times are economically hard, and gamers are simply looking to buy the cheapest decent gaming laptop they can get their hands on, whatever the brand?
Regardless, I have nothing against this particular machine. It's a good deal, no doubt, and the rest of the specs sheet looks excellent. You get a 10-core, 16-thread Intel CPU, 32 GB of RAM (a blessed relief, as most budget gaming laptops make do with 16 GB) and a 1 TB SSD. All as it should be.
But I keep staring at that xeno logo, and marvelling at how the times have changed. Alienware might not be associated with budget gaming hardware just yet, but a few more deals like this on reasonably-specced machines, and who knows? Stranger things have happened in this topsy-turvy world, after all.
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👉Check out our list of guides👈
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5. Best VR headset: Meta Quest 3
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