Alienware has picked up a bit of a name for itself for being, well, kinda expensive and hard to upgrade. Though that latter point is still partly true of its Aurora rigs, it's hard not to ignore how reasonably priced they are this Cyber Monday.
- We're curating all the Cyber Monday PC gaming deals right here
Starting off with the most important part, the RTX 5080 is a powerful card, and Multi Frame Gen is excellent, too. It's only a 15% bump over the RTX 4080 in raw performance, and MFG isn't universal, but it's hard to argue that it's not a powerful high-end GPU. And given you will pay $1,000 for one by itself, getting a full rig for under $2,000 is a solid saving.
The Intel Core Ultra 7 265F CPU has 20 cores (8 Performance and 12 Efficient) and a max boost frequency of 5.3 GHz. Launched earlier this year, you're getting good productivity performance, though AMD's offerings beat out this range for gaming. Intel being lumped with Alienware's rig (with no options to swap to AMD) still remains a bit of a disappointment, but you're still getting a fast CPU here.
What makes this deal so good isn't just the base price but how cheap it is to upgrade via Dell's site. You can double the RAM up to 32 GB, which is what I've done above, and it's entirely free to bump that SSD from 1 TB to 2 TB.
As far as I can see right now, the closest rig to this one out there is Lenovo's Legion Tower 7i, at $2,200. You're getting a similar CPU, the same graphics card, the same capacity of memory, and the Legion has its 2 TB of storage split between two drives, where the Alienware uses just the one. All this is to say, my money would be going on the Aurora.
A caveat worth mentioning with the Aurora is that, despite being easier to upgrade than the previous model, it still contains proprietary components, and that makes it harder to upgrade than a pre-built made out of stock parts. As well as that, AMD CPU rigs offer the best gaming performance right now, so you'll take a hit to your frames when compared to some other rigs.
However, what is undeniable is that getting such a beefy GPU (worth more than half the price of the rig by itself) paired with all those other components for under $2,000 makes this one of the standout deals of Cyber Monday so far. And with memory shortages threatening the supply of all manner of PC components going forward, it's a solid time to make that investment.
👉Check out all of Amazon's gaming PC deals here👈
1. Best gaming laptop: Razer Blade 16
2. Best gaming PC: HP Omen 35L
3. Best handheld gaming PC: Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS ed.
4. Best mini PC: Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT
5. Best VR headset: Meta Quest 3
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