Later today, Dell is going to slash the price of a particular Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 gaming desktop outfitted with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card. As configured, it has an 'estimated value' of $1,889.99. But with the discount in play, it will drop all the way to $1,199.99 when the deal unlocks.
Dell has taken the unusual step of posting the deal page ahead of time, with a banner that reads, "Stay tuned! This deal starts Feb 11 at 4:00 pm EST." Usually Dell reserves these kinds of heads up notifications for its door buster discounts ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 | Ryzen 7 3700X | GeForce RTX 3070 | 16GB RAM | 512GB SSD | $1,889.99 $1,199.99 at Dell (save $690)
The discounted price is less than what it could cost to build the exact same PC (with the cost of Windows 10 factored in). But just as importantly, it comes with a hard-to-find GeForce RTX 3070, in a well-rounded PC. The deal goes live on February 11 at 4:00 pm ET, and is likely to sell out fast.
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Dell's estimated value on this one is rather high, on a part for part basis. However, as discounted the entire kit is comparable to, and even a little cheaper than going the DIY route. Or a lot cheaper if you factor in street pricing for the still-elusive RTX 3070. As has been the case for a bit now, the best way to get a current-generation graphics card without getting ripped off is by buying a complete PC.
This configuration mates the RTX 3070 to an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X processor with eight cores and 16 threads clocked at 3.6GHz (base) to 4.4GHz (max boost), along with 32MB of L3 cache. It's based on AMD's previous generation Zen 2 architecture, and while not the latest and greatest, it is still an excellent CPU for gaming.
Other hardware includes 16GB of HyperX Fury DDR4-2933 RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD. I wish the SSD was a bit more capacious, though in lieu of a bigger primary drive, there's an option to add a 1TB HDD (7200 RPM) for $50 more.
My hunch is this will sell out pretty fast when the deal goes live, given the scarcity of GeForce RTX 30-series hardware and current pricing—there's a separate link to buy the exact same configuration right now at Dell for $1,665.99 (save $224 over the estimated value). The upshot is there are more customization options (for example, you can configure up to a 2TB SSD, with or without an HDD for bulk storage), but the starting price is several hundred dollars higher than the upcoming discount.