Dell's Presidents Day sale keeps rolling on, and it has a ton of gaming desktops and laptops still on sale for the rest of today only. While there is a lot of Alienware configurations to choose from, this mid-tier Aurora R8 gaming desktop stood out to us the most when comparing the on-sale price to its specs. $949.99 is just under the sweet spot for any DIY desktop, but instead of going with an AMD processor and graphics card to keep the cost below $1,000, you get an Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU with this one.
This Alienware Aurora R8 comes stacked with an Intel Core i5-9400 (6-core/12-thread, up to 4.1GHz), GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB GDDR6, 16GB dual channel DDR4 2666MHz RAM, and 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD. While we'd prefer a 1TB SSD, you can upgrade this later, or go with Dell's dual drive option at no extra cost—but that gets you a 256GB SSD as your primary drive and a 2TB 7200RPM HDD as your secondary.
However, if you want to keep the cost at $949.99, you can always bump the graphics card down to a GTX 1660 and bump up the storage capacity to a 512GB SSD primary drive and a 1TB 7200RPM HDD secondary drive. The GTX 1660 Ti is about 18 to 20 percent faster than the GTX 1660, so it's up to you what is more important: GPU speed, or more storage space. Either option makes for a great gaming desktop, though.
