You wouldn't normally pick one of Alienware's most powerful rigs as a value proposition. But a perfect storm of season sales and a spike in Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU pricing has left this Alienware Aurora R15 looking like quite the relative steal with $600 sliced off for Cyber Monday and a final sticker price of $3,299.
A key contextual touch point here is that RTX 4090s alone are going for about $2k right now, what with the rush to important a boat load of them into China before export restrictions prevent any further examples of Nvidia's most powerful gaming GPU from heading that way—legally at least.
Moreover, head over to Newegg and you find that the very cheapest pre-built PC with an RTX 4090 is only a couple of hundred dollars cheaper. And that'll be from a PC builder you've never heard of in a generic case.
- We're curating all the best Cyber Monday PC gaming deals right here.
This particular Alienware has 32GB of RAM and a somewhat small 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD? Plus an Intel Core i9 13900KF CPU. Oh, OK, Intel now does 14th Gen desktop CPUs. But the 14900K is a major disappointment and, as Jacob concluded, doesn't improve much on the 13900K is at all.
The RAM is dual 32GB sticks, too, allow scope for another 32GB to be dropped in. It's not the fastest DDR5, but it is at least DDR5. This rig also uses Alienware's R15 case, which has much more of a spacey Alienware vibe than the R16 chassis. The latter is an awfully generic square box, which you can see below.
The R15 case has some pretty trick cable management, plus AlienFX lighting. Elsewhere, there's a 1,350W Lunar Light 80 Plus Platinum PSU and Alienware Cryo-tech Edition CPU Liquid Cooling.
Of course, rigs like this will always be an anathema to anyone who prefers to build their own PC. But if you're looking for something ready made, the fact that you can get this slick Alienware machine for the same price as a generic box from a boutique PC building brand of zero provenance is pretty darn compelling.
