Over in Best Buy's, ahem, dads and grads sale, I've spotted an Alienware R10 Ryzen Edition gaming PC that combines some of AMD's top silicon today for just $1,600. That's a decent deal considering that card's a match for Nvidia's RTX 3080, and you get a sensibly spec'd PC around it as well.
My personal favourite GPU from AMD's RX 6000-series GPUs (I awarded it 90% in our review), the Radeon RX 6800 XT is an excellent card for 4K gaming. It comes with a generous 16GB of GDDR6 memory, quite a bit more capacity than either competing RTX 3080 model, and it doesn't struggle to push 60fps even at the more demanding 4K resolution.
To be honest, I wish you could still buy the RX 6800 XT for its original $649 MSRP, but that's not really the case anymore. Best Buy has a Gigabyte model going for $800 in its dads and grads sale (I was told not to mention the name of the sale by my editor because it sounds daft, so I'll do it a lot), which is an okay price if you really must purchase the card on its own.
We're looking at a holistic PC offer here in the dads and grads sale, though. That powerful GPU has been paired with a Ryzen 7 5800 for eight cores and 16-threads of processor performance. It's not quite the 'X' model we usually recommend in gaming PCs, but it's not far off as it's only moderately slower in terms of clock speeds. The TDP is lower at 65W, and those are pretty much the only differences between the two.
That CPU and GPU combo means you receive AMD's most up-to-date architectures in this one machine, RDNA 2 and Zen 3. Now we do know RDNA 3 and Zen 4 are expected later this year, but you probably won't find too many deals for those chips right off the bat. Personally, I wouldn't blame you for waiting to see how those chips fair—at least on the graphics side AMD could be really upping its ball game—but if you don't want to wait and save a little cash, this is a solid option.
A PC is more than a GPU and CPU glued together, however. There's also a 1TB SSD on this machine and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. Perhaps the best bit is that, unlike newer Alienware models we've looked at, it's my understanding that most of the parts on the R10 Ryzen Edition are a standard specification. It doesn't look the easiest machine to get into, but at least there's an upgrade path beyond Dell's own tech support if you need it. Though you will get that support if you need it.
This is just one deal I spotted over at Best Buy. There are another 1000 products or more on sale in its dads and grads sale for the next few days, so might be worth a scroll through if you're in the market for an upgrade.
Jacob has now been fired for repeated infringements of the 'dads and grads' embargo - Ed.
