When shopping for Black Friday gaming PC deals, it's about knowing which compromises to make for a deal. This Alienware Aurora R16 that Dell has discounted by $200 has the key parts I'd want off the shelf if I were buying fresh this year.
- We're curating all the best Black Friday PC gaming deals right here.
This build is very similar to the best Alienware build currently on our best gaming PCs (currently sold out), and for much cheaper by only stepping down to Nvidia's 4070 Ti GPU instead of the 4080. You can find a build with an RTX 4070 cheaper than this, but not often with the new enough 13thGen Raptor Lake processor that features in this build.
If I were getting my first gaming PC this year, or just stepping into a new system, getting a CPU and GPU together that shouldn't give me headaches anytime soon would be top priority. As a first gaming PC, that 1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe boot drive is plenty of room to play with for a while.
I couldn't squeeze my own system into that space these days, but the second PCIe NVMe M.2 slot this board has is the invitation to expand that I'm currently wishing my own system had.
As noted in our best PCs list, "Our major issue with recommending Alienware PCs now, however, is the bespoke hardware inside either locking you out of future upgrades, or locking you into an unnecessarily expensive upgrade path."
That's typically to do with Alienware's bespoke motherboards, cooling systems, and PSUs though, says our hardware managing editor Dave James. Check Dave's other thoughts on buying Alienware there, but this deal does fit his main warning of not buying the brand at full price.
