In case you missed it, we have new graphics cards on the way. And that can make dropping serious cash on a gaming PC worrisome. At least it normally would, but looking at the specs and price of this Alienware Aurora R10, you can be pretty sure that you're not going to be wracked with buyer's remorse after the fact.
For $1,400 you're looking at a machine that will handle 4K gaming at the highest settings. That's mainly thanks to the Radeon RX 6800 XT you'll find inside. This is AMD's best graphics card of this generation, and it's a card that is incredibly close to Nvidia's RTX 3080 in plenty of games.
There are a few exceptions, and it's fair to say that the RX 6800 XT isn't such a powerhouse at ray tracing, but those aside, this is certainly a worthy option. Given the price of the RTX 3080 still hasn't come down to the original MSRP, that's something you're just going to have to live with to hit this $1,400 price point.
Alienware has paired this with a Ryzen 7 5800 too, which is an extremely capable chip. You're looking at an eight-core, 16-thread CPU that can hit 4.6GHz at Max Boost, which will absolutely keep your GPU busy. It'll also handle more mundane tasks with ease. And while AMD has just released its new Zen 4 chips, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this processor, particularly when it comes to gaming.
The rest of the specification is healthy too, with 16GB of DDR4-3466, a 1TB NVMe SSD and a 1TB hard drive for your vast games library. The only mark against this build is that the RAM is a single 16GB stick, which means you won't be getting the full benefit of the dual-channel memory controller. That's one frustrating negative on an otherwise solid system. Ideally, you'd want to add another stick further down the line to unlock this system's true performance.
Overall, this is a lot of gaming machine for the money. One that comes in cheaper than the brand new thing, i.e. the RTX 4090 which costs at least $1,599, and yet is still capable of hitting great frame rates at 4K.
