RTX 5090 costs are so ludicrous that Alienware gaming PCs really really feel, dare I say, affordable

Brace your self. This Alienware Area 51 gaming PC is over $5,000. That is the type of cash I’ll possible by no means be capable of spend on a gaming PC, and admittedly, I would not advise most individuals achieve this. However, while updating our greatest gaming PC information, I used to be hit with the realisation that, for what you are paying, this really is not ludicrous. The horror, I do know.

Though the RTX 5090 MSRP is technically $1,999, it is not been unusual since launch to pay wherever between $2,400 and $3,000. As a outcome, we have been fortunate to identify RTX 5090 rigs underneath $4,500 (although there’s a fairly good $4,200 Cobratype deal on proper now). This is why, for $5,300 with an RTX 5090, Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, 64 GB of RAM, and a pair of TB of storage, Alienware have packed a beast of a PC into the Area-51 desktop we examined just lately.

Though you’d anticipate as such, we noticed monstrous scores in video games, like a mean fps of 256 in Cyberpunk 2077 on RT Medium and Quality Upscale. In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, we saw it get up to an average of 142 fps on Ultra. These are very nice scores and fitting of its price point.

The lack of an AMD option is disappointing, though. We saw the Corsair Vengeance A7500 (an RTX 5080 rig) outperform it in Baldur’s Gate 3, thanks to AMD’s 3D V-Cache CPUs. The Ultra 9 285K is a Cinebench wonder, and a pretty great productivity chip, but it’s a bit lacking in gaming. Our results still show quite a lot of power and good gaming performance, but the chip feels like a bottleneck in some games.

As well as this, though the Area-51 was touted as an upgradable Alienware rig, that claim comes with an asterisk. The PSU choice limits the potential motherboard upgrades severely, which means it’s likely that if you want to upgrade that motherboard, you will have to swap out the PSU too.

We saw excellent rendering scores in the likes of Blender, and importantly, its thermals make it the coolest rig we’ve tested in some time. The fan layout is a bit peculiar, as they’re all pointing inwards, and we saw a light improvement flipping them around, but it’s a mighty cool rig either way.

It’s also absolutely massive. It’s the kind of PC you walk up to and say, ‘yeah, that probably cost you a pretty penny’. Well, in this case, it’s 500,000 pennies.

If you’re on the lookout for a top-tier PC and have $5,000 lying around (that’s a big if), then the Alienware Area 51 is actually a very good rig, even though, as always, we’d advise hanging on for a sale. Alienware rigs tend to get discounts frequently, so you probably shouldn’t pay full price if you can stomach the wait.

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