If you’re seeking chart-topping gaming performance, then Alienware’s biggest and most powerful prebuilt should be high on your list. As part of a greater Dell Presidents Day Sale that started this week, the Alienware Area-51 AMD Ryzen X3D Edition RTX 5090 gaming PC has dropped in price from $5,650 down to $4,249.99 with free delivery. Prior to this sale, the lowest price I had seen for this exact configuration was $5,000.
Update: The price has dropped another $200 for Presidents Day.
Alienware Area-51 Ryzen Edition RTX 5090 Gaming PC
Alienware Area-51 AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D RTX 5090 Gaming PC (32GB/1TB)
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Alienware Area-51 AMD Ryzen 7 9950X3D RTX 5090 Gaming PC (32GB/1TB)
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The Alienware Area-51 is Dell’s flagship gaming PC. The product photos don’t give it due justice; this is a big chassis that towers over the Aurora R16 model with superior build quality and a redesigned cooling system with even greater airflow. This is the only model that can be configured with the hot and power hungry GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card. The first wave of Area-51 systems featured Intel CPUs exclusively, with AMD X3D options only available since late November.
This $4,450 config is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, 32GB of DDR5-6400MHz RAM, and a 1TB SSD. Additional system details include a 360mm all-in-one liquid cooling system for the CPU and a massive 1,500W 80Plus Platinum power supply that allows plenty of headroom for future upgrades.
The Area-51 is much more imposing than the Aurora R16.
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is the best gaming CPU for most people
…but you can also upgrade to the 9950X3D for a reasonable price
The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is considered to be one of the best gaming processors on the market and outperforms any Intel or AMD non-X3D chip in games thanks to AMD’s 3D-V-Cache technology. It only has eight cores, but that makes no difference in gaming since most games can’t utilize more than eight cores (if that) anyways. That’s why its gaming performance is nearly identical to the pricier 9900X3d and 9950X3D.
Now if you regularly use your PC for non-gaming applications that actually do benefit from as many cores as possible, then you can upgrade to an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D 16-core processor, which doubles the core count while offering similar gaming performance, for an additional $250. That’s actually very reasonable as far as CPU upgrades go; the difference in MSRP between a 9950X3D and 9980X3D is $220, so you’re only paying an extra $30 for the upgrade.
The RTX 5090 is the most powerful graphics card ever
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 has emerged as the most powerful consumer GPU on the market. Although with this generation Nvidia has prioritized software updates, AI features, and DLSS 4 technology to improve gameplay performance, the 5090 still boasts an impressive 25%-30% uplift over the RTX 4090 in hardware-based raster performance. If you want the absolute best performance for your gaming PC, there is literally no other option from any other brand.
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Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn’t hunting for deals for other people at work, he’s hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
