The best high-end prebuilt PCs command premium prices, but that doesn't mean you can't find great deals that will still save you a lot of money. In many cases, you can get a prebuilt for less than the cost of building a comparable DIY system. As part of its currently ongoing Alienware Black Friday Sale, Dell is offering an Alienware Aurora R16 GeForce RTX 4090 gaming PC for $2,999.99 after a $1,000 off instant discount. A standalone RTX 4090 GPU will run you $1,800 by itself, which means building your own DIY PC could easily run you the same price or more. Although building your own PC certainly has its merits, a prebuilt gaming PC is ready to go out of the box with an all-inclusive warranty.
Alienware Aurora R16 RTX 4090 Gaming PC
This Alienware Aurora R16 gaming PC is equipped with an Intel Core i9-14900KF CPU, GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, 64GB of DDR5-5200MHz RAM, and a 2TB NVMe SSD. The 14th gen Intel Core i9-14900KF is the most powerful consumer Intel CPU you can get right now. The chip is known to run pretty hot, but fortunately it's cooled by a robust 240mm all-in-one liquid cooler. The entire system is powered by an energy efficient 1000W 80PLUS Platinum power supply.
The RTX 4090 is likewise the most powerful GPU on the market. No other video card, either from NVIDIA or from AMD, comes close. In his RTX 4090 review, Chris Coke writes "The RTX 4090 may be huge and expensive, but holy smokes if it doesn’t blow the competition out of the water... Until the rest of the pack can catch up, between its impressive hardware specs and its DLSS 3 AI wizardry, even the $1,599 price doesn’t seem unreasonable for the unrivaled frame rates that this card can crank out." You'll be able to run any game in 4K with ultra settings and ray tracing enabled and still pump out high framerates, even the newest, most demanding titles like Black Myth: Wukong or Warhammer Space Marine 2.The 4090 is also the consumer card of choice for AI thanks to its 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM.
A note on Alienware's newest "R16" desktop chassis
The R16 is Alienware's current 2024 desktop PC design. It's 40% smaller in volume compared to previous iterations. It features a simple yet proven airflow pattern; air is drawn in through the side intake vents over the GPU area and a 120mm fan at the front of the case, and exhausts by way of a 120mm rear fan and two 120mm top fans. A 240mm radiator for the all-in-one liquid cooling system is mounted to these top fans. Some configurations don't actually include the liquid cooling system, but we rarely include them in this roundup. That's because Alienware's liquid cooling solution is far superior to their stock air cooling and is easily worth the price premium.
More Alienware Black Friday Gaming PC Deals
Alienware isn't the only brand that's on sale for Black Friday. Check out all of the best gaming PC deals from vendors like Best Buy, Amazon, and Walmart. I promise you, there are some spectacular deals in there. If you want to stick with an OEM manufacturer, HP has a Black Friday Sale going on right now as well.
Should You Wait for Black Friday?
In most cases, we would say that Black Friday has the best deals of the year. Dell, however, is quite the opposite. Dell likes to push its best Black Friday deals well in advance of Black Friday, sometimes even as early as October. There are very specific "doorbuster" deals that go live on Black Friday, but they aren't necessarily on gaming PCs. If you find a great deal on a configuration that's exactly what you're looking for at a price you're happy with, you should jump on it early.
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.
