It's pretty rare to score an Alienware system for around the cost of parts (or less), though it happens on occasion. Now is one of those times. Dell is offering a 17 percent coupon code on its Alienware Aurora desktop, and part for part, it's about equivalent to what you'd spend building your own.
The configuration in question is marked down to $1,734.59, versus Dell's "estimated value" of $1,769.99. Coupon code EXTRA17 knocks the price down to $1,439.71. That's $330 below the list price, and $294.88 below the discounted price. So, what does that include? Compared to the Aurora R8 that we anointed as one of the best gaming PCs, this is a refreshed model with a new look and superior hardware.
As configured, this PC sports an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X processor (8 cores/16-threads, 3.6GHz to 4.4GHz, 32MB L3 cache), Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics card, 16GB of HyperX Fury DDR4-2666 RAM, and a 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD.
If you factor in the cost of Windows ($100), you're looking at around $1,250 for the same part selection on Newegg, and that does not include the case, power supply, or motherboard. Add those in and you could easily exceed the after-coupon asking price.
In short, now is the time to pounce if you've always wanted an Alienware PC, but didn't want to pay a significant premium for one. Also bear in mind that you can customize the configuration with different CPU, RAM, GPU, and storage options.
