Alienware Area-51 9800X3D RTX 5090 PC on sale for $4,250

Alienware's flagship gaming PC is on sale

The Alienware Area-51 Ryzen X3D Edition gaming desktop with an RTX 5090 is on sale for $4,249.99. This is a $1,400 discount from its original price of $5,650.

This deal is part of the tail end of Dell's Presidents Day sales. Prior to this promotion, the lowest observed price for this specific configuration was $5,000.

What you get for the money

This configuration is Alienware's top-tier prebuilt system. It is built in the company's largest chassis, which is designed to accommodate high-power components and provide superior cooling over smaller models like the Aurora R16.

The sale price gets you the following specifications:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
• RAM: 32GB DDR5-6400MHz
• Storage: 1TB SSD
• Cooling: 360mm all-in-one liquid cooler for the CPU
• Power Supply: 1,500W 80Plus Platinum

The system is one of the few prebuilt models currently available with the power-hungry RTX 5090. AMD X3D processor options for the Area-51 line only became available in late November.

The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is a gaming powerhouse

The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is widely considered one of the best gaming CPUs available. Its 3D-V-Cache technology allows it to outperform both Intel and non-X3D AMD chips in most games.

It features eight cores, which is more than sufficient for gaming, as most titles cannot utilize more cores than that. Its gaming performance is nearly identical to the more expensive 9900X3D and 9950X3D models.

For users who need more cores for intensive non-gaming workloads, Alienware offers an upgrade to the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D for an additional $250. This is a relatively small markup over the parts' standalone price difference.

The RTX 5090 has no equal

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is the most powerful consumer graphics card on the market. It provides a 25%-30% performance uplift in traditional rasterization over the previous flagship, the RTX 4090.

Nvidia has also heavily focused on software and AI features with this generation, including DLSS 4. For maximum gaming performance in a prebuilt system, the RTX 5090 is currently the only option at this tier.