Save $600 Off the Alienware Area-51 RTX 5090 Gaming PC, Get a Free AMD Ryzen 9850X3D Upgrade

The Alienware Area-51 is Dell’s flagship gaming PC. Unveiled during last year’s CES, the Area-51 is a super-sized upgrade to the mainstream Aurora R16 system. The significantly larger chassis features more premium build quality and a redesigned cooling system with greater net airflow. In fact, this is the only model that Dell feels comfortable enough to equip 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 particular configuration is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D CPU, GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, 32GB or 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.

AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D is the best gaming CPU for most people

The AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D is considered to be one of the best gaming processors currently on the market and outperforms any Intel or AMD non-X3D chip in games thanks to AMD’s 3D-V-Cache technology. The 9850X3D replaces the 9800X3D as the best value for most gamers. Both chips are mostly identical but the 9850X3D has a 400Mhz faster boost clock (up to 5.6GHz), making it about 1%-5% faster in games. Dell is throwing this in for free, so why not?

Although the 9850X3D is an absolute speed demon for gaming, it only has eight cores. If you regularly use your PC for non-gaming applications that 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 $200.

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.

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.