The RTX 5090 is Nvidia's top-of-the-line card, which makes it the fastest consumer graphics card you can buy right now. But can you actually buy it? Most places are sold out of the RTX 5090 and prices from scalpers on eBay range from $3,400 to more than $4,000 for a card that's supposed to sell for around $1,999.
Fortunately, you can get a fully-loaded Alienware Area-51 desktop with an RTX 5090 inside for not much more than the bare card. For $4,899, reduced from $5,499, during Memorial Day weekend, you can get an Area-51 with a Core Ultra 9 285K CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, a 2TB SSD, a 1,500-watt power supply, Alienware's snazzy case and that RTX 5090 you've been dreaming of.
Alienware Area-51 Desktop with RTX 5090: was $5499, now $4899 at Dell Dell has this fully-loaded Alienware Area-51 for $600 off its list price. This config has a Core Ultra 9 285K CPU, 2TB SSD, 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1500W PSU in addition to the 5090 graphics.
We had a chance to review a similarly-configured Alienware Area-51 with RTX 5090 inside and came away impressed with its performance. In the review, we compared it to RTX 4090-powered desktops we had tested in the past.
At 1080p, the Area-51's Core Ultra 9 285K CPU held it back a little bit in comparison to competitors with the better but older Core i9-14900K processor. But when you step up to 4K resolution, you see more of a difference between the old and the new.
On Red dead Redemption 2, It scored 109 fps at Medium Settings (this is a very demanding title) , eclipsing competitors at that resolution by at least 29 fps.
(Image credit: Dell)
With ray tracing enabled in Cyberpunk 2077, the differences were also stark, with it beating its nearest competitor by at more than 20 percent.
(Image credit: Dell)
Overall, this is about as powerful of a gaming desktop as you can get.
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Avram Piltch is Managing Editor: Special Projects. When he's not playing with the latest gadgets at work or putting on VR helmets at trade shows, you'll find him rooting his phone, taking apart his PC, or coding plugins. With his technical knowledge and passion for testing, Avram developed many real-world benchmarks, including our laptop battery test.
That's a pretty crappy CPU to pair with the 5090. A much better choice would have been the 9800X3D or 9950X3D. I take it, those Area 51's are not flying off the shelf if they are already seeing massive discounts.
