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.
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.
With ray tracing enabled in Cyberpunk 2077, the differences were also stark, with it beating its nearest competitor by at more than 20 percent.
Overall, this is about as powerful of a gaming desktop as you can get.
