If you're wondering where and how to buy an RTX 3080 or RTX 3070 card, your chances of succeeding in what's left of 2020 seem slim. Most stores are constantly sold out of the GPUs and barring extremely good luck, you may be waiting until sometime in Q1 of next year to get your card. But what if you are willing to buy rather than build your RTX 3000-series powered desktop?
If you order the Alienware Aurora R10 or R11 desktop PC, you could be playing Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K with ray-tracing on (see Cyberpunk 2077 system requirements) when the year's most-anticipated game launches in early December.
And believe it or not, Dell has the Aurora configurations with RTX 3080 and 3070 on significant Cyber Monday sales. So, not only are you getting the card, but you're also getting a discount of as much as $237 off the list price when you use the coupon code WEEKEND10 at checkout.
The cheapest RTX 3080-enabled Alienware desktop is the Aurora R11 for $1772. However, at that bare minimum price, you only get 8GB of RAM and 1TB hard drive to go with the Core i7-10700F CPU. A more-realistic minimum config involves the same CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD for $1931. The WEEKEND10 coupon seems to only work on custom configurations and some, but not all ready-made configs.
Alienware makes two models of Aurora with the new RTX cards inside. The Aurora R10 uses AMD Ryzen 3000-series processors while the R11 has 10th Gen Intel CPUs. Otherwise, the two are pretty much identical.
The prices listed below are starting prices, but all the models are configurable with higher-end processors, more RAM and more storage. When I checked my zip code, the estimated shipping dates ranged from December 8th to December 17th, depending on whether I wanted to pay extra to a little extra ($25) expedite.
Alienware Aurora R11 with RTX 3070, 3080
The base specs of the Alienware Aurora R11 with RTX 3070 and 3080 aren't bad. The Core i7-10700KF can turbo up to 5.1 GHz and it has 8 cores. However, if you're spending more than $2,000 on a computer, you should probably have more than 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.
We recommend spending $196 to step up to the Core i9-10900F, $196 to double the RAM and $147 to get a 1TB SSD with a 1TB hard drive as well. Or again, you could upgrade with your own parts after buying and save some money.
Alienware Aurora R10 with RTX 3070, 3080
While the Aurora R10 isn't available with the new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs yet, it has a selection of Ryzen 3000 chips available. The base configuration has a Ryzen 7 3700X CPU that has 8 cores and a boost clock of 4.4 GHz.
However, you can configure with a more powerful processor, going all the way up to the Ryzen 9 3950X for an extra $784. We recommend splurging an extra $147 for the Ryzen 7 3800X (8-cores, 4.5 GHz boost) or Ryzen 7 3800XT (8-cores, 4.7 GHZ boost).
We'd also pay $196 extra to move up to 32GB of RAM and $147 to get a 1TB SSD with a 1TB hard drive for data. Or you could just add more storage or RAM on your own after buying.
For more savings, check our list of best Cyber Monday deals overall, best Cyber Monday monitor deals, best Cyber Monday SSD deals, best Cyber Monday CPU deals, best Cyber Monday graphics card deals, best Cyber Monday laptop deals, best Cyber Monday gaming PC deals and best Cyber Monday Raspberry Pi deals.
