by Over in the Best Buys, ahem, dads and grads sales, I’ve seen an Alienware R10 Ryzen Edition gaming PC that combines some of AMD’s best silicon today for just $ 1600 (opens in new tab). It’s a good deal considering that the card fits Nvidia’s RTX 3080 (opens in new tab)and you get a sensibly specified PC around it as well.
My personal favorite GPU from AMD’s RX 6000 Series GPUs (I rated it 90% in our review), Radeon RX 6800 XT (opens in new tab) is an excellent card for 4K gaming. It comes with a generous 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, quite a bit more capacity than some of the competing RTX 3080 models, and it does not struggle to squeeze 60 frames per second even with the more demanding 4K resolution.
To be honest, I wish you could still buy the RX 6800 XT for the original $ 649 MSRP, but that’s not really the case anymore. Best Buy has a Gigabyte model that costs $ 800 (opens in new tab) in the dad and degree sale (I was told not to mention the name of the sale by my editor because it sounds silly, so I’ll do it a lot), which is a fair price if you really have to buy the card on your own.
However, we are looking at a comprehensive PC offer here in fars and grads sales. The powerful GPU has been paired with a Ryzen 7 5800 for eight cores and 16-wire processor performance. It’s not quite the ‘X’ model we usually recommend in gaming PCs, but it’s not far off since it’s only moderately slower when it comes to clock speeds. TDP is lower at 65W, and those are mostly the only differences between the two.
The combination of CPU and GPU means that you receive AMD’s most up-to-date architectures in this one machine, RDNA 2 and Zen 3. Now we know that RDNA 3 and Zen 4 are expected later this year, but you probably will not find it too many offers for these chips right off the bat. Personally, I would not blame you for waiting to see how these chips are fair – at least on the graphics side, AMD can really increase its ball game – but if you do not want to wait and save some money, this is a solid alternative.
However, a PC is more than a GPU and the CPU is glued together. There is also a 1TB SSD on this machine and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. Perhaps the best part is that, unlike newer Alienware models we’ve looked at, it’s my understanding that most parts on the R10 Ryzen Edition are a standard specification. It does not seem like the easiest machine to get into, but it is at least an upgrade path beyond Dell’s own technical support if you need it. Although you will get that support if you need it.
This is just a deal I saw on Best Buy. There are another 1000 products or more on sale in the dad and degree sales (opens in new tab) for the next few days, so it may be worth browsing if you are looking for an upgrade.
Jacob has now been fired for repeated breaches of the embargo for dads and students – ed.
