As part of its Dell Cyber Monday Sale event, Dell has the 2023 Alienware Aurora R16 RTX 4080 gaming PC for only $1949.99 after a $550 instant discount. This is currently the least expensive Alienware (or Dell) RTX 4080 equipped gaming PC on Dell's website. The R16 looks radically different from the familiar Aurora styling we've seen for the past several years. In my opinion it looks great, but more importantly, Dell claims that the significantly smaller chassis runs cooler and quieter than before.
Cyber Monday Deal: Alienware Aurora R16 RTX 4080 Gaming PC for $1949.99
The R16 is the newest Alienware Aurora gaming desktop for 2023. The R16 chassis is 40% smaller in volume compared to previous iterations. It features a simple yet proven airflow design; air is drawn in through the side intake vents over the GPU area and a 120mm rear fan while a generously sized 240mm all-in-one liquid cooler exhausts air out through the top. A side benefit of this airflow design is that the GPU is supplied with fresh air from the outside instead of recirculating hot internal air.
This particular config features a liquid cooled Intel Core i7-13700F CPU, GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, 16GB of DDR5-5600MHz RAM, and a 1TB SSD. It's all powered by a 1000W 80PLUS Platinum power supply. The latest generation Intel Core i7-13700F Raptor Lake CPU boasts a max clock of 5.2GHz with 16 cores, 24 threads, and a 52MB cache. This is an outstanding gaming and workstation chip. The "F" in 13700F simply means that the chip doesn't have onboard graphics (iGPU). That won't matter if you have a discrete GPU, which in this case is the RTX 4080.
Speaking of which, the RTX 4080 is the second most powerful card on the market. On the AMD front, only the Radeon RX 7900 XTX can keep up (and that's if you ignore DLSS and ray tracing). It's much more powerful than previous generation cards, performing about 50% faster than an RTX 3080 Ti. It also supports DLSS 3.0 (DLSS 2.0 + frame generation), something the RTX 30 series lacks, and that increases the performance gap for games that support it. It's actually only 20%-30% slower than the RTX 4090 while costing hundreds of dollars less. If you're not convinced, check out our RTX 4080 review.
