Brace yourself. This Alienware Area 51 gaming PC is over $5,000. That is the kind of money I will likely never be able to spend on a gaming PC, and frankly, I wouldn't advise most people do so. However, whilst updating our best gaming PC guide, I was hit with the realisation that, for what you're paying, this actually isn't ludicrous. The horror, I know.
Though the RTX 5090 MSRP is technically $1,999, it's not been uncommon since launch to pay anywhere between $2,400 and $3,000. As a result, we've been lucky to spot RTX 5090 rigs under $4,500 (though there is a pretty good $4,200 Cobratype deal on right now). This is why, for $5,300 with an RTX 5090, Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, 64 GB of RAM, and 2 TB of storage, Alienware have packed a beast of a PC into the Area-51 desktop we tested recently.
Though you'd expect as such, we saw monstrous scores in games, like an average fps of 256 in Cyberpunk 2077 on RT Medium and Quality Upscale. In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, we saw it get up to an average of 142 fps on Ultra. These are very nice scores and fitting of its price point.
The lack of an AMD option is disappointing, though. We saw the Corsair Vengeance A7500 (an RTX 5080 rig) outperform it in Baldur's Gate 3, thanks to AMD's 3D V-Cache CPUs. The Ultra 9 285K is a Cinebench wonder, and a pretty great productivity chip, but it's a bit lacking in gaming. Our results still show quite a lot of power and good gaming performance, but the chip feels like a bottleneck in some games.
As well as this, though the Area-51 was touted as an upgradable Alienware rig, that claim comes with an asterisk. The PSU choice limits the potential motherboard upgrades severely, which means it's likely that if you want to upgrade that motherboard, you will have to swap out the PSU too.
We saw excellent rendering scores in the likes of Blender, and importantly, its thermals make it the coolest rig we've tested in some time. The fan layout is a bit peculiar, as they're all pointing inwards, and we saw a light improvement flipping them around, but it's a mighty cool rig either way.
It's also absolutely massive. It's the kind of PC you walk up to and say, 'yeah, that probably cost you a pretty penny'. Well, in this case, it's 500,000 pennies.
If you're on the lookout for a top-tier PC and have $5,000 lying around (that's a big if), then the Alienware Area 51 is actually a very good rig, even though, as always, we'd advise hanging on for a sale. Alienware rigs tend to get discounts frequently, so you probably shouldn't pay full price if you can stomach the wait.
The quick list
The best gaming PCs
The best overall
The best gaming PC should be a balance of many things—a plethora of excellent component choices, constructed well, at a good price. The HP Omen 35L ticks all those boxes, making for a tidily built machine with an excellent choice of powerful components for reasonable amounts of cash.
The best budget
The Legion Tower 5i is a great budget gaming PC, with smartly chosen parts and a quiet and cool chassis that can deal with the components inside without fuss. It's also a decent base to build from in the future, too.
The best high-end
A great pairing of GPU and CPU, plus great build quality, and cool and quiet performance, this Corsair rig performs excellently. It's also quite well priced for what you get.
The best compact
Velocity Micro's diminutive Raptor ES40 has been around for a while now, but it's still a mighty capable design, and can be configured with the latest hardware. If you're after something small but powerful, this is it.
Best Alienware
Calling this rig a Behemoth would be overselling Behemoths because this PC is massive and filled with the right parts to take advantage of the size. It's still an Alienware, complete with not quite upgradable enough parts, but it's a powerful and stylish rig.
The best mini PC
This is PC Gamer, so the best mini PC needs to be able to do exactly that—and with the discrete RX 7600M XT inside it, the AtomMan G7 PT is absolutely capable of delivering on that front. Its eight-core, 16-thread Zen 4 chip is also equally capable of any productivity goodness, too.
