Alienware Aurora R12 Gaming Desktop for sale in Washington, DC
The best Intel gaming PC
While the extra-terrestrial styling may not appeal to everyone, the performance of Alienware's Aurora R12 gaming PCs remains undeniable. The latest Aurora R12 uses the same compact design as its R9 and R10 forebears and gives the current Intel 11th Gen processors and Nvidia RTX 30-series GPUs a home in Alienware's classic chassis.
Like the Aurora R10 Ryzen Edition, Alienware offers the choice of both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards, but you have to dig into the customization options if you want to pick from either the Radeon RX 6800 XT or RX 6900 XT cards. Alienware also offers eight discrete configurations on its site, from low-end gaming rigs sporting the GTX 1650 Super and Core i5 11400F, all the way up to RTX 3090 gaming monsters.
That gives you a range of Alienware gaming machines from reasonably affordable 1080p gaming right up to blistering 4K workload-smashing performance, and the Alienware AIO cooling system will help keep the cozy interior of the case at a reasonable temperature, too.
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While the actual configs Alienware offers are great starting points, as with the Ryzen Edition, it's absolutely worth digging around in the customization options when it comes to picking the right rig for you. Our favorite setup, boasting the Core i5 11600KF and RTX 3060 Ti GPU, only comes with a 256GB SSD, and is sold with a single 16GB RAM stick of DDR4 by default.
The memory issue is something you must be aware of when buying Alienware products. In the customization options, you can choose to change that single stick of 16GB RAM to a pair of 8GB DDR modules, running at the same speed and total capacity, for free. This will double your memory bandwidth, and it's a bit off that it's otherwise sold with the weaker solitary stick.
We're not entirely sold on the high-end Rocket Lake 11th Gen CPUs, but Alienware offers the Core i5 11400F and 11600KF, which are much more tempting. Thanks to their Cypress Cove core architecture, the new Intel Core i5 chips make great gaming CPUs and would definitely be our picks if you're looking for a new Aurora R12 build.
We have played with the RTX 3090 version of the last-gen Aurora R10, sans liquid chilled GPU, and in gaming terms, you're not going to get a lot higher frame rates than you would with the RTX 3080 build. That's not a massive surprise given our testing of the RTX 3090 at launch; it only makes sense if you need that 24GB frame buffer for creative work.
SPECIFICATIONS
CPU: Intel Core i5 11400F–Core i9 11900KF
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1650 Super–RTX 3090
RAM: 8GB DDR4-3200–128GB DDR4-3400
Storage: Up to 2TB M.2 PCIe SSD + 2TB SATA HDD
Warranty: 1 Year (onsite)
REASONS TO BUY
+Toolless access
+Upgradeable
+Solid after-sale support
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