You can find an RTX 3080 this Prime Day, it just comes attached to an Alienware gaming PC
Update 23/06: The Intel-powered Alienware R12 deal is now sold out, but there's still stock of the AMD Ryzen machine available.
If there's one graphics card that everyone is after, it's the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. I don't blame anyone for it, either. The specs on the RTX 3080 are so immense for the money. Even Nvidia's RTX 3080 Ti, which I reviewed just a few weeks ago, gets bit in the ass by its price to performance. It happily dispatches 4K, with ray tracing enabled, so it's no wonder it's sold out everywhere.
With that in mind, I hadn't much hope for any RTX 3080 deals, in any form, this Amazon Prime Day. But perhaps I spoke too soon. There are a few deals touting the RTX 3080 late in the retail festivities: They're not discrete cards, which I would have preferred, but if you're willing to drop gaming PC cash then these two Dell gaming rigs deliver more than just treasured GPU silicon.
Effectively you're looking at a choice between Intel and AMD CPUs within these two rigs. In the cheapest of the two, the R12 at $2,199, you'll find an Intel Core i7 11700F CPU—that's one of Intel's latest Rocket Lake 11th Gen numbers. Then in the pricier R10 at $2,689, you'll find an AMD Ryzen 9 5900, which is a slightly stepped down version of our favourite CPU ever, the Ryzen 9 5900X.
Both, of course, fitted with an almighty RTX 3080.
The Intel-powered R12 comes with 16GB of memory and a 512GB NVMe SSD with a 1TB HDD. That should keep you just about covered for a handful of games—this is, after all, a PC seemingly tailored to high-end gaming.
The Ryzen-powered R10 looks suited to gaming as well, although a few notable improvements make it a little more suited to demanding content creation tasks or professional work too. That includes 32GB of DDR4 memory, which will work nicely alongside that 12-core chip. There's also a 1TB NVMe SSD for good measure.
Alienware Aurora R12 | Core i7 11700F | RTX 3080 | $2,489.99 $2,199.99 at Dell (save $290)
The Rocket Lake Intel i7 isn't the most popular of Core CPUs, but it will still make for a great gaming PC, especially when paired with that RTX 3080 from Nvidia. That's a true drool-worthy GPU, and with nearly $300 off the list price that makes this a genuinely tempting offer. The RX 6700 XT machine from iBuyPower isn't far off this price, and will be significantly slower in-game, though it is available much sooner than the August 2 delivery from Dell.
Alienware Aurora R10 | Ryzen 9 5900 | RTX 3080 | $2,919.99 $2,689.99 at Dell (save $230)
This machine is pretty much the best of the best. The 12-core Ryzen 9 5900 is only slightly lower clocked than our absolute favorite CPU, the 5900X, and the Nvidia RTX 3080 is definitely our favorite graphics card. It's just all but impossible to find right now. Except if you buy a pre-built machine, like this one from Alienware. With $230 off the sticker price, it's also kind of a deal.