Hello op,

Though the gaming community frowns on Alienware and prebuilt computers in general, I can give an enthusiastic endorsement of the Alienware alpha for playing Witcher 3 and in general. I bought a used entry level model (i3 processor, 4 gb) for $~350 and would recommend upgrading to 8gb ram, with or without replacing the hdd with an ssd. It provides a better-than-console experience for the Witcher 3 and presumably will be able to run any game released during this console generation. At least when I bought it, it literally wasn't possible to build your own gaming pc of comparable quality for even a remotely similar price. It may now be possible to do so, and that approach has the benefit of being able to later upgrade your graphics card, but depending on your enthusiasm for building pcs, I would honestly still nudge in favour of the alpha.

The base model (i3, 4gb ram, nvidia 860m) achieves > 60 fps at 720p on high settings, and at 1080p, ~40 fps at high settings, minus hairworks. The 4gb of ram becomes problematic in complex areas like novigrad and results in whole buildings clipping in or disappearing. This resolves with adding a second 4gb stick for 8gb total.

I have had intermittent issues with loading times with no clear explanation, sometimes being only fifteen seconds and sometimes > 1 minute. I am thinking about swapping out the drive for an ssd. I have however seen ssd users report the same problem with Witcher 3 so I wonder if it's an idiosyncratic problem.

In short, if you want a simple low end gaming pc, the old Alienware alpha is still an excellent option so long as you have a minimum of 8gb ram