Alienware revived its Area-51 laptops with serious performance and far-out designs

While parent company Dell is doing a big rebrand of its entire PC portfolio, at CES 2025 Alienware is sort of returning to its roots by bringing back the classic Area-51 name back for its new flagship laptop line.

Available in 16- and 18-inch versions, the resurrected Area-51 gaming notebooks feature what Alienware is calling a brand-new industrial design. Though if you look closely, you can see some similarities to existing systems like the x14 and x16. Both models sport a striking anodized liquid teal paint job with an almost iridescent quality. Around back, the company’s Aurora lighting has been integrated into the rear of the system to create a striking gradient effect on the laptop’s thermal shelf. And as before, you still get plenty of customizable RGB lights on the inside including behind both the touchpad and keyboard.

But the Area-51 laptop’s most distinctive feature might be its bottom, where Alienware has installed a Gorilla Glass window with an integrated vent to help manage airflow while also giving you a peek at the hardware inside. The company claims that thanks to its new thermal architecture, Area-51 laptops have 35 percent better airflow while being 15 percent quieter than before. There’s also a new hinge design that’s meant to hide exterior components while still allowing for easy access and stability.

Naturally, as Alienware’s latest flagship gaming laptops, the new Area-51 notebooks should offer top-notch performance thanks to support for up to Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPUs, 64GB of RAM (at up to 7200 MT/s, the highest yet on any Alienware laptop), 12 TB of PCIe Gen 5 SSD storage and next-gen NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPUs. More specifically, both models can handle up to 175 watts of total graphics power with an additional 105 watts dedicated to the CPU.

Unfortunately, the devices I played around with were mostly locked down, so I wasn’t able to play games or meaningfully test their processing power. That said, as the two launch systems for a new generation of laptop design, there’s a lot to like about Alienware’s revamped Area-51 laptop line. I absolutely love the new color, which is closer to emerald than teal in my opinion. Meanwhile, having up to 280 watts of total device power means there’s no shortage of computing oomph. I even like the glass panel on the bottom, though I do wonder how much extra weight that added compared to sticking with aluminum like on the rest of the system. That’s because at 7.6 pounds for the 16-inch model or a whopping 9.8 pounds for the 18-inch version, these things definitely aren’t light.

The other concern is that with high-end launch configurations starting at $3,199 when they go on sale sometime in Q1, they’re not exactly affordable either. However, Alienware says that less expensive “entry-level” models will arrive later starting at a more reasonable price of $1,999.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/alienware-revived-its-area-51-laptops-with-serious-performance-and-far-out-designs-040038956.html?src=rss https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/alienware-revived-its-area-51-laptops-with-serious-performance-and-far-out-designs-040038956.html?src=rss