Alienware's Area-51 is carrying the torch forward for the Mac Pro

Alienware was once known for its desktops. It made a name for itself with unique designs, flagship hardware, and unrivaled performance, but over the past several years, Alienware has struggled to evolve its desktop lineup. The use of propietary components, designs that aged poorly, and troubled thermal designs meant that Alienware never found its footing after the golden age of system integrators. The Area-51 looks to change that.

It’s big, it’s bold, and it comes packed with the most powerful hardware money can buy. It’s a true flagship desktop, which is something we haven’t seen a lot of on the Windows front over the past several years. It may be expensive, and you can do better building your own desktop. But if you want uncompromising performance in a massive tower, the Area-51 delivers.

Alienware Area-51 Desktop

The Alienware Area-51 is expensive, but if you’re after flagship hardware and performance, it’s one of your best options right now.

Pros & Cons

• Whisper quiet under load
• Full power for the RTX 5090 and Core Ultra 9 285K
• Full upgradable

• Very expensive
• Motherboard is oddly limited

Alienware Area 51 pricing and availability

The Area-51 is expensive. There’s no way around that. Prices start at $3,450, and for that price, you’ll get a 20-core Core Ultra 7 265, an RTX 5080, 32GB of DDR5 memory, and a 2TB SSD. You can climb all the way up to $6,100, though. With the highest configuration, you get a Core Ultra 9 285K, 64GB of DDR5-6400 memory, and a single 4TB NVMe SSD. You’re able to configure RTX 5080 models with dual 2TB SSDs, but unfortunately, the RTX 5090 configuration is only available with a single 4TB SSD.

Alienware’s pricing is slightly above the competition, but it isn’t unreasonable. If you don’t mind cutting your RAM, storage, and case, you can pick up the same CPU and GPU in a desktop like the ABS Eurus Aqua for around $5,000. However, larger desktops are more expensive. The MSI Vision Elite comes in at $6,000, while a custom prebuilt like the Skytech O11 will run you over $6,000 with similar specs. You could, theoretically, save money building your own desktop. But when an RTX 5090 alone can run you upwards of $5,000, going prebuilt for this flagship hardware might be the right call.

Although the flagship configuration is decent on the pricing front, I have a bone to pick with the entry-level configurations. The base configuration comes with a locked Core Ultra 7 265; it isn’t unlocked for overclocking, which is one of the main marketing points for the Area-51. In order to get that CPU unlocked, Alienware charges an extra $150, which is the same premium it charges if you go from the Core Ultra 9 285 to its K-series counterpart. Intel says the K-series chip should only be about $20 to $30 more expensive than a non-K part, so Alienware is charging a premium here for no good reason. All the CPUs should be K-series parts.

Unsurprisingly, Alienware charges a ton for extra storage, too. The base configuration comes with a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, and to jump up to a 4TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, you’ll spend an extra $400. If you want two of those 4TB drives, Alienware charges $950 extra. Thankfully, you have extra space inside the Area-51 to add your own storage.

A design that could rival the Mac Pro

This is a gorgeous desktop

The Area-51 looks amazing. It’s basically a bigger version of the Aurora R16, which marked a significant departure in Alienware’s design language. Outside a bigger size, the Area-51 comes in a sleek silver finish with a white side panel. It looks incredible. There’s a bit of RGB lighting around the front intake channel, as well as on the Alienware logo. But this is far from the unicorn puke you’ll find on most prebuilt gaming PCs. With tasteful lighting and a splash of silver, the Area-51 looks as powerful as it does sophisticated.

It’s an impressive design from a usability standpoint, too. The chassis has a mostly tool-less design. A single screw holds a locking mechanism in place. Undo the screw, twist the lock, and you’ll be able to pop off either side panel with one of two buttons. The transparent panel is made of acrylic, not tempered glass, and it’s thick. In fact, both of the side panels are thick, and they contribute a lot to the weight of the desktop on their own. I suspect Alienware tried to keep as tight of a seal inside the Area-51 as possible due to its airflow design; more on that later.

Internally, Alienware uses standard component sizes. Finally, you get a regular ATX motherboard on an Alienware desktop, along with a standard ATX power supply. You could rip all of the components out of the Area-51 and install whatever you want; everything is compatible with established standards.

That doesn’t mean everything inside the Area-51 is standard, though. The motherboard may have a standard ATX size, but it has a few quirks. For a positive, the motherboard supports three M.2 drives, so you can easily expand your storage. Otherwise, the motherboard has problems. It features an 8+4-pin configuration for the CPU, and it doesn’t use a standard 24-pin power connector. It also only comes with two DIMM slots. Further, Alienware separates the Wi-Fi antenna from the backplate of the board. If you end up swapping out the motherboard, you’ll have a strange square cut out in the rear of the case where the stock Wi-Fi antenna sticks out.

Despite those issues, Alienware has designed to Area-51 for upgradability. Not only are all the components a standard size, Alienware also includes a string of QR codes printed around the case and components. Each one will send you to a video that shows you how to upgrade that component. I love this approach. Not only is useful for newcomers to PC building, but Alienware also managed to integrate the codes into the design of the Area-51, so they don’t stand out like a sore thumb.

Related

Alienware Pro Wireless Mouse review: An excellent lightweight mouse for gaming

Dell’s new Alienware Pro Wireless Mouse is a great option for gamers who want a super light wireless mouse with top-of-the-line specs.

Chart-topping performance for a Windows desktop

But is anyone surprised?

You don’t need me to tell you that the Area-51 is fast. It comes with up to a Core Ultra 9 285K and an RTX 5090, and the highest-end configuration will run you over $6,000. It damn well better be fast. What’s important is that Alienware doesn’t trade any performance compared to building your own desktop with these same components. The Core Ultra 9 285K gets the full power available to it, and the RTX 5090 holds up incredibly well in both creator apps and games.

Starting with the CPU, the Area-51 put up basically identical results in Cinebench and Geekbench compared to my open-air test bench with a Core Ultra 9 285K and a 360mm AIO. There’s some slight variation, but it’s not anything to note. You’re getting the full power of the Core Ultra 9 285K in the Area-51. Compared to something like the M3 Ultra Mac Studio, the Core Ultra 9 285K certainly has less multi-core grunt, but it can keep pace in single-core benchmarks.

In creator apps, the RTX 5090 shines in Premiere Pro, vastly outpacing what the Mac Studio is able to offer despite that desktop’s huge array of CPU cores. Photoshop is a different story, but that largely comes down to the Core Ultra 9 285K. As you can read in my Ryzen 9 9950X3D review, Intel’s latest Arrow Lake CPUs show oddly low performance in Photoshop.

When it comes time to boot up games, you don’t want to settle for anything less than 4K with maxed-out settings considering the specs inside the Area-51. And the desktop can certainly hold up, even when looking at recent Unreal Engine 5 games like Oblivion Remastered, and titles that feature path tracing like Cyberpunk 2077. If you use the tools available in the most demanding games available today, you won’t have any issues pushing 4K with Ultra ray tracing settings at frame rates in the triple digits.

A big reason you can do that, however, is DLSS 4. The RTX 5090 not only supports the latest DLSS 4 model, but also Multi-Frame Generation (MFG). In games like Oblivion Remastered and Black Myth: Wukong with path tracing, you’ll need to use DLSS upscaling and MFG to get triple-digit frame rates. Anything less demanding, however, such as Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, will easily climb above 100 fps without any upscaling or frame generation assistance.

Related

7 ways Nvidia’s DLSS 4 is making the future of gaming happen today

DLSS 4 shows upscaling is the future of gaming.

Loads of power, adequate cooling

The Area 51 is designed to keep its flagship hardware cool

Alienware has made a big deal about the “innovative thermal architecture” of the Area-51. The idea behind Alienware’s design is positive air pressure. You get dual 140mm fans on the bottom, dual 180mm fans in the front, and up to three 120mm fans if you configure the desktop with an all-in-one liquid cooler. The big change compared to other desktops is that all the fans are installed as intakes. There are no exhaust fans. Alienware wants to create positive air pressure inside the chassis in order to force air to exhaust out the back.

As you can see from my bechmarks, the cooling system works. I used stress tests to push the GPU and CPU to their limits, and I left them running for about 30 minutes while monitoring power, temperatures, and clock speeds. For the GPU, it was FurMark at 4K. You can see the RTX 5090 immediately ramp up to 550W and remain there through my test. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, either. If you look at GPU temperatures, it remained at a steady 75 degrees Celsius throughout the test, which is very reasonable.

The thermal headroom is tighter on the Core Ultra 9 285K. Let’s start with temperature. The Core Ultra 9 285K has a maximum operating temperature of 105 degrees Celsius, but in Prime95’s torture test, it rarely topped 90 degrees. That’s despite the fact that the chip was consistently drawing between 225W and 250W, the latter of which is the maximum turbo power the Core Utlra 9 285K can draw. Over the course of the test, clock speeds dipped slightly, averaging around 4.8GHz around the start of the run while ending under 4.5GHz.

The Area-51 barely whispered during my tests, too. That really shouldn’t come as a surprise, though. This is a full-sized tower that’s packed with large fans, so Alienware has a ton of room to keep the flagship hardware inside cool. I’m not sure if this is the ideal system for cooling. Positive air pressure invites a lot more dust inside your PC. When the rubber meets the round, however, it works. The Area-51 is able to keep everything inside cool when pushed to the limit, and it does so without excessive noise.

Related

Geekom Megamini G1: A powerful, compact, and beautiful gaming desktop

This gaming PC is smaller than you’d expect, and it looks super cool

Should you buy the Alienware Area 51?

You should buy the Alienware Area-51 if:

• You need an RTX 5090.
• You don’t want to build a PC, but you plan on upgrading one.
• You have plenty of room for tall, 70-pound desktop

You should NOT buy the Alienware Area-51 if:

• You have limited space
• You’re able to build a PC on your own
• You don’t have a 4K display

The Alienware Area-51 makes sense. Taking the lessons from the Aurora R16, Alienware scaled up the design to accommodate the RTX 5090, as well as a more elaborate cooling system, which allows the desktop to stay quiet. Standard component sizes are a welcome evolution of Alienware’s previously propietary approach, though it’s obvious some of the old habits are still around when looking at how the motherboard is designed.

Alienware Area-51 Desktop

The Alienware Area-51 reboots Alienware’s iconic line of desktops with a new design, Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs, and Intel Arrow Lake CPU offerings.