Alienware’s flagship desktop has removed proprietary parts
The Alienware Area-51 laptops: Where do they come from? What do they need? How many hours have you heard about them?
Alienware is bringing back its Area-51 computer line, and its new flagship laptops are much showier than the secretive air base they’re named after. The bombastic, UFO-like Area-51 laptops are paired with a range of top-flight specs featuring Intel Arrow Lake CPUs and next-gen Nvidia GPUs — coming in two sizes: big (16-inch) and bigger (18-inch). When all the configurations are launched, they’ll start at $3,199 with an entry level $1,999 model coming later.
The Area-51 duo will rely on their RGB lighting for their splashiest pops of color, as both sizes of Alienware laptops come in just one chassis color, called liquid teal. It is believed that the finish looks almost charcoal black in a dimly lit room when the light catches it and shimmers when the light hits it.
The Area-51 has some of the highest-end specifications you can find. It can be outfitted with up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, Nvidia’s new 50-series GPUs, up to 64GB of dual-channel DDR5 RAM, and up to 2TB NVMe PCIe Gen5 SSD. Powering all of that in each the 16-inch and 18-inch laptops is a sizable 96Wh battery. Alienware doesn’t list any battery life estimates in the Area-51’s tech specs. We’ve asked how many hours of use people should expect when unplugged and haven’t yet heard back.
The displays feel a bit retro since the laptops use older display tech. Both machines have QHD panels with 3 ms response time, but they don’t have a tandem display like the upcoming Pro Premium laptop from Dell. Alienware announced a new gaming monitor at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, as well as some Area 51 and Aurora prebuilt desktops.
Alienware has built some of the easiest-to-open toolless gaming PCs around — but for years, the Dell-owned brand has stifled their upgrade potential by limiting them to Dell’s own proprietary power supplies and motherboards.
Even though the tempered glass sided chassis features fancy compartments for liquid cooling and power supplies, it’s no longer a hexagonal monster or even a proprietary tower: it’ll come with a standard power supply, standard based motherboard, and even feature standard fan mounting locations. Dell will offer a conversion kit that will allow it to work with third-party motherboards, even though there is a dedicated daughterboard for controlling and cable management.
The Alienware Area 51, an 80 liters tower just introduced at the ConsumerElectronics show in Las Vegas, ditches the proprietary parts in favor of standard ATX components.
Dell has changed its strategy for this year in an attempt to become more consumer-friendly, and they plan to eliminate the XPS brand for their Apple-like Pro and Pro Max product lines.
He said there was a decision to take the power supply unit and drive commonality between the Dell Precision products and Alienware products. He says that Dell was able to take advantage of economies of scale and get better prices by unifying its supply chain.
But Dell would need to see the numbers add up — not just in terms of price, but the ratios of price, performance, size, and quality that would allow a new Aurora to compete.
Does that mean the Alienware Aurora, the less expensive desktop that Dell is more likely to sell in volume, will get the treatment as well? He says they are evaluating that as well but he isn’t promising anything today. “We have to hit an inflection point … where we apply resources to go and redesign the internals of that chassis,” he says.
Why now? I asked McGowan, and his primary answer is that he’s listening to his customers. “I’m talking with customers, reading reviews, understanding what the sentiment is in the market and where things are going,” he tells The Verge, and what he’s hearing is demand for “standard mounting locations” — a demand so “loud” that Alienware decided to make a “wholesale shift” toward a fully upgradable computer.
That’s not to say there weren’t reasons to go proprietary, or that Alienware is promising to do this on every PC. In fact, Alienware built its own nonproprietary ATX motherboard for this Alienware Area-51, and the new 2025 version of its smaller Aurora (a spec bump with new Nvidia and Intel chips) will still feature proprietary motherboards and power supplies, at least for now.
It enabled Dell to downsize its cases at a time when it was valued more by its commercial customers.
