Alienware released a new flagship gaming laptop this year – the Area-51 – and it brings to the table a host of upgrades over the m-series laptops including a sleeker redesign, current generation components, and better cooling potential. It might be a tad early for a Dads and Grads event, but several variants of both the Alienware 16 Area-51 and Alienware 18 Area-51 gaming laptops are already on sale with discounts of up to $300 off. They’re equipped with the latest Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, including the RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. Orders are expected to ship out late June.
The Area-51: New Style, More Power, Better Cooling
New for 2025, the Alienware Area-51 gaming laptop features a magnesium alloy chassis with upgraded cooling to tackle the latest and greatest heat generating components. This includes more fans and bigger cutouts enabling greater airflow, more generous use of copper, and a new thermal interface material to better transfer heat away from the core components. Dell claims that the laptop can handle a higher power ceiling of up to 240W TDP without raising acoustics.
Design-wise, the Area 51 accentuates its smooth contours, with rounded edges and soft corners replacing the squared off design you’d see in most other laptops. The hinges are also mostly internally positioned so that they’re near invisible. As befits an Alienware laptop, there are ample customization options for RGB LED lighting.
Alienware 18 Area-51 Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX RTX 5070 Ti Gaming Laptop (32GB/1TB)
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Alienware 18 Area-51 Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX RTX 5080 Gaming Laptop (32GB/2TB)
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Alienware 18 Area-51 Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX RTX 5090 Gaming Laptop (64GB/8TB)
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The Alienware 18 Area-51 is a large laptop that serves more as a mobile desktop replacement than acommuter’s laptop. It weighs nearly 10 pounds and measures 0.95 inches at its thinnest point. It also consumes a lot of power (a 360W power brick is included), which means you should keep it plugged into an outlet when you’re using it. The larger form factor carries several advantages, like an expansive 18″ display, a full-sized keyboard with discrete numpad and a bigger, a beefier cooling system that can keep noise levels to a minimum, and extra ports (including RJ45).
Alienware 16 Area-51 Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX RTX 5070 Ti Gaming Laptop (32GB/1TB)
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Alienware 16 Area-51 Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX RTX 5080 Gaming Laptop (64GB/2TB)
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Alienware 16 Area-51 Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX RTX 5090 Gaming Laptop (32GB/1TB)
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The Alienware 16 might not be as imposing as the Alienware 18, but this is still a premium gaming laptop through and through with an emphasis on maximum power and cooling. It weighs in at 7.5 pounds and measures 0.85″ thick at its thinnest point. It also comes with a 360W power brick so you should keep it plugged into an outlet when you’re using it. The smaller form factor houses a 16″ display, standard sized laptop keyboard (meaning no discrete numpad), and no ethernet jack. Internally, the Alienware 16 can be upgraded with the same internal specs, like an Intel Core Ultra 9 HX processor and up to an Nvida RTX 5090 GPU.
The Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX is a top performing CPU
The Area-51 laptop is also equipped with a very powerful CPU as well. The Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX boasts a max turbo frequency of 5.4GHz with a whopping 24 cores and 40MB total L2 cache. According to Passmark, this is one of the fastest mobile processors you can get right now, going head to head with the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D.
How do the new Nvidia Blackwell mobile GPU cards stack up?
The RTX 5070 Ti mobile GPU is a substantial upgrade over the 4070 Ti. In fact, it offers gaming performance on par with the RTX 4080. The RTX 5080 mobile GPU is roughly 15%-20% more powerful than the RTX 4080 mobile GPU and about 5% more powerful than the RTX 4090. The RTX 5090 doesn’t offer much improvement over the RTX 5080 in terms of gaming performance, however it is a great GPU for creators thanks to its hefty 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM.
Check out more of the best Alienware deals
Check out our Best Alienware Deals article with all of Dell’s currently ongoing deals on gaming laptops and desktop PCs. Not everyone is the DIY type. If you’re in the market for a prebuilt gaming PC, Dell is one of the best brands we’d recommend. Alienware desktops and laptops feature solid build quality, top-of-the-line gaming performance, excellent cooling (further improved on the newer models), aggressive styling, and pricing that is very competitive with other pre-built options. Best of all, there are plenty of sales that happen throughout the year, so it’s not difficult to grab one of these computers at considerably less than their retail price.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn’t hunting for deals for other people at work, he’s hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
