The Area-51 laptops don’t feel like a throwback to old laptops: The high-end, portable laptops from Alienware

Tipping the scales like that, the Area-51 laptops don’t feel like just a resurrection of Alienware’s flagship brand name but a throwback to older, basically immobile desktop replacement laptops. That does come with some benefits, like a plethora of rear-mounted ports including HDMI 2.1, 2.5 gigabit ethernet (RJ-45), three USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 5Gbps ports, two Thunderbolt 5 / USB-C ports, and a headphone jack and full-size SD card slot on the side.

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 said that the finished product looks almost charcoal black when it is dimly lit and shimmers when the light is on.

Housed within that aluminum chassis, the Area-51 sports some high-end specs. 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. 96Wh of battery is used for the 16-inch and 18-inch laptops. Alienware doesn’t mention any battery life estimates in the tech specifications. We’ve asked how many hours of use people should expect when unplugged and haven’t yet heard back.

The displays are a little retro since the laptops use older display tech. Both machines have 2560 x 1600 QHD panels with 3ms response time and up to 300Hz refresh (240Hz on the 16-inch), but there’s no fancy tandem OLED or anything of the sort like Alienware’s parent company Dell put in its upcoming Pro Premium laptop. If you want OLED displays from Alienware, you’ll instead have to check out its gaming monitors — of which, it announced a new 27-inch 4K QD-OLED at CES 2025 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 for third-party motherboards to allow them to work with Dell’s dedicated daughterboard.

The new Alienware Area-51, an 80 liter tower just introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, ditches proprietary parts in favor of standard ATX components.

This is far from Dell’s only shift in strategy this year in an attempt to become more consumer-friendly: it’s also killing off the XPS brand for Apple-like “Pro” and “Pro Max” product lines instead, and those Pro laptops will now all feature consumer-replaceable USB-C ports in addition to user-replaceable batteries.

“There’s a clear customer advantage around how much power we can put into a compact mini tower. We are going to take that and pass it on to the user as cost related; when we get economies of scale across other Dell product, that is something we can adopt with little impact on the gaming side.

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.

So, does that mean the Alienware Aurora, the smaller and less expensive desktop that Dell is more likely to sell in volume, will get the ATX treatment, too? He told me that they’re evaluating that for Aurora, but he’s not 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? He says that he is listening to his customers. He tells The Verge he reads reviews, understands what the customers are saying and he hears that demand for standard mounting locations is loud.

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.

And, he says, it allowed Dell to shrink the size of its PC cases at a time its commercial customers, in particular, valued a “form factor aggressive” chassis.