The new Area-51 laptop feels like Alienware in a way that its most recent gaming PCs like its mammoth Area-51 desktop have not. The gaming laptop is extra: extra glowy, extra clicky, and all too over the top. The bottom panel sports a massive window where you can peer directly at the fan components. The only way you’d catch a glimpse of the rotating fans and the tint of RGB is if you lift up your laptop as if you were looking for a quarter that rolled under your dresser. The Razer Blade 18 has a similar portal on its undercarriage. As pointless as that is on either laptop, for the ever-extra Dell-owned Alienware, it seems more on point.
Alienware 16 Area-51 The return of the Area-51 laptop brings forth a pretty device with an excellent feel, but it doesn't offer the best display for its price. See at Amazon Pros Incredible mechanical keyboard
Incredible mechanical keyboard Great performance
Great performance Has that old-school Alienware flair
Has that old-school Alienware flair Bottom panel window is silly but fun Cons Screen isn't what you expect for $3,000+
Screen isn't what you expect for $3,000+ 16-inch model can get warm
16-inch model can get warm Heavy and thick
Heavy and thick Poor battery life
If it were the looks only, then I wouldn’t be nearly as smitten with the design. I was a fan of the 2024 Alienware laptops like the M16 R2, while its bigger brother, the Alienware M18, also received top marks—mostly for its excellent feel combined with great specs. So far this year, I’ve reviewed several gaming laptops all with the same Intel chip and top-end Nvidia graphics. Even in laptops that promote an easy overclocking feature to eke out a few more frames from your games—like Alienware’s latest—there normally isn’t much to differentiate these latest Intel-based laptops from one another in terms of raw performance, even though the Area-51 comes out on the top end based on raw benchmarks. Whether you really want this gaming laptop more than any other comes down to price, thermal management, the display, and feel. The Area-51 has its missteps, but if you have no care for what your laptop looks like, you should know Alienware is flying as high as a UFO thanks to the work the design team put into how the the machine feels when you’re actually using it.
Mechanical Keyboard Perfection
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