Alienware 16 Area-51: Performance from another planet

Now this is a gaming laptop.

- BY CHRIS HOFFMAN

The Alienware 16 Area-51 (fave.co/448Jbcn) is a high-end gaming laptop with a high-end Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU and Nvidia RTX 5080 graphics, which were both just recently released. It's a beautiful machine with premium touches like a mechanical keyboard. While it’s no budget gaming laptop (fave.co/44jP4EE), it's competitively priced compared to other laptops with similar hardware—and Alienware’s version may just be a better package.

SPECIFICATIONS

The Alienware 16 Area-51 is a 16-inch gaming laptop that combines a 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU along with an Nvidia RTX 50-series GPU. Our review model had an RTX 5080 GPU, but you can also get this machine with an RTX 5070 Ti or 5090 GPU. While the model we reviewed retails for $3,349, the base model starts at $2,999.

That Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX is worth highlighting! This Core Ultra (Series 2) processor is based on the Arrow Lake architecture and is screaming fast. In our benchmarks, this machine topped out the charts. However, it has a slow neural processing unit (NPU) and doesn't meet the bar for Windows 11's Copilot+ PC Al features (fave.co/3HJVbJN), if those matter to you. (Unless this is something you know you care about, I wouldn't worry about it—especially since Microsoft is signaling [fave.co/43M0jWu it may one day roll out these features more widely. But they aren't here at launch, and that may matter to some people.)

The laptop looks like it's about to blast the thrusters and head to outer space.

Model number: Alienware 16 Area-51 AW30

CPU: Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX

Memory: 32GB DDR5 RAM

Graphics/GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080

NPU: Intel AI Boost (up to 13 TOPS)