Alienware 16 Area-51 Review: If Only the Display Was as Fantastic as the Mechanical Keyboard

Gizmodo

14 hours ago

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.
Pros
Cons
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.
When closed or open, the Alien 16 Area-51 (that's the official name if you're Googling it) looks like a sleek and unique beast. The dark teal color surrounded by the soft RGB glow is evocative enough to make me think of a deep, dark sea. Maybe whatever Lovecraftian, Cthulhu-esque monstrosity would stay put a little longer if he hooked up the Area-51 in his R'lyeh gaming den? The great old one should just remember not to stick his slimy paws on the shell, as its extremely prone to smudging. Past Area-51 laptops came with lid embellishments that could make them look like the hood of a car, but I don't mind the sleek, rounded look much either.
See Alienware 16 Area-51 at Amazon
The Area-51's secret weapon is its full mechanical keyboard. Gaming laptops of yesteryear—even from just a few years prior to now—didn't used to be as timid about opting for mechanical switches. The Area-51 uses Cherry MX ultra-low-profile switches, and it's easily one of my favorite mobile machines to type on that I've used in years. The clacking sound isn't loud enough to annoy my nearby deskmates, but the noise belies its springiness on each press. It's a joy to type on and play with, with each key spaced just enough to avoid any potential misclicks. You can buy the laptop with more-typical dome switches, but you'd miss out on what is the laptop's best feature.
Mechanical keyboards are hard to find on most modern laptops nowadays without spending many thousands of dollars on a machine like the MSI Titan 18 HX. The Area-51 is the kind of device I yearn for if I need to switch to another laptop, and it's enough to make up for its few other faults. The trackpad is smooth and skatey enough, but it's surprisingly small for this size of device. I also disagree with the ports configuration. While I appreciate the easy-to-access SD card slot on the side, the single HDMI, twin Thunderbolt 5 ports, and three USB-A are all on the back right on the thermal shelf. Some users prefer this to keep dongles out of the way, but for those of us who need to swap out doodads often, it becomes a pain, especially when the laptop is running hot.
And the Area-51 does tend to get warm. The 16-inch model exhaust blasts heat out both the rear and sides. This can give your mouse hand a nice warm bath whether you're a righty or a lefty. Even with my hands on the palm rest, it felt warm to the touch. It was only slightly hotter toward the screen, where you expect the laptop's 'Cryo Chamber' thermal system, including its larger fans and vapor chambers, to be expelling all the heat.
Mind you, it never became expressly uncomfortable. The fact is, the power demands for the latest Nvidia GPUs have skyrocketed this generation. The Area-51 can handle up to 240W of peak power demand, but even when it was running through games with computationally demanding ray-traced lighting effects, I never saw the CPU break past 80 degrees Celsius. Higher temperatures would result in reduced performance. The GPU side also remained stable in all the games I tested. The issue would be if you're sitting in a heat wave like the East Coast of the U.S. recently suffered, which I fear could easily overtax the laptop's cooling elements.
The configuration Dell's gaming brand sent me for review included an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, 32GB of DDR5 RAM. Though the laptop starts at $2,850, that option will net you a lower-power Core Ultra 7 255HX and an RTX 5060. Those specs offer enough fidelity if you plan to push this device to the max 2,560 x 1,600 resolution in the most demanding games. The version I reviewed cost $3,250, though the Area-51 is still on sale from Alienware's website for a few hundred dollars less.
I managed to get solid frame rates for most of my demanding games on performance settings. Across games like Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake II, and Marvel's Spider-Man 2, I could reach playable frame rates without having to rely on Nvidia's DLSS upscaler. DLSS takes a frame at a lower resolution and upscales it with AI to a higher resolution while keeping that better performance. Things are more complicated with ray tracing enabled, which recreates realistic lighting effects in games. I could hit 38 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing settings on 'Ultra' and no DLSS, but to get above 70 fps you'll need upscaling. In Alan Wake II, you need DLSS on performance mode if you want most of the ray tracing settings enabled.
The gamut of synthetic benchmarks resulted in all the expected output, which is to say the Area-51 will be great at rendering tasks, at least according to our tests. If you imagine you need an RTX 5090 on mobile to have the perfect graphics workstation, know that the Alienware Area-51 was only five seconds slower in our Blender tests rendering a scene of a BMW compared to a laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 285HX and Nvidia's most powerful graphics processor.
For whatever you're paying, you're getting solid performance across the board in both demanding CPU and graphics tasks. The Alienware Command Center software's 'Performance' mode is good enough for most gaming tasks, though the device includes some light overclocking of the RAM, CPU, and GPU with its 'Overdrive' mode. This takes the current clock speed of the CPU, which sits between 2.7GHz and 5.4GHz boost speed for gaming, and notches it up a few ticks. It will also take what's normally a relatively quiet laptop and turn it into your usual jet engine you find on other expensive mobile gaming platforms.
Here's the odd thing about the Area-51. The display isn't what you expect to see on most laptops that cost more than $3,000. It's an IPS LCD screen with the added benefit of a high-percentage color gamut and a relatively bright screen. While other mainstream gaming laptops like the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 use the brighter and better definition of mini-LED, the HP Omen Max 16 makes use of the deep colors and inky blacks of OLED.
The Alienware Area-51 display doesn't look bad by any stretch. The blacks weren't as deep as you get on more-modern displays, but they don't present as grey to my eyes. A bigger problem is how the large top and bottom bezels have the effect of making the display seem scrunched. I may be spoiled, but I know that other displays present better contrast for the amount of money you're spending on this laptop.
The screen would be easier to swallow if the device were any more portable than other similar devices. This is the kind of device you will want to stay in your home. It's too wide to fit into most backpacks' laptop sleeves, and hauling the 7.5-pound laptop around isn't appealing no matter what bag you throw it in. Plus, you don't want to use this beast anywhere away from an outlet. Like most gaming laptops of this size, you won't be able to use the Area-51 for more than three hours off the plug before the battery gives out, even on balanced power settings. Alienware also includes a 'Silent' option, which limits power usage and the fans. Even then, you'll struggle to get four hours of lifespan out of your Area-51.
There's no option for a better screen across each of the company's new Area-51 models. Alienware also sent me its 18-inch Alienware Area-51 with the same CPU, twice as much RAM, and an RTX 5090 housed inside. That config costs a whopping $4,050. What that model represents is the apex of this current design, which Alienware calls its 'AW30' aesthetic. The keyboard is large enough to include a numpad, and it's better at keeping cool under pressure with the wider thermal shelf. The reason I chose to emphasize the 16-incher over the larger model is purely down to value. The shells on both are nearly identical. They have the same number of ports and very similar displays. The 18-inch holds the slightest edge with a 300Hz refresh rate compared to the 16-inch's 240Hz. Even if you're pushing games to their limit with Nvidia's multi-frame gen technology, you won't hit the ceiling very easily.
If you compare benchmarks, the version with an RTX 5090 easily outpaces one with an RTX 5080, but you will still run into issues using the mobile GPU. Without adding in DLSS, the highest-end GPU still won't be able to make a game like Cyberpunk 2077 run at playable framerates with path tracing enabled, which enables real-time dynamic lighting on top of your usual ray-traced lighting. If you absolutely demand the best from your mobile machines, you should opt for the 18-incher and an RTX 5090. For an 18-inch model with the same specs as my review unit, the Area-51 16 starts at $3,550 MSRP. You'll have to decide for yourself whether you need the extra breathing room for $300 more.
Even if I would prefer a different screen, the excellent keyboard is enough to make me consider the Alienware Area-51 as my personal platform for both gaming and non-gaming alike. If I'm going to go for a gaming laptop full of RGB lights, I'd rather it be as silly as possible. That wild bottom Gorilla Glass panel is like a window into my soul, showing me what my dumb gamer brain truly desires.
See Alienware 16 Area-51 at Amazon