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The Legendary Alienware Area-51 Gaming Laptop Has Returned: New Style, More Power, Better Cooling
Equipped with the new Nvida Blackwell RTX 5080 GPU.
Dell announced the return of the venerable Alienware Area-51 gaming laptop back in CES 2025, and starting today it is finally available to order. It comes in two size variants: the 16" model starts at $3,199.99 and the 18" model starts at $3,399.99. As expected from Alienware's new flagship laptop, the Area-51 is equipped with current generation components, including the latest and greatest Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU and NVIDIA Blackwell GPU. Orders are expected to ship out starting April 30, so get your reservation in now to prevent any additional delays.
The Alienware Area-51 Gaming Laptop Is Now Available
Currently both 16" and 18" Area-51 gaming laptops are available in one specific CPU and GPU configuration: the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU paired with the Nvida GeForce RTX 5080 GPU. 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 the fastest laptop processor on the market, with a healthy 7% lead over the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D. It's paired with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 mobile GPU. We haven't tested this GPU ourselves yet, but according to VideoCardz.com, preliminary 3DMark Time Spy benchmarks show it to be about 16% more powerful than the RTX 4080. The performance uplift paired with DLSS 4.0 compatiblity should allow it to run just about any game at blisteringly high framerates on the QHD+ display.
Rounding out the rest of the specs for the base configurations are your choice of a 16" or 18" QHD+ display with 240Hz-300Hz refresh rate and G-Sync certification, 32GB of DDR5-6400MHz RAM, and a 1TB M.2 SSD. Both 16" and 18" models include an option to upgrade your RAM and storage to 64GB and 2TB, respectively.
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. Connectivity-wise, you get three USB Type-A 3.2 15Gbps ports (one with PowerShare), two Thunderbolt / USB Type-C ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a card reader. The 16" model weighs in at 7.5 pounds and the 18" model weighs 9.6 pounds.
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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.
