Alienware 18 Area-51 Review: This gaming laptop replaces your computer!

The surprise was great when Alienware announced the return of a true legend at CES 2025 in early January. We are, of course, talking about the legendary Area 51 series. The gaming laptop has now arrived on the market in 16-inch and 18-inch sizes. We took a closer look at the Alienware 18 Area-51 in the top configuration in the test and are impressed.

Technical data

Alienware 18 Area-51 test: desktop replacement with a sci-fi look

• Unique design
• Outstanding workmanship
• Enormously large and heavy

Anyone who has missed the iconic science fiction look of the Alienware division recently will get their money’s worth again with the new Alienware 18 Area-51. After the last products from Dell’s gaming division, such as the Alienware m16 R2, came across as being rather staid, the new Area-51 is back with the full program.

Rounded edges, an inwardly offset connection strip at the rear and RGB lighting as far as the eye can see. The gaming notebook has a unique look and looks really classy.

This also applies to the greenish shimmering housing in the color “Liquid Teal”, which, in combination with the customizable AlienFX lighting, creates a unique look. Yes, this Northern Lights-inspired lighting is indeed quite unique, as it is reflected onto the surfaces. This can be seen at the back, for example, and provides a harmonious ambient lighting to the rear.

Especially cool: The Alienware 18 Area-51 features a transparent Gorilla Glass panel on the underside, which provides a view of the inside of the laptop – and has its own cooling system.

Maintaining the laptop is also very easy. You simply need to remove the Phillips screws on the underside and then access the inside. Two DDR5 slots and three M.2 2280 SSD slots are available here, although only one of these supports the PCIe 5.0 standard. Nevertheless, the notebook makes upgrades much easier than almost all of its competitors.

As Alienware clearly positions the 18-inch Area-51 as a desktop replacement, you can expect a real heavyweight here. The laptop weighs in at a whopping 4.34 kg and with dimensions of 410 mm x 320 mm x 30.5 mm, it is really bulky. However, the workmanship is outstanding, even though the casing is a real fingerprint magnet.

Features and connections

• top modern equipment
• PCIe 5.0 SSD
• Wi-Fi 7; 4K webcam

The features of the Alienware 18 Area-51 leave absolutely nothing to be desired. Only the best of the best. Under the hood of the top model is the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX with 23 cores and clock speeds of up to 5.4 GHz. It is supported by up to 64 GB of DDR5-6400 RAM and 2 terabytes of fast PCIe 5.0 system memory.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop with 24 GB of GDDR7 RAM is used as the top GPU, but the notebook is also available in weaker CPU and GPU configurations. The TDP is a whopping 280 watts, which promises outstanding gaming performance. Thanks to Advanced Optium, the laptop automatically switches between the internal GPU and NVIDIA chip depending on the application.

However, all variants combine fast Intel Killer Wi-Fi 7 and the latest Bluetooth 5.4. The transfer speeds via W-LAN are outstanding. There are also two webcams: The main camera has a resolution of 8 megapixels in 4K with 3,840 x 2,160 pixels, while the additional 2 MP camera enables login via Windows Hello thanks to IR.

A total of four built-in speakers (two 2-watt woofers and two 2-watt tweeters) including Realtek Smart Ampfier and Dolby Atmos provide the right sound. The maximum volume is excellent, but the sound quality of the speakers is unfortunately only average – we have heard much better laptop speakers here.

The connections: 2x Thunderbolt 5 and RJ45 LAN

The majority of the ports on the Alienware 18 Area-51 can be found on the back, neatly lined up next to each other. Here you will find, from left to right, the following ports:

• 1x RJ45 LAN
• 3x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 (including 1 with PowerShare)
• 2x Thunderbolt 5 USB-C
• 1x HDMI 2.1
• 1x power connection

On the left-hand side, there is also a 3.5 mm jack connection and an SD card reader, which scores with excellent speeds.

Alienware 18 Area-51 with bright QHD+ display

• 18-inch with 2,560 x 1,440 pixels
• 300 Hz, 3 ms response time
• 500 nits brightness

The Alienware 18 Area-51 comes with an 18-inch display with a QHD+ resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 pixels. It offers a frame rate of 300 Hertz with a good response time of 3 ms. It is also pleasantly bright at 500 nits and is very easy to read even in direct light.

It fully covers the DCI-P3 color space and is therefore very suitable for color-critical work. The screen also supports NVIDIA G-Sync. The matte screen is also very well protected against reflections and cuts a very good figure across all areas of application.

Unfortunately, the display only uses IPS technology, which is particularly noticeable in the colors and contrasts. Mini-LED or OLED would have been nice, but that would only have driven the price up even further

Outstanding keyboard

• Excellent mechanical keyboard
• pleasant tactile feedback
• Stylish, good trackpad

Alienware equips the Area-51 with an excellent full-size keyboard, which is also equipped with mechanical Cherry MX switches and AlienFX single-key illumination. More and more high-quality gaming laptops are now using mechanical keyboards, which I absolutely welcome.

In the case of the Alienware 18 Area-51, you get an excellent, tactile keyboard with pleasantly large keys, convincing pressure points and pleasantly high key travel. The keyboard is not inferior to some of the best gaming keyboards. In fact, this was one of the few gaming notebooks that I didn’t use an external keyboard for testing. That’s saying something.

The 13.2 cm x 7.9 cm glass touchpad also impresses with its excellent gliding properties and precisely implements multi-touch gestures and inputs. It is also fully illuminated, which looks pretty cool in combination with the Aurora effect. The pressure points are excellently accentuated, but unfortunately no triggers are registered in the upper area.

Heat development, volume and practice

• Outstanding cooling
• Fans remain quiet for a long time,…
• … but become very loud under load

In practice, the Alienware 18 Area-51 does an impeccable job. Even demanding tasks hardly pose a significant challenge for the gaming laptop. Multitasking, image editing, video editing, AI tasks and demanding games? No problem at all.

I was surprised by the notebook’s volume and cooling performance. The fans remain absolutely quiet in most tasks. The Area-51 even masters system and CPU benchmarks, where most gaming laptops already crank up the volume, without the noise increasing.

However, it can get quite loud under load. I measured a peak value of 56 dB(A) under continuous load. And that is quite loud, even though some models are even louder. However, compared to the Alienware m16 R2 from last year (63 dB(A)), the fan noise of the new laptop is comparatively bearable and not high-pitched.

But of course the CPU and GPU combination also needs to be cooled properly. Alienware has done a great job here with the new Cryo-Chamber on the underside and the Cryto-tech cooling technology. Even in the 3DMark stress test under continuous load, the components didn’t get warmer than 63 degrees Celsius, while the case hardly warmed up at all. Excellent!

The software used is the Alienware Control Center. It provides information about the CPU and GPU utilization as well as the temperatures in a clear design and allows the RGB lighting to be adjusted. Optionally for each zone individually or for the entire system.

Four performance profiles can also be set here, which do indeed have a noticeable effect on performance and volume. But more on that in a moment.

The Alienware 18 Area-51 in the benchmark test

I took a closer look at the performance in various benchmarks. Unless otherwise noted, the “Balanced” mode was used, which does not provide the maximum possible performance, but keeps the notebook quite quiet even under load.

I measure the productivity and system performance with PCMark 10 and Cinebench R23. PCMark 10 simulates different workflows when running the benchmark, which include word processing, surfing the Internet and spreadsheets. Cinebench, on the other hand, measures the speed of the CPU cores individually and in multi-core mode.

SSD

The performance of the Alienware 18 Area-51 is beyond reproach. This starts with the SSD from SK Hynix, which performs very well with around 10,000 MB/s reading and writing and can also maintain this performance flawlessly in the long term, as the 10 GB test shows.

The 4K and 4K64Thrd values and access times in particular are excellent, making the notebook ideally equipped for gaming use.

System performance

The laptop also cuts an excellent figure in terms of CPU and system performance, even though it is not quite at the top of the performance range, especially in the Cinebench CPU tests. There are other gaming laptops with Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX that perform a little better. Nevertheless, the values here are also outstanding.

The situation is different in the comprehensive PCMark 10 test, where the Area-51 is very far ahead among the best gaming notebooks. This applies in particular to the performance mode, which results in a performance increase of around 5 percent without the laptop being noticeably louder.

GPU and gaming

In real games, the jump is even more pronounced. Very commendable: The laptop automatically switches to “Performance” mode. So you don’t have to do anything manually to get the best possible performance. The performance increase here is between 5 and 9 percent, depending on the game.

Generally speaking, the Alienware 18 Area-51 also masters the latest games in QHD+ resolution and with maximum details without any problems. Even the extremely demanding F1 25 can be played at around 36 fps, and in combination with DLSS it also runs smoothly at 65 fps. Less demanding games such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle or Shadow of the Tomb Raider can even be mastered by the laptop in 4K resolution at 66 and 187 fps respectively.

In general, the gaming performance is roughly on a par with the desktop RTX 4080 and clearly outperforms the laptop RTX 4090. However, an RTX 5080 desktop, such as the ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 OC Edition (our test), delivers up to 10 percent more performance.

Benchmark	Results
Fire Strike Total	38,279 points
Time Spy Total	23,336 pts.
Time Spy Extreme Total	12,169 pts.
Port Royal Total	15,920 pts.
Speed Way Total	6,453 pts.
Solar Bay Total	115,283 pts.
Steel Nomad Total	6,092 pts.
F1 24 (Ultra Preset) – 1080p	157 fps (average)
F1 24 (Ultra Preset) – 1440p	107 fps (average)
F1 22 (Ultra Preset) – 1440p – Performance	112 fps (average)
Final Fantasy XV (High Quality) – 1080p	20,794 pts.
Final Fantasy XV (High Quality) – 4K	11,035 pts.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Ultra) – 1080p	217 fps
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Ultra) – 1440p	196 fps
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Ultra) – 1440p – Performance	204 fps

Battery life of the Alienware 18 Area-51

• 96 Wh
• 360-watt power supply and charging via Thunderbolt 5
• lean runtimes

As is so often the case, the battery is the Achilles’ heel of the Alienware 18 Area-51. Dell gives the gaming laptop a battery with a capacity of 96 Wh, which is charged with a massive 360-watt power supply. This charges the battery completely in almost exactly 2 hours.

Depending on the task and scenario, this is enough for a battery runtime of 2-5 hours, whereby the latter value is only realistic when surfing the web. The runtime already drops to 2 hours and 23 minutes in the PCMark 10 Office benchmark. In the gaming test, of course, it is significantly less, ending after 58 minutes. This makes it clear that the Area-51 is not necessarily intended for long-term mobile use, even though the new Intel Core Ultra processors hardly lose any performance in battery mode.

Incidentally, the laptop is not only charged via the dedicated power connection, but also via Thunderbolt 5 if desired, albeit only with 100 watts of power.

Alienware 18 Area-51 Review: Conclusion

The Alienware 18 Area-51 is an absolute monster. And by that I don’t necessarily mean the massive weight or the gigantic dimensions. But rather the performance. In many areas, the RTX 5090 gaming laptop comes threateningly close to my desktop PC (samtr RTX 4080 Super) in terms of performance and even outperforms it with the PCIe 5.0 SSD.

The laptop masters modern games flawlessly, even in 4K resolution, and if not, DLSS 4 takes care of the rest. The cooling performance is absolutely outstanding and it takes a very long time for the fans to turn up to full speed – although they do get really loud when they do.

Alienware combines all this with an excellent keyboard and a fast, good display. Although this unfortunately only uses an IPS panel. Mini-LED or OLED would have been nice, but would only have driven up the already high price even further.

So can the Alienware 18 Area-51 replace a dedicated gaming PC? In my opinion, the answer is yes: Yes. At least if you don’t need the absolute maximum in performance and are prepared to dig deep into your pocket for it. This currently puts the gaming notebook on the throne among all the models we tested.

PRO

• Elegant design
• Outstanding workmanship
• Great keyboard
• Excellent performance
• Upgrade-friendly

CONTRA

• Large & heavy
• Display only IPS
• Average speakers
• Very expensive

Alienware 18 Area-51

Design & Workmanship

Display

Features

Performance

Battery

Value For Money

91/100

The new Alienware 18 Area-51 is a unique and incredibly high-quality gaming notebook with impressive performance.