Alienware revives its iconic Area 51 gaming PCs and laptops at CES 2025
Alienware is bringing back the gaming brand that made it a household name among gamers in the 1990s and early 2000s with the relaunch of the Area 51 gaming PC and Area 51 gaming laptops at CES 2025.
The resurrected line was last seen with the Alienware Area 51m gaming laptop, last refreshed in 2020, while the Area 51 desktop was last refreshed in 2017.
In addition to the Area 51 line, on the laptop side, Alienware has released several generations of X-series, M-series, and unbranded Alienware laptops, available in sizes from 11.6 to 18 inches. Meanwhile, the Alienware Aurora line has been keeping the desktop side going for several years after the Area 51 desktop was discontinued.
Now both laptops and desktops will simply be Area 51, and whatever R number will follow as the devices are refreshed with new hardware and designs in the coming years.
An iconic desktop line returns
The Area 51 desktop was last seen in 2017 when the Area 51 R4 was announced at E3, and the new Area 51 tower returns to its roots as a workspace for PC components, with a massive 80 liter capacity and expandability built into the chassis and component design.
The enclosure will also feature a positive pressure airflow design that exhausts warm air through the back of the enclosure without the use of an exhaust fan, reducing noise under load.
The PC also uses AIO liquid cooling for the CPU, sold with 360mm or 240mm radiators, with plenty of room for a 420mm radiator if you choose to upgrade.
The available configurations will vary, as they currently do with the Alienware Aurora line, but you can configure it with up to 64 GB of DDR5-6400 RAM, up to 8 TB of storage, and up to an Nvidia RTX 5080 graphics card when the PC launches in the first quarter of 2025. A starting price has not yet been announced, but the launch configuration is expected to cost around $4,500 (about £3,600/AU$ 6,750).
Alienware Area 51 laptops
In mobile gaming, the Alienware Area 51 gaming laptops will be available in two sizes, 16 inches and 18 inches, and will be configurable with up to an Intel Core Ultra 285HX processor and Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU, with a total power profile of 280W.
All that power is going to generate a ton of heat, so the chassis has been redesigned to improve airflow over the components by up to 37% while being about 15% quieter (at least according to Alienware).
There are also some design and aesthetic highlights, such as the underglow under the keyboard, caused by the bottom RGB fan (this is in addition to the RGB lighting for the keys themselves).
The Area 51 laptops are also the first from Alienware to support PCIe 5.0 SSDs, configurable up to 12TB.
The Area 51 laptops will go on sale later in the first quarter of 2025 with some higher-end configurations starting at around $3,200 (about £2,560 / AU$4,800), but will ultimately settle for a starting price of around $1,999 (about £ 1,600 / AU$3,000). More and more entry-level laptop configurations are becoming available.