To gauge this system’s exact performance level, I ran it through our usual benchmark suite and compared the results against the following high-end laptops.
The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 ($2,299.99 as tested) is the one system here firmly below the Area-51 in on-paper power, with its RTX 4070 in a thin chassis. From there, the HP Omen Max 16 ($3,509 as tested) and Razer Blade 16 ($4,499.99 as tested) are high-end RTX 50 series-based alternatives, while the MSI Raider 18 HX AI ($3,999 as tested) shows what a larger 18-inch laptop can do with the same GPU.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL’s PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. PCMark’s Full System Drive subtest measures a PC’s storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the freeware video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
These results show, in no uncertain terms, that this laptop and its processor are ready to tear through office and multimedia workloads. It posted the highest result on PCMark 10’s productivity test and found itself behind only the larger 18-inch system on any other test. Many shoppers likely want this machine primarily for gaming. Still, for the cross-section of users who want to edit media and crunch other demanding workloads, the Area-51 is more than capable.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We challenge all systems’ graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad’s regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. We also turn to 3DMark’s Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment.
Our real-world gaming testing comes from in-game benchmarks within Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen is capable of a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. Each game runs at two sets of graphics settings per resolution for up to four runs total on each game.
We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates to test display refresh rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs fully, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR, on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies.
Unsurprisingly, the RTX 5080 is an amazingly capable gaming GPU by any objective measure, pushing above 60 frames per second (fps) even at 1600p in almost all scenarios. We expect the Cyberpunk Ray-Tracing Overdrive setting to be too much for virtually any laptop without the help of DLSS. As you can see, all of these potent machines struggled on that test, but it’s a decent measure of where raw GPU power stands—especially as DLSS makes generational improvements murkier. The Call of Duty results demonstrate the sky-high frame rates you can expect to see in competitive multiplayer games (many of them less visually demanding than CoD) using the high-refresh-rate screen.
In summary, the Area-51 can push more than 60fps in nearly any modern game at maximum visual settings, barring natively rendered, heavily ray-traced scenarios. This machine is right up there with any other high-end system here, including the larger-bodied MSI Raider. In fact, it shows the value of firsthand testing and not basing your graphics-performance expectations on GPU name alone: In several areas, the Area-51 matched or outperformed the RTX 5090-bearing HP Omen Max 16 and Razer Blade 16. This is no underdog story—this laptop is also expensive—but it’s not a case of style over substance, either. This Area-51 configuration can punch upward into the next performance class under certain circumstances.
Battery Life and Display Tests
We test each laptop’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software. With it, we measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
As positive as the other results were, battery life is one area where this laptop fell hopelessly short. Gaming laptops aren’t exactly expected to last long off the charger (even while not gaming), but their stamina has improved, on average, over the years. As with the Omen Max 16, this laptop’s battery harkens back to when sub-three-hour runtimes were the expectation, which is not a positive. Plan to plug in this laptop before long if you take it on the road—mind you, not that it’s great for using at a cafe or on a plane, given the weight.
The screen-test results were much more impressive, with broad color coverage and high brightness ratings. The peak brightness score we recorded is even higher than Dell’s stated rating of 500 nits.
