Alienware 18 Area-51 Review

Introduction

The Alienware 18 Area-51 sees the long-awaited return of one of the longest-serving high-performance ranges of PCs and laptops in the land.

The Area-51 series dates back to 1998 in Alienware circles, and replaces the outgoing m-series of high-power laptops, bringing back a heritage line, and oodles of power, for a price.

The version I have is the huge flagship – the 18 Area-51 – complete with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor and RTX 5090 inside, along with 64GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. For good measure, you also get an 18-inch 2560×1600 300Hz IPS display and a fully mechanical keyboard.

As is typical with Alienware and this lineup, it doesn’t come cheap. I hope you’re sitting down for this, as the 18 Area-51 is £4348.98/$4399.99. That makes it nearly £1000 more than the Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate (RTX 5090) I tested earlier this year for a lot of the same specs, as well as the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025).

It’s fair to say that the 18 Area-51 is going to have to be quite something to make its way onto our list of the best gaming laptops we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• Classic Alienware looks
• Heavy, but with a great port selection
• Marvellous keyboard and trackpad

This resurrection of the Area-51 series of laptops has seen a redesign from the previous run of Alienware laptops that sees them lean back into the wackier, space-age language that was a big part of their past.

Even at first glance, the 18 Area-51 is an unmistakably Alienware laptop, with its funky teal lid and chunky shelf behind the hinged screen that’s unlike anything else you’ll find out there today. It’s a pleasantly curved chassis for a more modern nod against the usually sharp-angled options found elsewhere.

At 4.34kg, this feels more like a desktop replacement than a conventionally portable laptop – it’s ridiculously large for what one might consider a laptop in 2025.

For the same weight, you could have two MSI Stealth A16 AI+ (2025) laptops, which isn’t short of power on its own with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor and RTX 5070 Ti. It’s also nearly two kilos more in weight than the 16-inch Alienware M16 r2 I looked at last year.

The ports are contained on the rear of this Area-51, including two super-fast Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports (that can drive 4K/240Hz screens), as well as three USB-A ports, a full-size HDMI and an Ethernet jack. There is also a DC port for charging, and the left side has a headphone jack and SD card reader.

Otherwise, the left and right sides are left for cooling vents, while you can see the cooling system in action through a window on the underside.

Understandably, being such a large laptop means this Alienware option benefits from a proper full-size keyboard with arrow keys, nav cluster, function row, and number pad. Much to my satisfaction, it is also mechanical, being kitted out with clicky Cherry MX Ultra Low Profile switches that provide an immensely positive and tactile action for one of the best laptop keyboards I’ve used full stop. It is also RGB-enabled for a further dash of colour.

The trackpad here is responsive and of a decent size for navigating with your fingers, while it is fully RGB for a surprising pop of colour.

Display and Sound

• Large, high-res and refresh rate screen
• Middling black level and contrast against rivals
• Good colours, and okay speakers

If there is one area where I’m a little surprised by the 18 Area-51, it’s with the display. As much as this is traditionally the portion where we see the most skimping, on a laptop at this price, I’d have expected a little more than the IPS panel offered up by Dell.

I should stress that this is a huge 18-inch IPS panel with a solid 2560×1600 resolution and immense 300Hz refresh rate for incredible responsiveness, but on other comparably priced laptops from Asus and Medion, we’ve seen OLED and Mini LED options with stronger pop and depth.

The 490.6 nits of peak SDR brightness is decent for both indoor and outdoor use, giving images some punch, while its 0.12 black level out of the box is decent. Going up to max brightness yields a much worse 0.47 level, leading images to have a tinge of grey. The 1010:1 contrast ratio is typical with IPS panels like the one fitted here, although the 6500K colour temperature is right where it should be.

The 18 Area-51’s colour accuracy is rather excellent for an IPS panel, with 100% sRGB coverage proving it perfectly displays mainstream colours for productivity tasks, while the 98% DCI-P3 and 88% Adobe RGB results are well above the requisite level where I can recommend this screen for more colour-sensitive tasks.

As for the speakers, they’re okay, and have good volume with a decent mid-range. There isn’t too much bass, though, which can leave the sound feeling a little hollow.

Performance

• Sublime processing power
• The most powerful laptop we’ve ever tested
• Immensely fast SSD

Dell has thrown the kitchen sink at this revived Area-51 laptop, as they did in the past. With this top-spec model I have, it pairs the 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor with the beefiest GPU in Nvidia’s new Blackwell lineup with an RTX 5090 running at 175W TGP.

In the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests, the Core Ultra 9 275HX proved itself again to be an especially powerful chip with fast single-core performance and sublime multi-core scores. Intriguingly, the multi-threaded score in Cinebench R23 is some 65 percent higher than that of Medion’s Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate (RTX 5090), in spite of the two laptops having the same chip.

The addition of an RTX 5090 also pushed the 18 Area-51 to new heights in games and a very high score in the 3DMark Time Spy test that put it as the most powerful gaming laptop we’ve tested to date.  

1080p performance here is remarkably strong, with Cyberpunk 2077 at 157.82fps and Returnal at 166fps, respectively. Rainbow Six Extraction at 318fps is also more than enough to max out the 300 Hz refresh rate, proving that eSports titles don’t necessarily cause this Alienware laptop to sweat.

In going up to 1440p, we’re seeing 120.15fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 133fps in Returnal, which are simply incredible. We might have seen Rainbow Six Extraction’s frame rate drop by a third to 213fps, but still.

Bringing ray-tracing into the mix does bring the 18 Area-51 back down to Earth a tad, with a 47.45fps result at this laptop’s native 2560×1600 resolution with the RT: Ultra preset. At 1080p, we’re seeing 76.82fps. Nonetheless, those numbers are still some 20 percent or so higher than Medion’s customer.

The new DLSS Transformer model pushed these results up to 84.51fps and 108.44fps, respectively, with a much stronger performance thanks to the powers of DLSS4 and the new Transformer model that does a better job of preserving detail and removing unwanted artefacts against the older CNN version.

Being a 50-series laptop also means this 18 Area-51 can benefit from Nvidia’s clever multi-frame-gen tech with the 5090 that’s present. With this, it adds up to three ‘fake frames’ for every ‘real’ frame rendered to increase your FPS for optimal performance on high-refresh-rate screens. The results are reliant upon there being a high enough base frame rate to prevent displayed images from being choppy or there being horrible latency.

For ray-traced Cyberpunk 2077 at this laptop’s native 2560×1600 resolution and with DLSS Transformer applied with the maximum 4x multiplier, it was able to get up to 258.27fps, while at 1080p, it went as high as 334.97fps, again maxing out the 300Hz refresh rate of the display. That’s mightily impressive.

While doing this, this laptop didn’t necessarily feel as if it was getting too hot, especially thanks to this laptop’s clever Cryo-tech cooler with four fans and more copper on the heat pipes. The fans weren’t spinning like mad to the point that the Area-51 sounded like an aeroplane preparing for take-off. Sure, you could hear the fans were working, but it wasn’t too distracting.

This 18 Area-51 also comes with 64GB of DDR5 RAM and a capacious 2TB SSD in this spec that’s one of the fastest I’ve tested, thanks to measured read speeds of 13787.73 MB/s and write speeds of 12807.95 MB/s.

Software

• No bloatware installed
• Some handy Alienware apps installed
• Not enough AI horsepower to be a Copilot+ PC

The 18 Area-51 comes with a very clean Windows 11 install that doesn’t have any real bloatware, and only comes with a handful of system-specific apps preinstalled.

Chief among these is the Alienware Command Center, which is this laptop’s catch-all system app where you can check on things such as system utilisation and enable different performance modes. You can also configure the RGB lighting across the keyboard and trackpad, and even choose specific settings to enable in the games you have installed, such as choosing a different performance mode.

As much as there is a large Copilot key on this laptop for waking Microsoft’s AI assistant, this laptop isn’t powerful enough on the AI front to become one of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs with its extra AI gubbins.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 2 hours and 38 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for less than half a working day

Given the hungry internal components and a large, high-refresh-rate screen to power, it’s perhaps no surprise that this 18 Area-51 has a huge 96Whr cell inside to keep it running. Dell says it’ll last for nearly seven hours, although that figure is quoted with the lower power RTX 5070 Ti variant of this laptop.

In dialling the brightness down to the requisite 150 nits and running the PCMark 10 battery test, this Alienware laptop lasted just 2 hours and 38 minutes, meaning you’ll definitely want to keep it plugged into the mains as you’ll barely be getting through half a working day before it conks out.

It comes with a hefty 360W DC charging brick that should get you back up and running in a reasonable time, although it took 55 minutes to get the charge level back to 50 percent, while a full charge took 110 minutes.

Should you buy it?

FAQs