Alienware’s new Area-51 laptops have light-up trackpads and fans

Alienware is bringing back its Area-51 computer line, and its new flagship laptops are much showier than the secretive air base they’re named after. The bombastic, UFO-like Area-51 laptops are paired with a range of top-flight specs featuring Intel Arrow Lake CPUs and next-gen Nvidia GPUs — coming in two sizes: big (16-inch) and bigger (18-inch). They’ll start at a pricey $3,199 when select configurations launch by the end of Q1 2025, with an entry-level $1,999 model and other configs coming later.

Unlike last year’s M16 R2, which trimmed down the protruding butt found on many Alienware laptops, the Area-51 has a full-on dump truck for a rear. And this protrusion, where all its ports are located, even lights up with a soft, supple glow of RGB illumination. The Area-51’s RGB light show extends to per-key keyboard illumination, a light-up trackpad, and lit case fans. The light-up fans are visible through the intake holes on the top deck as well as a seethrough Gorilla Glass panel on the underside, also showing off some of the laptop’s innards.

The Area-51 duo will rely on their RGB lighting for their splashiest pops of color, as both sizes of Alienware laptops come in just one chassis color, called liquid teal. The anodized finish is said to take inspiration from the aurora borealis, looking nearly charcoal black in a dimly lit room until its lid or underside shows a slight shimmer of iridescence when the light catches it.

Housed within that aluminum chassis, the Area-51 sports some high-end specs. It can be outfitted with up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, Nvidia’s new 50-series GPUs, up to 64GB of dual-channel DDR5 RAM, and up to 2TB NVMe PCIe Gen5 SSD. Powering all of that in each the 16-inch and 18-inch laptops is a sizable 96Wh battery. Alienware doesn’t list any battery life estimates in the Area-51’s tech specs. We’ve asked how many hours of use people should expect when unplugged and haven’t yet heard back.

The Area-51 duo use a new thermal architecture to keep all this hot hardware cool, and Alienware claims it moves up to 37 percent more airflow while running 15 percent quieter than the older Alienware X16 R2 from 2024. All those specs and improved thermals sound nice on paper, but keep in mind, these new Area-51 models are hefty laptops. Remember that older X16 R2 laptop that Alienware compares them to? The X16 R2 weighs six pounds. At 7.6 pounds, the new 16-inch Area-51 weighs about as much as the average American newborn baby, and the 18-inch is even heavier at nearly 10 pounds.

Tipping the scales like that, the Area-51 laptops don’t feel like just a resurrection of Alienware’s flagship brand name but a throwback to older, basically immobile desktop replacement laptops. That does come with some benefits, like a plethora of rear-mounted ports including HDMI 2.1, 2.5 gigabit ethernet (RJ-45), three USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 5Gbps ports, two Thunderbolt 5 / USB-C ports, and a headphone jack and full-size SD card slot on the side.

The big drawback here is that the displays also feel a little retro, since the laptops use older IPS display tech. Both machines have 2560 x 1600 QHD panels with 3ms response time and up to 300Hz refresh (240Hz on the 16-inch), but there’s no fancy tandem OLED or anything of the sort like Alienware’s parent company Dell put in its upcoming Pro Premium laptop. If you want OLED displays from Alienware, you’ll instead have to check out its gaming monitors — of which, it announced a new 27-inch 4K QD-OLED at CES 2025 as well as some Area-51 and Aurora prebuilt desktops.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge