Here’s Alienware’s fresh take on entry-level gaming laptops

Alienware is introducing a brace of new, much affordable gaming laptops: the Aurora 16 and 16X, starting astatine $1,149 and $1,949, respectively. Unlike the flagship Area-51 laptops announced backmost astatine CES, the Auroras are meant to beryllium a small much versatile, portable, and comfy for wide laptop use. They regenerate the older Alienware M, X, and cheaper Dell G lines — which volition beryllium dilatory phased retired arsenic portion of Dell’s streamlining of its merchandise lines. 

Some configurations of the Aurora 16 and 16X are launching contiguous successful North America, with further models arriving later.

The duo of indigo-colored 16-inch laptops are lighter, smaller, and cheaper than the 16- and 18-inch Area-51 models. They’re inactive beauteous hefty astatine astir 5.5 to 5.86 pounds, but overmuch lighter compared to the 7.6 to 10 pounds of the Area-51. And the caller models adjacent person a stealth mode fastener that switches the RGB lighting to a simpler achromatic airy and tones down the fans. The Auroras get their sanction from 1 of Alienware’s desktop lines, but they’re meant to beryllium taken places, arsenic the 16 and 16X were designed to acceptable successful a backpack acknowledgment to a deficiency of thermal support (the large butt down the hinge galore gaming laptops have). Instead, the Auroras person a protruding bump beneath their chassis wherever their fans propulsion successful air.

Spec-wise, some laptops person 16-inch displays, but the Aurora 16 has a 300-nit 120Hz 2560 x 1600 IPS panel, portion the 16X has the aforesaid solution but gets up to 500 nits and 240Hz refresh rate. The Auroras person 2 USB-A, 2 USB-C, HDMI 2.1, Ethernet, a 3.5mm combo audio jack, a proprietary powerfulness plug, and Wi-Fi 7. Each has its ports connected the near and rear, freeing up the close broadside for unhindered rodent movements portion gaming. One of the USB-C ports connected the 16X gets faster Thunderbolt 4 and DisplayPort 2.1 alternatively of conscionable USB 3.2 Gen 2.

Both laptops tin beryllium outfitted with up to an Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU, but for CPUs, the 16 gets Intel “Raptor Lake Refresh” chips — based connected architecture from 2022 — portion the 16X has the latest Intel “Arrow Lake” configurations up to the Core Ultra 9 275HX. While the Aurora 16 starts astatine a precise debased terms that’s much akin to a MacBook Air, its starting config has a two-generations-old RTX 3050 GPU and conscionable 8GB of RAM. That’s a beauteous aged GPU for a caller laptop successful mid-2025 and a shockingly debased magnitude of RAM for immoderate Windows notebook supra $1,000, fto unsocial a gaming laptop. Even Apple’s basal models now springiness you more. The Aurora 16 tin of people beryllium purchased with much RAM than that, and the 16X starts with a much respectable 16GB and RTX 5060.

Dell-owned Alienware is angling these caller models astatine gamers connected a fund oregon those who tin lone warrant 1 instrumentality for some play and enactment (or school). I conscionable can’t assistance uncovering it comic that, betwixt Alienware and its genitor institution Dell, it’s really Alienware with the clearer and much pleasant-sounding naming scheme. Somehow, the try-hard gaming marque with an alien caput logo understands that names are amended than a mishmash of Plus, Premium, Pro, and Max.