Alienware Refreshing Aurora, Area 51 with New Nvidia and AMD Graphics

Alienware is refreshing its two popular desktop towers, the Aurora and the Area 51, with Nvidia and AMD’s latest graphics technologies, making them more powerful than ever before. The Aurora will be available in October and Alienware is aiming to have it start around $899. No pricing or availability was announced for the Area 51.

What we don’t yet know are what these graphics solutions will be. Alienware hasn’t said. That likely means the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, RTX 2070 and whatever comes next from AMD, whether that’s an RX 600 series from AMD or a new round of Vega-based GPUs.

The Aurora R8 continues to be an almost completely tool-free upgrade. It will offer 600W of power dedicated to the graphics alone and 120W for overclocking with liquid cooling, all while managing to be smaller than the last generation Aurora. The company claims that the latest generation will support up gaming on three 4K displays with its highest-end graphics options. It will include 8th Gen Intel Core i5 and i7 (including overclockable variants) processors.

We know even less about the Area 51 R6. There’s no pricing or release date, just a promise of the latest tech. It’s Alienware’s flagship desktop, though, so expect that it will be both powerful and expensive.

Alienware is also introducing third-party support for Alienware Command Center. Beginning July 31, it will be available on any PC, assuming that you’re using an Alienware peripheral that it works with, such as a mouse, keyboard, headset, monitor or graphics amplifier. You’ll be able to control the lighting on the peripherals and use the app’s library and profile features.

Lastly, the Alienware 15 R4 and Alienware 17 R5 are getting slight refreshes with per-key lighting on the keyboard. Previously, the keys were only lit by zone.

Andrew E. Freedman

Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and Mastodon @FreedmanAE.mastodon.social.

  • Kenneth Barker
    AMD cards? If there is anything to include it would be the underwhelming 1 year old cards. Hardly new, or worth buying today. And if AMD does announce new cards (600 series or new Vega cards) soon completely surprising people. It will be the same story as it will likely be a rebrand and nothing new other than trying to trick uneducated buyers into thinking its something new and upgrade worthy.

    AMD has already made it pretty clear that nothing new from RTG will come out until mid next year. Since Nvidia has now launched new cards, eyes might shift towards AMD to see how they react. I think many were surprised by what this new series and tech even is. It is hardly understood as to what it really means yet, and I have a hard time believing AMD has anything even remotely close to being able to compete with the complete rework of the turing arch. I am not saying that it is going to do anything special... only time will tell us that, but it is certainly very, very different with a whole heck of a lot of potential. If AMD was building GPUs with a more traditional, or God forbid another GCN arch, then AMD may be in a weird spot if it turns out Nvidia's Turing actually does some amazing things.
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  • BaRoMeTrIc
    AMD makes its bread and butter now off of solid performing mid-range cards, I would be ok with an AMD RX 680 with 8GB GDDR6 based on VEGA architecture. That would be a solid performing card. Would it blow NVIDIA out of the water? No... Would it compete with the GTX 2060, probably. Plus FreeSync monitors and now TVs are a heck of a lot more accessible to the average budget-minded consumer.
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