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.
