I tested Alienware’s new gaming laptop. It’s an out-of-this-world value

Best Prices Today: Alienware 16X Aurora

The Alienware 16X Aurora is a 16-inch gaming laptop with a screaming-fast Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, an Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU, and a bright, beautiful, and smooth display. A $1,999 is a good price for these specs. With the Aurora 16X, Alienware is delivering real value. Alienware isn’t just a high-end premium brand anymore.

Alienware 16X Aurora: Specs

The Alienware 16X Aurora is a 16-inch gaming laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU. This is a high-end laptop gaming CPU based on Intel’s Arrow Lake architecture, although Intel brands it an Intel Core (Series 2) — just like Lunar Lake and some Meteor Lake chips.

Our $1,999 review unit had an Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU, although Alienware also offers this machine with RTX 5060 graphics. It had 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, but Dell offers this machine with up to 64 GB of RAM. Dell offers other configurations of this laptop starting at $1,549.

• Model number: AC16251
• CPU: Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX
• Memory: 32 GB DDR5 RAM
• Graphics/GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070
• NPU: Intel AI Boost
• Display: 16-inch 2560×1600 IPS display with 240Hz refresh rate
• Storage: 1 TB PCIe Gen4 SSD
• Webcam: 1080p camera
• Connectivity: 2x USB Type-C (one Thunderbolt 4, one USB 3.2 Gen 2), 2x USB Type-A (USB 3.2 Gen 1), 1x HDMI 2.1 out, 1x Ethernet (RJ-45), 1x combo audio jack, 1x power in
• Networking: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Biometrics: IR camera for Windows Hello
• Battery capacity: 96 Watt-hours
• Dimensions: 14.05 x 10.45 x 0.92 inches
• Weight: 5.86 pounds
• MSRP: $1,999 as tested

Aside from a reflective Alienware head on the lid, this laptop is all business and looks like it could be a workstation laptop. It doesn’t have extreme ‘gamer’ aesthetics.

Alienware 16X Aurora: Design and build quality

The Alienware 16X Aurora, with its “Interstellar Indigo” color scheme, looks deceptively like a black laptop from some angles, but the dark-blue-to-violet shades are visible at the right angles. Aside from a reflective Alienware head on the lid, this laptop is all business and looks like it could be a workstation laptop. It doesn’t have extreme “gamer” aesthetics.

The 16X Aurora has an anodized aluminum lid and bottom cover, giving it a more premium feel — Alienware’s more budget-focused Alienware 16 Aurora just has the anodized aluminum lid. However, it’s not all aluminum — the area around the keyboard is matte plastic. Still, it feels good and looks good. It does pick up fingerprints more than I’d like, as you’ll see in some of the photos — that’s the main issue. The laptop is solid and the hinge action is great — it’s easy to open with one hand.

Alienware 16X Aurora: Keyboard and trackpad

The Alienware 16X Aurora has a full-size keyboard complete with a number pad. With 1.4mm of key travel, it feels good. It doesn’t have the wow factor of the snappy mechanical keyboard you’ll find in a high-end Alienware 16 Area-51 or the surprisingly hefty feeling keyboard with the higher actuation force you’ll get in a Razer Blade, but it works well.

This laptop has a customizable backlighting, but it’s one zone: You can choose a single color to apply to your entire keyboard.

The Alienware 16X Aurora includes a trackpad with a plastic surface. It’s fine — it’s a little on the small side and a glass trackpad would be nicer, but this works well.

Alienware 16X Aurora: Display and speakers

The Alienware 16X Aurora has a 16-inch 2560×1600 resolution IPS display with a 240Hz refresh rate and up to 500 nits of brightness. It’s a solid display with advanced features like Nvidia G-Sync for variable refresh rates. That high refresh rate makes the experience “buttery smooth” in games and on the desktop, and the high brightness combined with excellent color reproduction delivers a much better display experience than the lower-end Alienware 16 Aurora’s display. You’re getting a noticeably better display for your money here.

While I’m often wowed by the vivid colors on OLED displays, this display delivers a beautiful picture. A high-end IPS display can look incredible, too, and this panel proves it.

This isn’t a touch-screen display, so it doesn’t need the glossy coating touchscreen laptops tend to have. The matte display and its anti-glare coating combined with a high brightness means this laptop’s display does an unusually good job of minimizing reflections and glare.  

I test every laptop’s speakers by playing Steely Dan’s Aja and Daft Punk’s Get Lucky. The Alienware 16X Aurora delivered decent sound quality, with a brighter, more detailed sound in Aja — the instrument separation was crisper than on the less expensive Alienware 16 Aurora I reviewed at the same time. Get Lucky had a fun sound. But, as always, it could use more bass — laptop speakers lack bass in general, and the better the rest of the speaker setup is, the more the lack of bass stands out to me from an audio quality standpoint.

Alienware 16X Aurora: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

The Alienware 16X Aurora has a 1080p webcam, and it’s significantly better than the 720p webcam found in the lower-end Alienware 16 Aurora. The image quality and color reproduction beat that lower-end hardware. For a gaming laptop, though, this is fine. Also, because there’s an NPU in this machine, you get access to Windows Studio Effects for fixing eye contact, blurring your background, and more.

The dual-array microphone setup in this laptop sounds decent, but it isn’t up to the audio quality standard I’ve heard in business laptops where video conferencing is a major concern.

The Alienware 16X Aurora features an IR camera for Windows Hello, so you can sign into Windows with your face. It works well.

Alienware 16X Aurora: Connectivity

The Alienware 16X has a good number of ports, and the only thing you might miss is an SD card reader.

On the left, this machine has a USB Type-A port, Ethernet jack, and combo audio jack. On the back, there’s a second USB Type-A port, two USB Type-C ports (one of them is also a Thunderbolt 4 port), HDMI 2.1 out, and power-in port.

You could nitpick — sure, it would be nice if both USB Type-C ports were Thunderbolt 4 ports — but this is a good setup. I always love to see ports — especially the power connection — on the back of the gaming laptop so peripherals get out of the way.

Alienware includes Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 hardware in this machine, which is also good to see. The Wi-Fi worked well.

Alienware 16X Aurora: Performance

The Alienware 16X Aurora’s cooling system kept the system cool and the fans stayed at a reasonable volume level. Playing the latest big games like Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 and Doom: The Dark Ages, the keyboard stayed a little warm, but not too hot, and most of the hot air was propelled out of the back of the machine. Some hot air does come out of the sides of the laptop — not a lot, but ideally it would all be pumped out of the back and away from your mouse hand.

With a high-end Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU and Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics, this machine delivered excellent performance in those games — and the display delivered beautiful image quality, too. As always, though, we ran the Alienware 16X Aurora through our standard benchmarks to see how it performs.

First, we run PCMark 10 to get an idea of overall system performance. With an overall score of 8,794, the Alienware 16X delivered incredible performance — edging out even the more expensive Alienware 16 Area-51 in this benchmark. It’s within the margin of error, but the high-end Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU here is doing work.

Next, we run Cinebench R20. This is a heavily multithreaded benchmark that focuses on overall CPU performance. It’s a quick benchmark, so cooling under extended workloads isn’t a factor. But, since it’s heavily multithreaded, CPUs with more cores have a huge advantage.

With a multithreaded score of 13,872 in this benchmark, we once again saw just how impressive this machine’s CPU is.

We also run an encode with Handbrake. This is another heavily multithreaded benchmark, but it runs over an extended period. This demands the laptop’s cooling kick in, and many laptops will throttle and slow down under load.

The Alienware 16X Aurora completed the encode in 477 seconds on average. That’s just under eight minutes. On this benchmark, the higher-end Alienware 16 Area-51 beat the 16X Aurora, despite both machines having the same CPU. I’d bet that’s thanks to the higher-end cooling setup on the more expensive Alienware laptop.

Next, we run a graphical benchmark. We run 3Dmark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance, on all the machines we review.

With a 3Dmark Time Spy score of 13,342, the Alienware 16X Aurora’s Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics came in in the middle of the pack — a good ways ahead of the Alienware 16 Aurora with its RTX 5060 graphics but far behind Nvidia RTX 5080-powered machines.

After that, we run the benchmarks built into some games. First, we use the benchmark in Shadow of the Tomb Raider to test all the gaming laptops we review. It’s an older game, but it’s a great way to compare GPU performance across different PCs.

With an average FPS of 183, the Alienware 16X Aurora delivered excellent performance. You likely won’t get better performance without going up to a laptop with an RTX 5080 or 5090.

Finally, we run the benchmark in Metro Exodus. This is a more demanding game, and we set the benchmark to 1080p resolution at the Extreme detail setting.

With an average FPS of 53 in this high-end Metro Exodus benchmark, the Alienware 16X Aurora offered good performance even at these brutal graphical settings. Of course, it once again comes in behind laptops with higher-end GPUs.

Overall, the Alienware 16 Aurora delivers incredible CPU performance thanks to its high-end CPU, but gaming laptops tend to be more GPU-constrained. You might be better off with a gaming laptop with a slower CPU and Nvidia RTX 5080 graphics, if you can find that as an option. The GPU is the bottleneck here — which is fine, but it’s not as high-end as the CPU.

Alienware 16X Aurora: Battery life

The Alienware 16X Aurora has a massive 96 Watt-hour battery, which is about as large as they’re allowed to get before the Transportation Security Administration won’t allow them on airplanes in the U.S. Many 16-inch gaming laptops include smaller batteries. While the hardware is power-hungry, that battery ensures you can squeeze more runtime out of your laptop when you’re away from an outlet.

To benchmark the battery life, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on repeat on Windows 11 with airplane mode activated and the keyboard backlight turned off until the laptop suspends itself. We set the screen to 250 nits of brightness for our battery benchmarks. This is a best-case scenario for any laptop since local video playback is so efficient, and real battery life in day-to-day use is always going to be less than this.

The Alienware 16X Aurora lasted 407 minutes in this benchmark — that’s just under seven hours. In the real world, you’ll get a few hours away from an outlet. That’s fine for a gaming laptop — you’ll need to plug in for good gaming performance, anyway — but this isn’t the ideal machine if you want a gaming laptop that can also deliver long battery life away from an outlet.

Alienware 16X Aurora: Conclusion

The Alienware 16X Aurora is an impressive machine. At $1,999 for an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, an RTX 5070, and a display of this caliber, it’s serious value compared to what you’d pay for competing laptops with similar hardware — at retail price, it undercuts many similar laptops by a few hundred bucks.

It’s a great experience, but some people might want a faster GPU for better gaming performance, an OLED panel, or a higher-end all-metal build quality. You’ll pay extra for touches like that, though. This is a mid-range laptop that delivers value and doesn’t feel like a budget machine. That’s very impressive coming from a brand like Alienware that’s historically been more high-end, especially with prices climbing all around.

Best Prices Today: Alienware 16X Aurora

Author: Chris Hoffman, Contributor, PCWorld