The Area-51: new color, curvy design, metal construction, and upgraded cooling
New for 2025, the 18" Area-51 is Alienware's biggest and best gaming laptop. It's pricier than other RTX 5080 equipped laptops (less so with this deal), but that's because the build quality far exceeds most of its competition. For starters, the Area-51 chassis is clad in anodized aluminum for both the lid and bottom chassis and features a unique iridescent finish that sparkles in direct lighting. The frame is made of a durable and lightweight magnesium alloy. Cooling has been upgraded with generous amounts of copper and a new thermal interface material to better transfer heat away from your hottest components as well as more fans and bigger cutouts for greater airflow. Dell claims that the laptop can handle a higher power ceiling of up to 240W TDP without raising acoustics.
Design-wise, the Area 51 has a sleeker, more contoured shape compared to previous models, with rounded edges and soft corners replacing the traditional squared off design. The hinges are internally positioned so that they're near invisible. There's a transparent window on the undercarriage to show off the internal components. As befits an Alienware laptop, there's plenty of RGB illunimation, although most of it can be turned off if you want your laptop to be a bit more subtle.
The GeForce RTX 5080 mobile GPU is better than the RTX 4090 mobile
The Alienware Area-51 is equipped with an aggressive cooling design that allows it to accomodate a more powerful GPU like the RTX 5080 without throttling it. The RTX 5080 mobile GPU is roughly 15%-20% more powerful than the RTX 4080 mobile GPU that it replaces. In fact, it's slightly more powerful than the RTX 4090, which was the previous generation's flagship card. It will run any game at frame rates of 60fps or higher on the 1600p display. You could even enable ray tracing and still get playable frames, something that was unheard of in laptops just a few years ago.
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Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
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