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

Alienware is introducing a pair of new, more affordable gaming laptops: the Aurora 16 and 16X, starting at $1,149 and $1,949, respectively. Unlike the flagship Area-51 laptops announced back at CES, the Auroras are meant to be a little more versatile, portable, and comfortable for general laptop use. They replace the older Alienware M, X, and cheaper Dell G lines — which will be slowly phased out as part of Dell’s streamlining of its product lines. 

Some configurations of the Aurora 16 and 16X are launching today in North America, with additional 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 still pretty hefty at around 5.5 to 5.86 pounds, but much lighter compared to the 7.6 to 10 pounds of the Area-51. And the new models even have a stealth mode button that switches the RGB lighting to a simpler white light and tones down the fans. The Auroras get their name from one of Alienware’s desktop lines, but they’re meant to be taken places, as the 16 and 16X were designed to fit in a backpack thanks to a lack of thermal shelf (the big butt behind the hinge many gaming laptops have). Instead, the Auroras have a protruding bump beneath their chassis where their fans pull in air.

Spec-wise, both laptops have 16-inch displays, but the Aurora 16 starts has a 300-nit 120Hz 2560 x 1600 IPS panel, while the 16X has the same resolution but gets up to 500 nits and 240Hz refresh rate. The Auroras have two USB-A, two USB-C, HDMI 2.1, Ethernet, a 3.5mm combo audio jack, a proprietary power plug, and Wi-Fi 7. Each has its ports on the left and rear, freeing up the right side for unhindered mouse movements while gaming. One of the USB-C ports on the 16X gets faster Thunderbolt 4 and DisplayPort 2.1 instead of just USB 3.2 Gen 2.

Both laptops can be outfitted with up to an Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU, but for CPUs, the 16 gets Intel “Raptor Lake Refresh” chips — based on architecture from 2022 — while the 16X has the latest Intel “Arrow Lake” configurations up to the Core Ultra 9 275HX. While the Aurora 16 starts at a very low price that’s more akin to a MacBook Air, its starting config has a two-generations-old RTX 3050 GPU and just 8GB of RAM. That’s a pretty old GPU for a new laptop in mid-2025 and a shockingly low amount of RAM for any Windows notebook above $1,000, let alone a gaming laptop. Even Apple’s base models now give you more. The Aurora 16 can of course be purchased with more RAM than that, and the 16X starts with a more respectable 16GB and RTX 5060.

Dell-owned Alienware is angling these new models at gamers on a budget or those who can only justify one device for both play and work (or school). I just can’t help finding it funny that, between Alienware and its parent company Dell, it’s actually Alienware with the clearer and more pleasant-sounding naming scheme. Somehow, the try-hard gaming brand with an alien head logo understands that names are better than a mish-mash of Plus, Premium, Pro, and Max.