Gaming legacy
Before Alienware arrived, gaming PCs were beige boxes that bored everyone to tears. That all changed in 1996 when Alienware released its first PC with some flair (see pic). It’s been 25 years and the brand is still pushing PC design with out-of-this-world designs and high-end components.
Once known as Saikai, Alienware is now owned by Dell. After many years of pumping out gaming PC and laptops — and concept gaming handhelds — that look unlike anything else in the market, Alienware’s current flagship PC, the Aurora, is getting somewhat of a redesign.
Unidentified gaming object
The new Aurora PC sports the redesigned Legend 2.0 chassis, which reworks the internal space to make it 50 percent roomier than its predecessor without increasing its external size. The expanded internal compartment not only makes it easier to upgrade and work on the computer but also improves airflow.
On the Aurora, you’ll find at least two 120mm fans and up to four fans on higher-priced models. The PC uses an all-in-one liquid cooler to keep temperatures down. Another way to improve cooling: a motherboard design that puts components on the perimeter for better airflow instead of jumbling them together in the middle.
Alien sighting
Unlike pretty much every gaming PC on the market for the last five years, Alienware has not used a clear side panel on its PCs until now. While the side panel is optional, it’s a big step for Alienware. To make the side panel option more worthwhile, the new Aurora also has double the lighting zones (eight to be exact) to show off its guts.
Marginal gains
Don’t expect the new Aurora to blow you away when compared to previous models. According to Alienware, with Nvidia’s RTX 3090 GPU, the new Aurora PC is only 5 percent faster than the previous Aurora R12 model. The CPU runs 3 percent cooler. It’s 13 to 16 percent quieter when idle and 9 percent less noisy when running CPU-intensive tasks. Regardless, the Aurora with max specs is already a beast, so there’s not a lot of room to grow.
Price, release date, and configurations are still unknown at this time. However, I would expect the latest modern CPUs, GPUs, RAM, and storage configurations. The previous Aurora R12 flagship comes with up to an 11th-Gen Intel Core i9 processor, an RTX 3090 GPU, 128GB of RAM, and 2TB of NVMe SSD storage. It’s not cheap.