If you've got the bucks, you don’t have to look far to find a big, mean gaming laptop that excels in all AAA games and delivers a luxe computing experience. The Alienware 18 Area-51 (starts at $1,899.99; $4,549.99 as tested) is that kind of heavyweight champion. Our top-end configuration comes with a sweet Intel Core Ultra 9 processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. Take that full meal with a side of mechanical keys and a bright, 300Hz, 1600p in-plane switching (IPS) display, all served within a stunning RGB-lit chassis.

Regardless, it’s tough to justify Dell's pricing at the high end. This thing is practically a dumbbell, and you'll have to race to finish your reps before its battery runs out. That likely won't matter to most desktop replacement shoppers, but the lack of advanced display options, such as mini-LED, might. When you rocket past four grand, mere IPS just doesn't cut it anymore. Does that, along with the pricing, detract from the overall experience? Not necessarily in use, but enough to keep the Area-51 from higher honors. For the best value in a giant-screen gaming laptop, look to the Editors' Choice-award-winning MSI Raider 18 HX AI.

Configurations: Have You Considered Financing?

Any gamer shopping for new hardware is likely to see Alienware products appear in their search results, often with a substantial price tag, particularly for their most powerful models. Surprising no one, a decked-out Alienware 18 Area-51 is one of the most expensive gaming laptops available. 

Our test configuration costs $4,549.99 (at times, seen as low as $4,049.99) for an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics chip, 64GB of memory, a 2TB solid-state drive, an 18-inch WQXGA (2,560-by-1,600-pixel) 300Hz IPS display, and a CherryMX mechanical keyboard. That’s a couple of months' worth of rent or two mortgage payments right there.

The cheapest configuration costs $1,899.99 for a Core Ultra 7 255HX CPU, an RTX 5060 GPU, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a standard keyboard. I do not recommend this configuration because premium gaming laptops, such as the Area-51, don’t scale well at lower-power configurations. If all you care about is getting bare-minimum gaming performance and can lose a few inches of display, you can find an RTX 5060-level gaming laptop for a bit more than half this price. Also, I wouldn’t configure the Area-51 without the mechanical keyboard: It's a huge perk on such a large laptop.

Design: Embrace the Rainbow

For all that money, I certainly expected something slick-looking, and that’s precisely what I found in the box. While I’m not a big fan of the Liquid Teal color, the aurora borealis-esque lighting popping off on the rear hinge looks stunning. It sells the whole aesthetic and makes that chunky 9.6-pound, 0.95-inch-thick chassis feel worth its weight. It’s easily the heaviest and thickest out of all its competitors, so you'll want to keep this one planted on your desk.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Iridescent paint coats the anodized aluminum lid, and it looks as fancy as it sounds. Again, I'm not a fan of the color, but the quality speaks for itself at the price. The lid is sheer, aside from an RGB-lit Alienware logo, while the rear houses a host of ports, plus vents that emit an RGB light show from within the chassis. It’s pretty slick.

Popping open the lid reveals a black deck offsetting a full rainbow-lit keyboard and touchpad. (Yes, the whole touchpad glows.) You'll find a chunk of space above the keyboard dedicated to more vents. Alienware had to do something with the space—after all, it’s an 18-inch laptop that measures 12.6 inches deep, which means a huge keyboard deck. Dell's build is sturdy, too, with minimal flex on the hood and deck. Meanwhile, the display bezels are thin for the large screen, but Dell found enough room for a webcam on top.

Display and Audio: A Premium Showing

I am hyper-particular about displays designed for gaming, especially in a laptop that costs double my rent. My biggest critique of the Alienware 18 Area-51 display is that it does not feature mini-LED technology at this price, lagging behind competitors that sell it for less. (Mini-LED is the closest a laptop screen of this size can get to OLED-like backlighting and contrast ratios.) Despite that, the Area-51 features one of the better IPS displays I’ve seen.

With an 18-inch WQXGA (2,560-by-1,600-pixel) screen, you can capture all the sharp details in high-fidelity games like Cyberpunk 2077. However, what really leverages the powerhouse GeForce RTX 5090 GPU is its 300Hz refresh rate. If a GPU is an engine, the display is the car. You can experience up to 300 frames per second (fps) on screen (and yes, the human eye can see the difference). In Cyberpunk 2077, the Alienware captures the flashy lights and blood-soaked combat with vivid precision.

The Area-51 contains a four-speaker system with powerful audio. It pumps out crisp dialogue in games and reproduces bass-heavy music well. The sound system becomes a little messy with sharp, techno sound effects like those found in Cyberpunk 2077. A pair of dedicated headphones will provide a better experience, but you can still enjoy most game audio using the laptop’s speakers.

Keyboard, Touchpad, and Webcam: Close to Perfect

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Alienware 18 Area-51 comes with one of the best laptop keyboards. That comes down to a single configuration choice: switching from a traditional membrane keyboard to a Cherry MX mechanical keyboard for just $50 more. Tapping the keys produces punchy, clicky feedback that feels satisfying when pulling off headshots in Call of Duty. (You can opt for a membrane keyboard, but I don’t recommend it.)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Another wise decision was to install a glass touchpad in this machine. Not only does it look sleek, thanks to the RGB lighting, but it also feels smooth to navigate, even with my disturbingly large number of open browser tabs. (Don’t judge me.) The clicker also produces a pronounced, pleasantly sharp sound.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

I wouldn’t launch a career as a streamer with this 1080p webcam, though. The usual vibrant colors in my Gurren Lagann poster behind my workspace look dull, and the poor contrast washes out half the window and ceiling in the background. You'll also notice a layer of noise over the live image, which removes a lot of the detail from my face. It’s perfectly fine to chat with friends or even videoconference for work, but if you need a sharper appearance for public presentations or entry-level livestreaming, grab the 4K option. At the time of publishing, the upgrade costs nothing in Dell's online store configurator.

Ports: This Laptop Is Packing

As anticipated, this chunky gaming laptop contains a plethora of ports. Most of them are on the rear, but you'll find two on the left side: a 3.5mm audio jack and an SD card slot, which is helpful for creatives or casual users looking to transfer smartphone data.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The rear is where your armory is. There, you'll find two Thunderbolt 5 ports for connecting modern, speedy devices and three USB-A ports for legacy peripherals. The laptop also features an HDMI 2.1 port for connecting to an external display and an RJ-45 Ethernet port for a direct internet connection (typically faster than wireless). If you don’t have access to Ethernet, you can rely on Wi-Fi 7, the fastest wireless connectivity available on any laptop today. The system also features Bluetooth 5.4 for connecting all your peripherals.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Performance Testing: Peak Potency at Your Fingertips

You want to see what peak performance looks like? To recap, we tested the Alienware 18 Area-51 stacked with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, an RTX 5090 GPU, 64GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. Apart from the SSD size, the Alienware doesn’t get more powerful than this.

We ran this beast against the Editors' Choice award-winning MSI Raider 18 HX AI ($3,999.99 as tested), an 18-inch gaming laptop with a mini-LED display and an RTX 5080 GPU. Taking a step down in size, but with the same 5090 GPU as the Area-51, we threw the Razer Blade 16 ($4,999.99 as tested) and HP Omen Max 16 ($3,509.99 as tested) into the mix. And finally, we compared the Alienware 18 with its little sibling, the Alienware 16 Area-51 ($3,399.99 as tested), which houses an RTX 5080 GPU.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. 

Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. 

Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image-editing prowess through a variety of automated operations in the seminal photo editor Adobe Photoshop 25.

I experienced smooth performance while juggling several apps at a time on the Alienware 18 Area-51. Overall, the Area-51 aced every single productivity benchmark we sent it through, taking first place in both PCMark tests. (The 18-inch Alienware demolished the PCMark Storage test with its PCIe Gen 5 SSD inside, compared with the Gen 4 models inside the rest.) However, the MSI laptop's slightly superior processor outperformed the Alienware in Cinebench, HandBrake, and Geekbench. The 18-inch Area-51 is still a creator's big-screen paradise, but the MSI does it all just that much better with a higher-fidelity screen.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We challenge all systems’ graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first pair, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), uses the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The second two, Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests, assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last, we turn to 3DMark's Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment.

Our real-world gaming testing is based on the in-game benchmarks for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooters, open-world games, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen supports a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. Each game runs at two sets of graphics settings per resolution, for up to four runs total on each game.

We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates to test display refresh rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs to the max, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies. The capacity of these frame-rate boosts varies with the version of frame generation tech available: DLSS 2 and 3 stitch in one AI-generated frame for every originally rendered frame, while the latest DLSS 4 inserts up to three additional frames. (FSR can generate up to four new frames per original, while Intel's XeSS can only stitch in one new frame per original frame.)

(The HP and MSI laptops could not run the Call of Duty benchmark during their reviews, so we have omitted them from the charts below for those tests.)

The Alienware 18 Area-51 is one nasty customer. Its superior GPU consistently outpaced the MSI laptop's step-down RTX 5080 graphics chip and any other RTX 5090 implementation in this comparison. Save for a few edge cases, both 18-inchers left the smaller laptops scrapping for third place. Those results make sense, since the 16-inch laptops are designed for more portability, except for the Alienware 16 Area-51, which simply contained the weaker RTX 5080 GPU.

With its RTX 5090, the Alienware 18 Area-51 can handle the majority of AAA games at their highest settings at its native resolution. You won’t be able to make much use of its 300Hz display in crunchier games like Cyberpunk 2077, unless you turn on frame generation. But with Nvidia's latest Multi-Frame Generation technology inside, you'll see the Area-51 surviving the next era of AAA games for years to come.

Battery Life and Display Tests 

We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To gauge display performance, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

With an 18-inch display and the most powerful GPU currently available, I had only the most minimal expectations for the Alienware 18 Area-51's battery life. As a result, no crushed dreams here: This machine couldn’t even get you through a rewatch of Avengers: Endgame before it died. Most of its competitors are the same way, save for the MSI laptop and the Razer Blade 16. 

While it’s no OLED or Mini-LED, the Alienware 18 Area-51’s display is super bright and produces a wide color range to show off all those vivid hues in your favorite movies and games. Don’t dismiss the Alienware just because of its IPS panel: It keeps pace with its premium competitors, particularly in color coverage. Regardless, the MSI Raider's screen holds mini-LED's extreme brightness and contrast ratio over the Alienware's IPS.