Alienware Area-51 Review: One Super-Clean Beast Of A Gaming PC
Alienware Area-51 Software Experience
Our Alienware Area-51 came out of the box running Windows 11 Pro 24H2. We did fully update the system using both Windows Update and Alienware's tools, and updated the graphics driver to the latest Game Ready driver from NVIDIA's website. The most consequential application preinstalled on the Area-51 is Alienware Command Center, which provides functionality for the RGB lighting system, peripheral configurations, and more. We made a point to check that our BIOS was the latest version with the correct settings applied in the interface, for reasons that will become apparent very soon.
Alienware Command Center is home to all of the system controls for both the system performance as well as RGB options. Command Center automatically puts the Area-51 into Performance mode whenever a recognized game launches, whether you do so from Steam or another launcher, or the Library screen in Alienware CC itself. This lets you get the best performance possible without having to babysit settings just to have the quietest system while it's idle. We dig it.
And then once you run a game, hovering the mouse pointer over its title card and going to the settings screen, we can see performance over time. It also shows CPU and GPU utilization while it's running. In the screenshot above, the GPU is not really utilized while in the menus, but you can see its usage jump while the built-in benchmark in Cyberpunk was running. The top graph is frames per second, and moving the mouse around shows instantaneous fps while the game is running. You can also override global performance presets from here on the right.
RGB settings within Alienware Command Center can be configured for all attached and supported peripherals, or on an individual basis. There are several cycling options, either for colors or pulses. It doesn't talk to standard addressable RGB peripherals, nor does it talk to Corsair iCUE peripherals, so for example our Void headset doesn't appear. We'd love to see interoperability in the future, rather than vendors take the current "lock-in" approach.
Lastly, we could control brightness, contrast, PIP settings and more without using the monitor's control stick. This is very convenient, but it does require the USB cable be attached to the display, which you're likely to do anyway to utilize all of the monitors accessory ports. The messages to change these options can only be sent via USB, though we suspect most users will want that set up in the first place since those USB ports are handy.
Finally, it's time to see how the system performs.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
The first thing we'll take a quick look at will be storage performance, to see how the 2TB SK Hynix PC811 Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD in the Area-51 stacks up. This is a quick and dirty benchmark to gauge throughput and IOPS for a variety of transfer sizes.
You can see a blip in write speeds, which we think is just a cache clearing strategy, but otherwise performance is solid. Read speeds frequently topped 6.5 GB per second and for the most part, writes hit 6 GB/sec as well. This drive allowed the Area-51 to boot super fast, and game loads were also as quick as you'd expect from a high performance SSD.
Browserbench Speedometer
The world has moved on from Speedometer 2, but we have a lot of comparative data, so you'll see that older benchmark, but we're also testing against some of our CPU testbeds to have the latest Speedometer 3. Both benchmarks use a variety of JavaScript applications to cover DOM manipulation and JS business logic execution speeds, reported in runs per minute.
We're off to a strong start for the Alienware Area-51. Speedometer 2.1 is an older benchmark, but we have a lot of comparable data from as recent as earlier this year, yet the system just demolishes the field due to the newer CPU architecture and various browser optimizations. It also takes the top spot against our CPU testbeds in the latest version of the test.
Cinebench Benchmarks
Just like Browserbench Speedometer, we're looking at two versions of Cinebench, just to have comparative data both for other desktop systems we've previously reviewed as well as our CPU testbeds.
Based on prior experience with the Core Ultra 9 285K, we'd expect the Area-51 to be at the top of the chart, and that's exactly what we get. Even AMD's very best Ryzen 9 9950X3D can barely keep up in the newer Cinebench 2024. And in the prior Cinebench R23 benchmark, the Area-51 reigns supreme against the other gaming desktops we've reviewed by a pretty wide margin.
Blender 3D Rendering
Blender is another rendering workload that reports samples per minute across three workloads of varying difficulty.
Blender is the sort of test that you might not throw at a gaming PC, but for 3D professionals it makes for a relevent metric for performance comparisons. The rendering performance in Blender is what we expected from the Area-51's Core Ultra 9 285K processor, though it finishes a notch behind our testbed, which is equipped with much faster CU-DIMM memory.
Geekbench System Testing
As with Cinebench and Speedometer, we're going to bridge the gap using both Geekbench 5 and 6. These are synthetic tests, but they use real-world scenarios as their base. Both single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads apply.
Geekbench is a simulated workload that tries to test the worst case scenario where a lot of latency-sensitive performance is on the line. Here, the new Area-51 leads the pack overall.
PCMark 10 Productivity Tests
PCMark is UL's big productivity test suite. It uses a wide variety of applications to measure performance in a large number of productivity scenarios, including office apps, video conferencing, and digital content creation.
PCMark 10 is not the best result for the Area-51. It's about 12% slower overall than the Maingear ZERO that we reviewed last year, despite a big win in the Digital Content Creation test. It's got more to do with the CPU, though, as the Essentials subtest is where the system falters, scoring well behind the entire field. That persisted across multiple runs.
Productivity may not really tax the Area-51 all that much, but with that NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 in there, we expect that this thing will put up some important wins in 3D tests.
3DMark Time Spy DirectX 12 Benchmark
3DMark Time Spy Extreme is a synthetic DirectX benchmark test from UL. It features a DirectX 12 engine built from the ground up to support bleeding-edge features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading. Time Spy is designed to test the DX12 performance of the latest graphics cards using a variety of techniques and varied visual sequences. This benchmark was developed with input from AMD, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the other members of the UL Benchmark Development Program, to showcase the performance and visual potential of graphics cards driven by close-to-the-metal, low-overhead APIs.
As expected, the Area-51 cleans up here. It has by far the most powerful consumer gaming GPU available, and it mops the floor with the competition as a result. The nearest competitor is the Origin Neuron, and it has both a last-gen CPU and GPU, so of course the Alienware wins out.
3DMark Port Royal DXR Benchmark
We also tested the cards with UL's DirectX Ray Tracing Feature test. This test is laser-focused on ray tracing (or what NVIDIA refers to as path tracing) performance, and uses fewer of the graphics card's other resources.
Once again, the Area-51 dominates this test. The Area-51's GeForce RTX 5090 is the undisputed champion of DXR acceleration, and its 40% margin of victory over the recently-reviewed Maingear Apex Force really drives that point home.
Before we get into our gaming benchmarks, we want to draw your attention to the video review again. While some of the titles for which we have a lot of historical data are getting on in years, that video review has a ton of testing in much more recent titles. It will give prospective buyers a bit of insight into how the Area-51 performs in the latest games from the last year or two.
Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker
Our testing begins with one of the more popular MMORPGs around. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker isn't a graphically intense game by today's standards, but it benefits greatly from strong single-threaded CPU performance. The Alienware Area-51 was tested at 4K UHD with the Maximum quality preset here...
There's no contest here. The average frame rate is 30% higher than the Maingear Apex Force, and the low is actually slightly slower. This very well could be due to the fact that the Ryzen 9 9800X3D in that system tends to do very well with elevating the measured low frame rates in most game tests.
Forza Horizon 5 Benchmark
Forza Horizon 5 is a gorgeous open-world DirectX 12 racing game with a built-in benchmark that uses various advanced graphic techniques, including ray tracing with realistic shadows, and large, complex maps. Once again, the systems were tested at 4K with high image quality settings.
And once again, the Area-51 wins this benchmark. But, the Maingear Apex Force has a better minimum frame rate, which we still attribute to the difference in processors.
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Benchmark
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is an action-adventure game where you play as Star-Lord and lead the rest of the Guardians from mission to mission. The game’s minimum requirements call for a Radeon RX 570 or GeForce GTX 1060-class GPU, but it also supports some of the latest graphics technologies, including DXR and DLSS. With all of the in-game image quality settings maxed out, this game can be pretty punishing.
Winning these benchmarks by around 50% must be tremendously boring for the Area-51. Be sure to check out that video to see more demanding titles on display, for sure.
As an aside, seeing these tests run on a 4K QD-OLED display with a 240 Hz refresh rate is buttery smooth. We're talking about a $7000 setup, but in some ways, you do get what you pay for.
F1 2022 Benchmark
F1 22 is a Formula One racing simulation from Codemasters, and like previous version of the game, it sports impressive visuals. This version of the game supports DirectX 12 with ray tracing, and it incorporates support for a number of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and NVIDIA technologies (like DLSS). We tested the games with its Ultra High graphics preset, with ray-tracing and TAA enabled at 4K to see what these systems could do.
The Area-51 was built for gaming, and gaming it can certainly do. We haven't seen one hint of the lightly-threaded CPU issues that cropped up earlier in any of our game benchmarks.
F1 2024 Benchmark
We've been running F1 24 on our graphics test bench systems, which use a Ryzen 9 9800X3D for a processor. We used the same Bahrain track as before, but this game puts more strain on the ray tracing hardware in our test graphics card.
Even with all that cache in the 9800X3D, our test bench isn't quite able to keep up with the Area-51.
Next up we're going to see how much noise the Alienware Area-51 generates considering its power draw (which we'll also see), and then render our final verdict.
