Alienware Area-51 Review: Ryzen 7 9850X3D Powered Elite Gaming

When most folks think about Alienware, they think about gaming PCs. And so it's time to get into that. The system is certainly decked out for it; the Ryzen 7 9850X3D in the "S" tier of gaming CPUs and the GeForce RTX 5090 is a world-beater. So we should expect some killer performance in two scenarios: 4K high-end graphics, and pure pixel pushing power for high-refresh monitors at 1080p. The latter sounds counter-intuitive, but 4K at 60fps is just as many pixels as 1080p at 240fps. So both scenarios need a lot of horsepower. Let's take a look.

UL 3DMark Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks on the Alienware Area-51

The venerable 3DMark application dates all the way back to 1998, although that version wasn't even related to this one in terms of technology. 3DMark includes more than a dozen tests now, but we're not going to waste everyone's time by running them all. Instead, we've picked out four tests that we think represent modern gaming well enough to give you an idea of how the machine performs.


Again, we're looking at a lot of systems with more than eight cores, so the Area-51 drops down the list a bit in this gaming-related CPU test. We don't think anybody is going to feel the crunch, however, in this pure CPU stress test. 

As if to prove the above point, the Area-51 turns in the single-fastest performance on both Game Test 1 and 2 in Time Spy. It's a DirectX 12 benchmark that doesn't use any ray tracing hardware. This is just pure pixel-pushing power on raster graphics, and the Area-51 took the cake. 


Port Royal uses DirectX Ray Tracing, and for the most part the scores are neatly divided. Back in May of last year when we tested the older generation Alienware Area-51, Intel's Arrow Lake CPUs were still new and Intel was famously still tweaking the scheduler, firmware and drivers, so it's more than 10% slower than the new version. While we don't have that PC in hand any longer, we have to think it's a closer match these days. 


Steel Nomad has pretty well hit a wall, as the distance between first and worst places here is just 5 fps, or just a hair over 3%. The GeForce RTX 5090 is doing the heavy lifting on this test as well.

Cyberpunk 2077 Benchmarks on the Alienware Area-51

We had to bid adieu to the Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark after our HP Omen Max 45L Desktop review. After all the effort Capcom put into making the game run better on the PC platform, the company elected to pull the benchmark rather than update it. So it's no longer available for download on Steam.

Cyberpunk 2077 may have launched in late 2020, but due to all the work that CD Projekt Red has put into the game engine in the years intervening, it's still one of the very best-looking games available today. The world of Night City looks amazing, especially in doors and in the dark with all of the city's neon and incredible lighting effects. We cranked the Ray Tracing Ultra preset to the max and turned off upscaling (which is on by default, with a dynamic frame rate to boot) so that we could suss out differences between graphics cards where they might have otherwise been hidden. The game has its own benchmark, and so that's what we used with the results below. 


We're just getting started with this benchmark, but it's probably no surprise to see the Area-51 at the top of the chart. It runs at nearly 60fps on its own, and with the default DLSS settings, it can hit much higher frame rates and still look phenomenal. 

F1 25 Racing Benchmarks on the Alienware Area-51

In F1 25, you race Formula 1 cars around a variety of real-life tracks around the globe. It's almost like that's in the title. Anyway, the latest iteration of Codemasters' racing simulator builds on the excellent technology in the previous game, New features this time around include LIDAR-scanned tracks, more realistic tonemapping, and an optional path tracing mode that we are unfortunately not using for our testing.


The 1080p test might be the first time that the Area-51 actually struggled, as much as 350 fps can be considered struggling, at least. The system is only about 7% off the pace set by our own Ryzen 7 9850X3D bench test, and I think we'd be hard pressed to see the difference. Of course, many pixels is a great equalizer, and we see at 4K that performance neatly sandwiches together. Folks with high-refresh 4K monitors are in for a treat, as the game looks phenomenal and runs really well with these settings. 

The Talos Principle II Unreal Engine 5 Benchmarks

We'd like to use Fortnite, the most popular Unreal Engine 5 game, for our benchmark testing, but there are a few problems with that. The first is that it actually just runs a bit crap, with constant shader compilation stuttering even after hours of play. But the second is that Epic invalidates replays for the game with every single update, so we'd have to retest all of our hardware every single time.

So instead, we use The Talos Principle II, which is a fantastic Unreal Engine 5 first-person puzzler with a very handy built-in benchmark.


This test is neatly all bunched together at 4K, since all of these systems have the same GeForce RTX 5090. CPU performance at 1080p is top-shelf, as there's a 1% difference between the test Area-51 system and our own test bench Ryzen 7 9850X3D. Nobody is going to have any issues due to frame rate in this title. 

Overclocking the Alienware Area-51

These days, top-tier CPUs are generally running at their peak under load already. Thanks to intelligent controls that factor power consumption, clock speed, and temperature, the best way to get high performance is to just have a really good CPU cooler. The Area-51 has that, as we'll see in the thermal section shortly. 

So instead, Alienware focuses on prioritizing GPU performance. Again, NVIDIA gave the GeForce RTX 5090 pretty intelligent controls surrounding power, thermals, and performance too, but the Command Center utility can adjust those curves automatically. And that's what we did for these results. At the top of the previous page we covered the Command Center UI, so you can check that out in case you missed it. 



The game benchmarks are ever so slightly faster with the OC1 profile, but there's just not that much to pull. All three of these results are basically within the margin of error. The GeForce RTX 5090 and Ryzen 7 9850X3D in the Area-51 is just fast at default. It's probably not surprising there's not much more to give, so we'd be quite happy to just leave the system on the Balanced setting. 

Let's talk about thermals on the next page, and then wrap up with our conclusions...