When Dell launched its Alienware Area-51 series earlier this year, we were impressed by its AW30 design and nearly all of the changes when compared to the outgoing Alienware m or x models. At over $3000 for the RTX 5080 configurations, however, the series is certainly out of budget for a lot of users and students. Enter the Alienware 16X Aurora designed to be a step down from the Area-51 and starting at more affordable prices.

The 16X Aurora comes with lower-end GPU options when compared to the Area-51 as to be expected, but it still inherits many of the design aspects of the Area-51 for relatively strong first impressions for a midrange gaming laptop. Whereas competing models in this category tend to use more plastics and lower-end IPS displays with poorer colors to save on costs, the 16X Aurora consists of more metal and comes standard with full DCI-P3 colors for a starting price of $1500.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to the 16X Aurora is that it ships with the GeForce RTX 5070 instead of the RTX 5070 Ti. As mentioned earlier this year, the mobile RTX 5070 Ti is a significant improvement over the mobile RTX 5070 due largely to its larger pool of VRAM. Gaming on the 16X Aurora is therefore best at Medium QHD settings for most demanding titles.

See our full review on the 16X Aurora to learn more about the model.

Allen Ngo – Lead Editor U.S. – 5362 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2011

After graduating with a B.S. in environmental hydrodynamics from the University of California, I studied reactor physics to become licensed by the U.S. NRC to operate nuclear reactors. There’s a striking level of appreciation you gain for everyday consumer electronics after working with modern nuclear reactivity systems astonishingly powered by computers from the 80s. When I’m not managing day-to-day activities and US review articles on Notebookcheck, you can catch me following the eSports scene and the latest gaming news.