Alienware Aurora 2021: New Design and Top Performance

The new Alienware Aurora lands right on time for the 25^th Alienware Birthday this month. I like its Legend 2.0 chassis design with smooth organic curves and the white/black with green/purple accents (powered by AlienFX lighting). There’s something about it that reminds me of some of the Evangelion colors, but I digress. Some people only care about specs and value, but many others love this kind of design.

My favorite version of this computer is the one with an optional transparent scratch-resistant side panel, which looks perfect with soft internal lighting and clean cable management. Alienware has a proprietary motherboard with optimum cable connector locations to help keep everything clean. If you’re picky about cables, there’s an optional cable cover that magnetically attaches to the back of the tower to hide connectors and cables.

The functional aspect of the chassis is what’s most important on a daily basis. Alienware says that it features 1.5X the internal volume of the Aurora R12/R10, and I find that to be very comfortable for most potential users. All this space comes from a large overall volume that stands that 589x225x510mm for a weight of 34.2 Lbs.

There are four 120mm fans to ensure adequate and (relatively) silent airflow, but if you want a quieter experience, opt for the SKU with liquid cooling. Depending on the situation, the OEM says that it can be 9% to 16% quieter than its predecessor. Even airflow disruptions by the internal cables have been carefully avoided.

The cooling improvements let you run hotter when gaming but also quieter during idle or low-intensity tasks. A must if the laptop is near you.

The airflow is most important for the (up to) GeForce RTX 3090, which is a graphics performance beast. Because the company did not disclose all the final specs, there’s speculation that some SKUs could be powered by an unannounced Intel Gen12 CPU (+DDR5 RAM?).

We’ll know more when the reviewer’s guide and final spec and pricing are up “later this fall,” but Alienware expects this Aurora to be 5% faster than the Aurora R12 (RTX 3090). Source: Alienware’s blog post.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Computers, Gaming
Tags: alienware, Dell, desktop pc, gaming pc, Social Hit