Alienware brings OLED to its gaming laptops for the primary time in years — anti-glare OLED show boasts 240Hz refresh fee and 0.2ms response time

Alienware is bringing OLED panels to a good portion of its gaming laptops for the primary time, following within the footsteps of manufacturers like Asus and Lenovo which have launched OLED shows to gaming laptops over the previous 12 months. Alienware was truly a pioneer on this area, providing OLED panels on fashions right here and there, going way back to 2016. But now the Alienware 16 Area-51 and Alienware 16X Aurora are getting up to date with 240Hz anti-glare OLED shows.

For now, Alienware is simply updating its 16-inch laptops with an OLED panel. Dell claims the show has a 0.2ms response time, 620-nit peak HDR brightness, and 120% protection of the DCI-P3 colour area. It additionally comes with certifications from VESA, together with DisplayHDR True Black 500 and ClearMR 9000. The shows include an anti-glare coating, which Alienware claims reduces “gloss by 32%.” That quantity comes from inner testing from Samsung Display, so add a little bit of salt.

The Alienware 18 Area-51 isn’t getting an OLED improve, as a substitute sporting the identical 18-inch IPS panel, with a 300Hz refresh over the earlier era.

All three laptops stay unchanged aesthetically, nonetheless sporting Alienware’s AW30 design language that it rolled out final 12 months; you’ll be able to learn our ideas on them in our Alienware 16 Area-51 review and Alienware 16 Aurora review. The 18-inch and 16-inch Area-51 models have a slight spec adjustment, however. Alienware says they’ll pack “new” Intel Core Ultra 200HX processors. These laptops already go up to a Core Ultra 9 275HX, which is one step below the highest-end mobile Arrow Lake offering Intel has. Dell wasn’t able to share model names or specs.

Outside of the CPU updates (and the OLED display on the 16-inch model), the two Area-51 designs remain unchanged. You can configure them with an RTX 5070 Ti up to an RTX 5090, as well as up to 64GB of DDR5-6400 memory and a total of 12TB of storage, split across three M.2 PCIe Gen 4 SSDs in RAID 0.

The lower-end Alienware 16X Aurora remains unchanged, outside of its OLED update. You can configure it with up to a Core Ultra 9 275HX — it isn’t getting whatever new HX models Intel has, it seems — along with up to an RTX 5070 mobile running at a 115W TGP. You can also configure it with up to 64GB of DDR5-5600 memory, as well as 2TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage.

All three updates will be available in the first quarter of 2026, but Alienware hasn’t shared any pricing details yet. Given the current crisis in RAM availability, there’s a good chance prices will rise compared to last year’s models.

Alienware Ultra-Slim and Entry-Level concepts

Alienware is updating its range of Area-51 and Aurora laptops at the beginning of the year, but it teased two new models that will arrive later in 2026. Currently, they’re just called the Ultra-Slim and Entry-Level laptops. These laptops will round out Alienware’s laptop offerings, as it moved away from designs like the slim Alienware x14 R2 during Dell’s larger rebranding efforts.

First, Dell says the Ultra-Slim design is around 17mm thin, or around 0.66 inches. For context, the MacBook Air M4 is about 0.45 inches thick, while the 2024 and 2025 Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is around 0.64 inches. For specs, Alienware says the laptop will come with a discrete Nvidia GPU and “new highly efficient CPUs.” It’ll be available in a 14-inch and 16-inch variant, and Alienware claims the 16-inch model is nearly 50% smaller in volume compared to the Alienware 16 Area-51.

Alienware hasn’t shared any details about the Entry-Level laptop yet, short of the render you can see above. Alienware says those interested should “stay stunned for more this spring,” suggesting the laptop is closer than the lack of details would let on.

Alienware Area-51 Desktop, now with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D

Starting in February, Alienware plans to offer its flagship Area-51 Desktop with AMD’s new Ryzen 7 9850X3D. The souped-up X3D chip comes with an average 7% improvement compared to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, says AMD, though even Team Red’s official benchmarks show minor improvements in most games, with some games posting identical results.

The Ryzen 7 9850X3D is identical to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, short of the clock speed. The updated CPU can climb up to 5.6GHz, while the original model topped out at 5.2GHz. Nothing else is different. Both CPUs carry the same 120W TDP, and they both carry 104MB of combined L2 and L3 cache. The 96MB SRAM chunk is placed under the compute die on both models, giving them more thermal headroom for overclocking. AMD supports multiplier-based overclocking (along with PBO) on both chips.

Alienware originally launched the Area-51 Desktop exclusively with Intel’s Core Ultra 200S ‘Arrow Lake’ CPUs before bringing AMD’s Ryzen 7 9700X, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and Ryzen 9 9950X3D to the desktop in November of 2025. Alienware hasn’t said if the Ryzen 7 9850X3D will replace the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but AMD claims both CPUs will live in the Zen 5 X3D lineup moving forward.

Outside of the new CPU, the specs of the Area-51 remain unchanged. You can pack in up to an Nvidia RTX 5090, 64GB of DDR5-6400 memory, and 12TB of total SSD storage split across three 4TB PCIe Gen4 drives. Neither Alienware nor AMD has shared pricing details on the Ryzen 7 9850X3D yet, but the configuration will reportedly arrive in February.

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