Gaming PC enthusiasts dream up powerful, fast builds, but assembling one is more than just picking components—it’s about design, lighting, and aesthetics. While DIY builds can be rewarding, they demand time, patience, and budget. Alternatively, prebuilt options like Alienware’s revived Area-51 offer premium performance and sleek looks. The 2025 model is a 70-pound beast with cutting-edge cooling, top-tier GPUs, extensive connectivity, and a hefty price tag. Reviewing such machines takes serious time.
Many gamers and DIYers talk to one another about the system they’d like to build. It usually has the biggest and fastest of anything that can be put into a gaming PC. But building one’s dream machine isn’t just stuffing components in a tin box. How the interior looks is also a feature—it’s got to be cool, and highly desirable, and lighted.
Building your own system and getting it the way you want it to look and perform can be very satisfying, very difficult, and very time-consuming. And that’s okay if you enjoy doing the work and have the time (and budget). I’ve built several systems, and although they were functional, they never looked as good as I would have liked them to—I just ran out of time (or patience).
The other choice is to buy a prebuilt machine. Several companies offer such systems, but the granddaddy of the dedicated gaming PC is Alienware. Who can forget the iconic Area-51, introduced 1998.
Twenty-seven years later, Alienware dusted off the model number and introduced the 2025 version of its famous Area-51 super gaming machines.
The machine is truly a beast, but a very clean, and quite a cool, beast. Weighing over 70 pounds (the original Area-51 weighed 50 pounds—graphics AIBs and PSUs were lighter then).
There are also easy access side panels and QR codes that offer tutorials for swapping out nearly every component. The desktop tower is also one of the first to feature a positive pressure-cooling system that moves hot air out of the PC without the need for exhaust fans.
It’s got the usual collection of back panel ports (mic, line out) and two USB 3.2 Type A (5 Gbps), and two USB 3.2 Type C (10 Gbps) with power share. There’s also a SPDIF, two Thunderbolt ports, three USB 2.0 ports, and two USB 2.0 with power, and of course, an RJ-45. But it also has two Wi-Fi antenna connectors (for diversity, 2×2 320Hz) MIMO 802.11be. You get a version with a 16GB RTX 5080 and either 4TB or 2TB storage and 32GB or 64GB RAM; or a 32GB RTX 5090 and 2TB of NVMe M.2 storage and 32GB or 64GB DDR5 XMP (6400 MT/s) RAM. There are also three M.2 expansion PCI ports: two Gen 4 and one Gen 5. The PSU is rated at 1500W. The unit we tested had an RTX 5090, 64GB RAM, Windows 11 Pro, and a retail price of $5,259.99.
Bringing up a new system is very time-consuming, especially if you intend to benchmark it. You have to download a dozen or more programs, with each download taking about an hour. And, if you find those programs online, another half hour of clickety-click. Smarter reviewers maintain a disc image and just transfer that, but that, too, takes hours.
I mention this because although it doesn’t take long to read a review, it sure takes a lot of time to write one.
Games benchmarked
• Assassin’s Creed Mirage: 2020 Ubisoft
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6: 2024 Activision
• Cyberpunk 2077: 2020 CD Projekt
• Far Cry 6: 2021 Ubisoft
• Final Fantasy XV: 2016 Square Enix
• Metro Exodus: 2019 Deep Silver
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider: 2018 Square Enix
• Watch Dogs: Legion: 2020 Ubisoft
With one notable exception (Call of Duty) the difference in fps result between 1440p and 2160p resolution was not significant, averaging (without COD) to 3%, and in some cases, higher resolution got a better score. And yet, a 4K screen has 225% more pixels than a 1440 screen. That suggests the games may be more CPU bound than by graphics.
We used the in-game benchmark program for all the game benchmarks. That is our preferred methodology because of the repeatability and ability to compare to other systems’ results.
Synthetic benchmarks use the benchmark company’s game engine, which is highly comparable to independent game companies’ engines, but different, nonetheless. It is, however, highly repeatable and reliable.
Synthetic benchmarks
• UL Port Royal
• UL Speedway
• UL Steel Nomad
• UL Time Spy Extreme 4K
• UL DLSS feature test 4K
• UL Mesh Shader feature test
• UL Procyon Computer Vision
• UL Procyon Office Productivity
• UL Procyon AI Image Generation
• Geekbench 3
The following charts show the test results we got with various benchmarks.
The frame rates in the DLSS tests were absurdly high. The tests don’t really offer much insight into the system’s behavior.
The following tests gave an arbitrary score, and comparisons are interesting but not conclusive.
As would be expected, FP16 had higher AI performance than FP32.
The Office Productivity and Image Generation tests gave predictably higher scores for smaller resolutions.
We also ran the Blender benchmark and the SPEC workstation benchmarks.
The SPECviewperf benchmark measures the performance of GPUs for computing systems running the latest versions of SolidWorks, 3ds Max, Catia, Maya, and more. The benchmark bases its measurements on “viewsets,” which are actual traces of the source applications running various workloads.
We ran the latest version of SPECviewperf (literally hours old), so there’s no comparative scores, but previous SPEC results were in the 30s to 50s.
Alienware AW2725Q monitor
As of the time of this writing, the Alienware AW2725Q is the highest-resolution and fastest monitor available. It is a 4K QD-OLED HDR10 (Dolby Vision and HDR400 compatible) monitor with a 48 to 240 Hz refresh rate. The response time is 0.03 ms, and the bright (1,000 cd/m2), 100% RGB (DCI-P3, sRGB) display has a 1,500,000:1 contrast ratio. It uses a low blue light panel and is compliant with TÜV Rheinland, and it is compatible with Adaptive Sync, Nvidia G-Sync, and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro. And it’s full of holes. There are three HDMI 2.1 ports with HDCP 2.2, a DisplayPort 1.4 input, plus an upstream (1.5 Mbps) USB 3.2 port, and a powered (15W) downstream USB 3.2 port.
I’m a big-screen multi-monitor pixel pig, as many people know. But I’ve spent many hours in front of this amazingly bright, crisp monitor and never felt like I was missing anything, nor did I get any eye fatigue. The multiple HDMI ports and single DP connector surprised me, it’s usually the other way around. That input configuration suggests it is designed for consoles and media center AV amps as well—a universal display with a relatively small footprint. Alienware has put everything that could be put in a monitor in this beauty. It’s a lot of monitor for just $900.
System: Alienware Area-51 AAT2250
Conclusion—what do we think?
Given that the CPU, AIB, PSI, NIC, SSD, and RAM are all purchased parts not made by Alienware, what, then, is the value-add of prebuilt gaming computer? In the case of Alienware, it’s over 37 years of experience building the highest-performance PCs possible. That’s not just jamming a bunch of components is a box and attaching wires to them; it’s cooling, cable lengths and weight, motherboard design, accessibility, durability, and the subjective factor of aesthetics. Also, Alienware has earned a reputation for building reliable, sturdy super-high-performance systems such that they are the PC of choice of financial analysts, high-end content creators, engineers, and R&D labs, to name a few—it’s not just gamers who want the best.
On a couple of benchmarks, the RTX 5090 got excited and ramped up its fan to max RPMs (1,673 to 1,978 for an overclocked AIB), and you can hear that. The system is pretty soundproof and quiet but still can sound banshee-like when stressed. However, if you’re in a battle in an FPS or RPG, there’s going to be so much noise coming from the game in those moment that you won’t notice or care—and that’s especially true if you are wearing earphones.
If you’ve got the budget, the 2025 Area-51 is the way to go.
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