Alienware's new Aurora gaming PC uses liquid cooling to tame Nvidia's RTX 3090 and 3080

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The Asetek cooler previewed in May is being rolled out in earnest for Nvidia's Ampere generation.

Alienware Aurora Nvidia Ampere GPU cooling
(Image credit: Alienware)

Alienware has confirmed the new GeForce RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 Nvidia Ampere graphics cards will be front and centre in the looming refresh of its popular Aurora Gaming Desktop range, and it's jamming some serious GPU cooling in there to cope with them too. The Aurora desktops have been sitting pretty at the top of our list of best gaming PCs for ages now, and with Nvidia's impressive-looking new GPUs at their heart, it looks like they might be there to stay too.

Those new GeForce GPUs are going to be featured across both its Intel and AMD Ryzen-based machines too, so no matter which side of the processor divide you sit, you're still going to be able to come to the fight rocking one of the latest second-gen RTX cards. 

It's interesting that only the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 have been mentioned by Alienware so far, while the lower-spec RTX 3070 is conspicuous by its absence. Alienware does say that it's going to have a range of configurations, but right now it's only talking about the very high-end of Nvidia's new line of Ampere cards.

Probably because of those beefy new GeForce GPUs, Alienware has also hinted at a new "unique cooling and thermal design intended to prioritize gaming performance." Presumably that means prioritizing gaming performance over a decibel count…

That's the dual-slot liquid GPU cooling design Asetek previewed back in May, and it looks like it was commissioned specifically to deal with the increased power demands of the new Nvidia Ampere cards.

Screen queens

(Image credit: Future)

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Alongside the announcement of new Ampere-powered gaming desktop PCs, Alienware has also announced a bunch of new gaming monitors. 

The Alienware 38 and Alienware 27 are both Nvidia G-Sync Ultimate certified displays with DisplayHDR 600 ratings. The 38-inch features an ultrawide IPS panel, while the 27-inch is a 1440p monitor with a 240Hz refresh rate.

But that's not the quickest panel Alienware has just announced… the Alienware 25 is the company's latest esports-focused monitor, with a 360Hz refresh rate and Nvidia's new Reflex Latency Analyzer, "giving competitive gamers an accurate measurement of system latency for the first time."

What it likely won't do is tell you how to improve your latency, however.

Dave James
Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.