It's rare that I review something that I would actually buy right at this moment in time. Even if it's a good product that I recommend, it's usually out of my own budget or just not quite at the top of my PC priority list compared to other upgrades. But with the Alienware AW2525HM, I can say that I would 100%, for reals, be considering hitting the purchase button right now if I didn't already have this review model in front of me.

That's because it seems designed for people exactly like me: people who are into competitive FPS gaming more than anything else, but who are also on a strict budget.

Not too long ago, I tried out the 600 Hz Zowie XL2586X+. That monitor is perfect for serious tactical FPS players like me, but it also costs *gulp* $1,000. This Alienware is a much more sensible proposition: $250 for a 320 Hz panel. Plus, here you're getting an IPS rather than a TN panel, and some pretty nice HDR to boot. That's irrelevant for competitive FPS gaming, but even if you only very occasionally dabble in casual games, it's nice to have.

Make no mistake, though, both the Zowie and the Alienware here are for a particular market, and that is the competitive FPS gamer. While most similarly priced panels are 1440p, 27-inch deals, monitors for this market skim off a couple of inches and drop down to 1080p resolution.

That's great for giving a full view of a tactical FPS scene and permitting split-second reactions, and it can help boost your FPS a little, but for other games, higher pixel density and a wider view are probably where it's at, even if you have to sacrifice some smoothness by dropping the refresh rate.

Jumping into Counter-Strike 2 with the Alienware AW2525HM after gaming on a 144 Hz IPS monitor for so long was a surreal experience: I couldn't quite believe just how much of a difference doubling my refresh rate could make. Flicking my aim felt incredibly smooth, and I felt like I was seeing animations—including, importantly, enemy movements—in more detail and more quickly than I had seen them before. It's hard to convey just how much better 320 Hz feels than 144 Hz if you're a competitive FPS gamer; all I can say is the difference is more than noticeable.

That being said, there's more to smooth and snappy gameplay than just the refresh rate, and this monitor isn't perfect in at least one other area. That area is motion clarity, which shouldn't be overlooked for competitive shooters. Unfortunately, the Alienware has significantly more noticeable blur—caused by pixels taking a long time to change colour—than a monitor like the Zowie one, which uses backlight strobing to keep motion very clear. I checked how the Alienware performs in the UFO test, and there's a definite blur behind the friendly green creature's flying machine.

Swapping from something as smooth and clear as the $1,000 Zowie, I certainly noticed the difference, even with the Alienware's overdrive settings enabled and on their highest. (Side note: I noticed little contrast between the three overdrive options, so I kept the middle one selected just in the name of caution, given the 'extreme' option would be the most likely to cause inverse ghosting.)

Saying all this, coming from another 144 Hz IPS—as I swapped back and forth between the two for comparison—I didn't really spot any additional blur in practice. The only thing I noticed was the buttery smooth, increased refresh rate. My brain simply doesn't register any perceived blur in the face of such a step up in refresh rate. If I had the choice between a 144/165 Hz panel with great motion clarity or this 320 Hz Alienware panel, I'd choose the latter without a doubt.

There is some competition in this budget, high refresh rate space, such as the 210 Hz KTC H27T22C-3, for instance, which our Jeremy rated pretty highly after testing. But we're talking 320 Hz here, and while going from 210–320 isn't going to be as big of a jump as from 144 or 165, it's still noticeable, and every little helps if you're playing competitive FPS games.

Going from 144 Hz to 320 Hz gives a night and day difference in terms of how enjoyable the gameplay is, and it can even improve your personal performance. Using Nvidia's Latency and Display Analysis Tool (LDAT), I witnessed an end-to-end response time of 7.9 ms at 144 Hz, but a noticeable decrease to 6.1 ms at 320 Hz, tested over 150+ runs each.

It's also worth noting that this kind of response time matches—in fact, even beats—the response time I saw with the Zowie monitor. It's as snappy as you could want for competitive gaming, and you'll only really get better if you opt for an OLED, but even then, any extra you gain won't be perceptible.

I should also note that I found the darkness stabilisation feature (on its lower setting) genuinely beneficial, which I didn't expect. This essentially boosts darker areas, which can help you spot enemies more easily in shadowy parts of the map. I now only play CS2 when this is enabled, although I do turn it off when I play casual games, to make sure I'm getting the fully contrasted experience.

Given all this, I'd say this monitor is aimed at, and is ideal for, competitive FPS gamers looking to upgrade from a 144 Hz or 165 Hz monitor on a budget. Assuming their PCs can churn out the 300+ fps needed to make the most of the Alienware AW2525HM, it will be well worth it.

If this doesn't describe you, it might still be worth it if you're setting your sights on 1080p gaming. Setting aside the main 320 Hz appeal, the monitor itself looks lovely, with nice thin bezels and an understated but nevertheless distinctly Alien-like adjustable stand. It also has two USB ports with pass-through and a handy shoot-out headphone hook on the left side.

From a casual gaming perspective, one thing I'm pleasantly surprised by is the HDR experience. I didn't expect much, but actually, after calibrating everything, playing Doom Eternal with HDR on is wonderful. Everything just feels that much more immersive and realistic with it enabled, thanks to the improved colour space and contrast. It's not advertised as being full-blown HDR, and it doesn't even seem to have a VESA certification for it, but the colour gamut seems to be wide enough to make for a very eye-pleasing experience.

In fact, the panel is pretty nice in general, too, even without HDR enabled. Brightness seems very uniform to my eyes, and colours seem accurate enough once greens are toned down ever so slightly. But I suppose the question is whether all this is enough in the face of 1440p monitors, which definitely do look sharper thanks to increased pixel density. Given the monitor isn't bad in respect to colour and brightness, if you think you can crank out the frames to make the most of the refresh rate at 1080p, I'd certainly not rule it out even for casual gaming.

That being said, for casual gaming, I'd still lean towards a 1440p panel. My 1440p BenQ monitor, which is now pretty old, looks better in terms of clarity and vibrancy than this Alienware, and I'd prefer using it for non-HDR games that I can't hit 200+ fps on—which will presumably be a lot of games for a lot of people.

So, that brings me back to the primary use case: competitive FPS gaming. If that's your jam and you're on a budget, the Alienware AW2525HM is ideal. It even works fine for some casual gaming and movie watching on the side. But if the latter are your primary use cases, I'd say steer clear.

This is it, unambiguously my Computex highlight and also a genuine surprise. I give you the Alienware AW3926QW in all its 39-inch OLED, 5K2K, RGB-stripe, remarkably priced glory.

This isn't actually the first 39-inch 5K2K OLED on the market. Actually, I've already reviewed one, the LG Ultragear 45GX950A, and it actually disappointed a little.

That was a pity because the fundamental form factor of 39 inches and 5K2K is just so fantastic. It's basically a 32-inch 4K monitor widened out to 21:9. So, that's epic ultrawide immersion with proper pixel density.

But this Alienware ain't quite the same as that LG, and for several good reasons. Firstly, that LG was a $2,000 beast at launch and still goes for about $1,700. Alienware isn't listing a price just yet. But multiple high-quality sources are reporting that the AW3926QW could come in at $1,099 MSRP.

Next up, while this Alienware uses an LG WOLED panel, it's not the same one as the Ultragear 45GX950A, which has an additional white subpixel to boost peak luminance but comes with several downsides, including slightly fuzzy font rendering and less vibrant colours.

In my subjective experience, LG's WOLED panels with the added white subpixel actually look a bit dull next to Samsung's QD-OLED tech, even when they have brighter on-paper specs.

Alienware is rating this new panel at 300 nits full-screen and 1,300 nits peak HDR, so it's very much comparable with the latest RGB Samsung QD-OLEDs.

The 300 nits rating is also slightly brighter than the LG monitor, which is odd given the whole point of the added white subpixel is to boost measured brightness. Oh, well!

But wait, there's more. The Alienware AW3926QW also has a much more gentle 1500R panel curve, where the LG Ultragear 45GX950A has been saddled with a silly 800R bend.

That really is far too curved, and this Alienware fixes that problem in a jiffy. Oh, and it also has a glossy anti-glare coating. The LG model is matte. Another win.

On paper, then, this new Alienware is a killer; it addresses all the issues with that initial 5K2K panel. It also won't suffer QD-OLED's purple tint problem in bright ambient light.

That's been reduced with the latest QD-OLED panels, including the one in the MSI MPG 322UR X24. But it has not been entirely solved.

Overall, I'm very excited at the same time as not quite believing this new Alienware will actually be the one. Thus far, I've found LG's WOLED tech to be underwhelming. But this new panel certainly has the claimed specs to fix that.

Here's hoping, although my wallet will be hoping it doesn't. Because if this Alienware delivers, it's going to be taking a hammering.

We got our first look at Alienware's first budget gaming laptop at CES earlier this year, and now, nearly half a year later, the Alienware 15 is here, and you can go buy it over at Dell.com right now.

But before you go rushing off to throw your money at one, there are some things you ought to know about. I'm not necessarily blaming Dell here, but the specifics of this new machine tell you all you need to know about the PC gaming hardware market. In short, it's in real trouble.

For a start, the Alienware 15 is not a new mega value proposition in the same way the new Alienware AW2726DM OLED gaming monitor is. That's a brand new OLED gaming monitor, using a quality Samsung panel that is still very competitive with the current generation of OLED gaming displays, but for an affordable price brand new that you'll only otherwise see from OLEDs on special offer.

That's not the case with the Alienware 15 laptop. This is a brand new gaming laptop that Dell is determined to point out is still sporting the Alienware DNA and build quality, just with some judicious cuts here and there, and a potentially dubious specs sheet.

One thing to note is maybe a little trite, but this looks far more like a Dell Gaming laptop (a brand now seemingly defunct) than anything with the traditional style and aesthetic of an Alienware machine. It sure does look like a corporate slab. But that's not necessarily a terrible thing.

What kinda might be is that it's 2026 and this is a gaming laptop that is launching with an RTX 3050 configuration from the off. Now, that config is not available in every territory—in the US, the bottom rung will be the RTX 4050, and only RTX 5050 and RTX 5060 options are available today—but in the UK, we're treated to the full last-last-gen horrors. It's not even that cheap; the RTX 3050 system is still £979 😱

It's also restricting its GPUs to a total graphics power (TGP) of 85 W, which is going to hold back your new RTX Blackwell graphics chips if you can stretch your wallet that far. Given the impressively thin chassis, that's maybe okay, and the same as the Alienware 16 Aurora machines.

What I struggle with a little more is the way Dell is resolutely going with single channel memory across the board for its new machine. I predicted we'd see more vendors doing this very thing with the RAMpocalypse forcing manufacturers' hands in terms of dealing with ludicrous memory pricing, and lo, it has come to pass.

But it's not just at the bottom end of the configuration scale, because despite having a pair of SODIMM slots in the back of the Alienware 15, the 8 GB, 16 GB, and 32 GB configurations include just one single stick of RAM. Alienware said "we're doing our best to hold to" its pricing in the face of memory volatility, and that meant that "out of the box it was best for us to go with single channel."

Sure, you're getting the same raw capacity, but going with single channel over standard dual channel memory (basically using two discrete sticks) means you are halving your memory bandwidth. I will say, that doesn't make a whole lot of difference in most games—Alienware estimates about a 5% performance hit—but in general use, it does affect what you can do with your system.

None of this would be that painful if it weren't for the price. I will say again, this is not a cheap laptop, even if Dell wants to call this an entry-level Alienware machine. The RTX 4050 version in the US, with an AMD CPU, is going to start at $1,300, and right now, you're looking at $1,500 for the RTX 5050 system with 16 GB single channel memory and a 512 GB SSD. Worse still, you cannot configure an Alienware 15 with an RTX 5060 for less than $2,290, with 32 GB of single channel memory and a 1 TB SSD.

For comparison, you can buy an RTX 5050 version of the Alienware 16 Aurora for $1,200 with 16 GB of dual channel DDR5 memory and a 512 GB SSD. Or, y'know, you could buy an actual budget gaming laptop with an RTX 5050 inside it for $799 instead.

It's not all bad, because the Alienware 15 will be a genuinely good machine, just not a budget option. At least not until the sales really bite into it. The rounded chassis looks good, it has ditched the big bum of the Area-51 machines, and it comes with a full numpad. Dell has also ensured that its 15-inch screen is still a 16:10, 1200p option, not the more traditional 15-inch 16:9 panel.

So, it'll be a quality machine, though it's not really the super-affordable, entry-level Alienware you might have hoped for post-MacBook Neo.

It just so happens I've been daily driving an old school VA panel this week. It's a budget 34-inch ultrawide and, funnily enough, it provides the perfect foil for Alienware's new 27-inch QD-OLED monitor, the Alienware AW2726DM.

This, too, is a budget offering, albeit in the loftier context of OLED gaming monitors. Yours for $349.99 from Dell's website, this is one of the cheapest gaming OLEDs yet from a big brand. And it does a pretty definitive job of highlighting just how far gaming monitor tech has come in the last few years. Because this Alienware mostly blows that budget VA panel away.

Hold that thought while we cover off some speeds and feeds. This is a 27-inch QD-OLED 1440p panel with a native resolution of 2,560 by 1,440 pixels and 240 Hz refresh. Notably, it's also based on older QD-OLED panel tech from Samsung. That's part of how Alienware hits that low price point.

For the record, this isn't the very oldest QD-OLED monitor panel tech. Strictly speaking, it's Gen 3 QD-OLED circa 2024. There's a guide to all the QD-OLED generations here, but Gen 3 panels brought various refinements including improved lifespan and durability, reducing the risk of burn-in, and revised subpixel structure to improve font rendering. Just note, this generation of panel still has a triangular subpixel structure as opposed to the preferable true RGB-stripe setup of the very latest Gen 5 QD-OLEDs, such as the MSI MPG 341CQR QD-OLED X36.

One area that wasn't really improved with Gen 3 is brightness. This is a slightly complicated subject, but most Gen 3 QD-OLED panels are rated at 250 nits full-screen, 1,000 nits peak in a small 2% window and have HDR 400 True Black certification. Somewhat surprisingly, Alienware rates this particular model at 200 nits full screen. We'll see how that translates into the viewing experience in a sec.

Apart from the older generation QD-OLED panel, there's further evidence of cost savings with the Alienware AW2726DM. The main chassis screws rather than clips into the stand (only really of significance during initial setup), there's no USB-C (not a big deal unless you were planning to, say, tag team with a work laptop), no USB-A hub (more of a pity given the added cable clutter it implies) and a less comprehensive OSD menu that's missing some features.

By implication, then, connectivity is limited to HDMI and DisplayPort. And for most of us, that's just fine, especially if it enables a lower price point and makes OLED thrills more more accessible. All that said, the Alienware AW2726DM doesn't look cheap. It has a slick, slim bezel look and a fully adjustable stand, including rotation into portrait mode.

Fire it up and, sure enough, it's that familiar QD-OLED experience. The downsides include an overly warm colour temp and the usual purple tint to the panel in bright ambient light that slightly undermines the whole per-pixel-lighting, infinite-contrast OLED thing. But only slightly.

The positives, on the other hand, well, there are plenty of those. This is a really punchy, pleasing panel, even with that notional 200 nits rating. The caveat to that is the need to set this monitor up correctly.

For starters, its default SDR mode isn't terribly well calibrated. I had to resort to an alternative colour profile in the Windows Color Management tool to get the SDR colours looking right, which is probably too much to ask of most casual PC users.

Still, it looks really super once you get it set up. What's more, the SDR calibration in HDR mode is actually pretty good. So, were this my display, I'd just enable HDR, tweak the SDR brightness in the Windows Display Properties menu, and leave it like that forever.

Running this display thusly also has the benefit of higher peak SDR brightness. There's a price to pay for that in terms of more brightness variability depending on how much of the screen you are lighting up. But if, like me, you end up using dark mode with as many apps and website as possible, it's a very nice solution.

Of course, that's all desktop larks. What about games? Really, there's not much to report and that's definitely good news. By that I mean this budget QD-OLED looks just like any other Gen 3 QD-OLED.

In other words, it's absolutely stellar when it comes to HDR performance compared to any LCD panel. The way this monitor can render, for instance, a searingly bright neon bar light on a totally black background totally confounds any LCD monitor, including that budget VA I've been running of late. In part thanks to a glossy panel coating that really accentuates the lighting control and contrast, it really is an eye-popping experience on a totally different level.

Then there's the speed. That old school VA panel I've been playing with of late looks blurry and smeary enough in isolation. But compared to the lightning fast 0.03 ms response of this QD-OLED, it's just hopelessly outclassed.

As I've mentioned in several recent monitor reviews, I've more or less hung up my Counter-Strike boots. But I'm still just about qualified to say the combination of 240 Hz refresh and 0.03 ms response offered here will be a revelation for most gamers used to LCD panels. Yes, there are much higher refresh OLEDs now available. But the benefits do diminish above 240 Hz unless you are an awfully capable esports type.

This monitor isn't perfect, of course. At this price point, you could have a 27-inch 4K IPS panel with a decent refresh rate and far better pixel density. It would probably be brighter in outdoor game scenes too. So, yeah, full screen brightness in games is still a bit of a weakness.

However, it's definitely worth understanding how this older QD-OLED panel compares with similar vintage WOLED panels made by LG. LG's WOLED tech includes a white subpixel that boosts full-screen brightness, which is measured with the display showing pure white.

The thing is, most of the stuff you look at in practice is coloured and, in that context, the extra white subpixel often isn't a help. Long story short, QD-OLED has better colour brightness. And that means the subjective experience with this QD-OLED rated at 200 nits is brighter and punchier and more vibrant than a WOLED panel rated at 250 nits or even 275 nits.

Put it this way. I would absolutely take this Alienware over the Gigabyte GO27Q24G I reviewed a few weeks ago with its early-gen WOLED panel. The Gigabyte is brighter on paper, but feels a bit dingy in reality.

Alienware has skimped a bit on the OSD menu and the OLED panel care features. The only option in the OLED panel maintenance sub menu is pixel refresh. But you still get a three-year warranty, so you have a pretty decent window before you have to worry about burn-in.

Anywho, the upshot of all this is that, were I in the market for a new monitor at roughly this price point, this panel would pose quite the conundrum. The HDR performance, the contrast, the light control, the speed, it's all so much better than any LCD monitor. I'd struggle to settle for even a good IPS panel.

On the other hand, the 1440p resolution on a 27-inch monitor does make for quite chunky pixels, though is easier on the GPU. For gaming, that's fine, there's plenty of detail on offer. But for daily driving, I'd prefer a bit more detail, sharper fonts, all that good stuff.

That's just me, of course. Thanks to our recent survey, however, we know that 27-inch 1440p is still the most popular monitor form factor among you lot. And if you are looking to stick with that setup but want a dramatically better gaming experience by several metrics and without spending absolute megabucks, well, the Alienware AW2726DM should absolutely be on your relatively affordable OLED shortlist. It's really very good.

The unshakable presence of AI has been an unwelcome companion of my job for the past few years, but it sure feels like longer. It's not even like it's some excitingly malevolent artificial mind with tendrils of influence weaving its way throughout my world. That would at least be satisfying from a sci-fi perspective. No, what I've had to deal with can barely write, definitely cannot count, and has only just figured out what fingers are.

Yet it's been something that has pervading every product announcement, presentation, or pre-briefing I've been a part of in recent times from any company even tangentially related to tech. To the point where I now have a bullshit AI bingo card I fill out just to distract myself from the barely resistible desire to stab a pen through my own hand just to feel something real.

Every new piece of technology, whether that's a laptop, graphics card, mouse, keyboard, BBQ, whatever, is now presented as being powered by AI or comes with an AI assistant, or just has an 'AI' sticker on the box.

So thank you, Dell, for making your CES 2026 pre-briefing so blessedly free of effusive AI chat that I just had to mention it.

It started off with Dell vice chairman and COO, Jeff Clarke, taking to a small stage to talk about the state of the industry and where Dell and its Alienware sub-brand is going this year. He talks tariffs, the slow transitioning of the industry (he says CPU, but I'm presuming he meant OS and Windows 10 → 11), and then "we have this un-met promise of AI, and the expectation of AI driving end user demand," as well as the fact that "we're about ready to enter 2026 with a memory shortage that is pretty significant."

Clarke and his co-presenters then go on to introduce the return of the XPS laptop lineup, some new high-end ultraslim Alienware laptops, as well as some entry-level Alienware laptops (cheap Alienwares? Really?), new spins of its Area-51 desktops, and a handful of new monitors.

All of this is very "consumer-first" and aimed at dialling in to both expand the numbers of people using Dell/Alienware tech and the areas in which it operates. And the only mention of AI in the entire thing is Jeff's little line at the beginning. It's clear, concise, focused on the tech and, in the Q&A that followed, refreshingly honest.

"One thing you'll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first," Dell head of product, Kevin Terwilliger says with a smile. "So, a bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC."

It's not that Dell doesn't care about AI or AI PCs anymore, it's just that over the past year or so it's come to realise that the consumer doesn't.

"We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."

In a way, you could argue that's tantamount to dumbing down the technology for the end user. But this isn't like withholding information about the core counts of the chips inside your machine, or the TGP of the mobile GPU at its heart for fear of confusing some fictitious customer. There are people who care about the hardware inside these devices, but it's becoming clear there are precious few who care about the AI components or theoretical capabilities of those machines.

The fact that a huge PC brand such as Dell/Alienware has decided to ditch the AI-first marketing that seems to otherwise permeate everything—and honestly still permeates—is entirely welcome, very refreshing, and hopefully the mark of things to come.

Because, until AI becomes a valid, useful technology for the end user of these devices, and not just some marketing check box or buzzword for investors, every company ought to take a leaf out of Dell's book and just keep schtum. And that's honestly not something I've said many times about the big PC box shifter in the past.

As well as teasing a new ultraslim Alienware gaming laptop design Dell has also given us an early look at its new entry-level gaming laptops aimed at "ensuring that really there is a product for everyone" in its Alienware range.

Dell's COO, Jeff Clarke, spoke at the start of our CES 2026 pre-briefing in December about the company wanting to get back to its roots and also broaden its horizons. "It's a scale business, all 280 million units matter… You can't succeed if you're treating a portion of it like a distant relative... If I give you one thing to walk away with, it's the following: the consumer business is important to Dell."

The whole briefing felt very much like a mea culpa from the massive PC box shifter, but it looks like the company is putting its product where its marketing mouth is, what with the return of the XPS brand, reining back its effusive AI marketing, and throwing cheaper Alienware notebooks out into the wild.

The words 'Alienware' and 'entry-level' are not normally associated with each other, and it's perhaps a measure of where Dell finds itself right now that its traditionally premium-focused gaming brand is looking for a new market.

"This is an entry-level laptop that brings Alienware to that broader audience," says Alienware's head of product, Matt McGowan, introducing the new machine. He notes the system is still in development, and the fact that, like its new ultraslim design, it has no sub-brand name as yet suggests it hasn't been in development for that long, either.

"We aim to deliver the most bang for the buck with this new product," says McGowan. "Our goal is to hit price points hundreds of dollars cheaper than where we are today. And really the intent here is to bring more people into the Alienware family."

Given the RAMpocalypse is going to be spiking prices across the board when it comes to gaming PCs and laptops throughout 2026, offering a more affordable alternative actually within its premium brand could be a smart move for both Alienware and Dell itself. Especially as PC gaming remains a growing segment of the market.

"More and more people want gaming PCs, but there's a lot of technology in here," says McGowan. "It's expensive to deliver a product that plays games well, but we wanted to attack that problem head-on.

"Now, this product isn't at the level of an Area-51, of course, but it's still built to our standards. So, we're being smart about where we make investments, we're not cutting corners on the things that matter the most, like build quality, thermals, performance."

From the brief look we've had so far, it looks… like a laptop.

It's interesting to see that Alienware has decided to make sure there's a numpad on the device, and I'd suggest we're probably looking at something that will follow more or less the same design notes as Lenovo's entry-level LOQ range. Though that at least makes sure to offer high TGPs on its mobile graphics cards, while Alienware's more affordable Aurora laptops have been suffering with bottom-end 80 W RTX 5060 chips, for example.

Whether Dell can resist the urge to artificially hobble its entry-level range to encourage upselling will potentially be the thing that makes or breaks this cheaper Alienware project. We'll supposedly know more in the Spring as development continues.

It wouldn't be CES without someone trying to outdo the current creator of the best compact gaming laptop. At CES 2024 that was Asus, updating its Zephyrus G14 machines to blow Razer's Blade 14 out of the water. At CES 2025 it was Razer's turn to hit back with an updated Blade 14, and at CES 2026 it's Alienware's turn to try and commit regicide.

This is just a CES tease, however, so we don't even know what Alienware is going to call its new range of ultraslim gaming laptops, but at the Dell CES 2026 pre-briefing it showed off the new ~17 mm thin design. The idea being to create a "jack of all trades" that will appeal to gamers and creators alike; for people who don't want to have a machine that screams 'I AM A GAMER' while still delivering on performance.

"We focused on two main details: performance density and design versatility," Matt McGowan, head of product at Alienware, tells us. "We wanted to pack as much performance as possible into the most compact design we could engineer.

"It's a 16-inch laptop that's roughly 50% smaller than our 16-inch Area-51. Now, it doesn't aim for that same performance ceiling as the Area-51, but it delivers some serious gaming performance."

So, that's the performance density side, but what about that design? I'm going to be honest, the renders and the machine that McGowan showed off on-stage don't have me feeling inspired. I get the idea of going for what it's calling a "timeless" design, but this is one more Alienware product where the hand of Dell is obvious.

"We wanted a laptop that has incredible build quality," says McGowan, "premium materials, incredible battery life, and a timeless aesthetic that performs in any environment. This doesn't look like your traditional Alienware; so it's a little more covert, but just as iconic."

It remains to be seen just how 'iconic' this little fella is in the flesh/brushed aluminium, but it's going to have to be something special to get ahead of Razer and Asus in the premium compact gaming laptop race. It's slim, but is still thicker than either the current Blade 14 or Zephyrus G14 designs, though that could translate to better relative gaming performance if the TGPs and cooling are handled correctly.

There will both 14- and 16-inch designs of the new Alienware gaming laptop, so its possible the smaller machine will have a slightly different Z-height, and could end up closer to the Razer and Asus 14-inchers.

I asked the question, but McGowan wouldn't be drawn on which mobile GPUs the new ultraslim gaming laptop would use, nor on the TGP levels its cooling would allow those chips to run at. These will be key questions we're going to need answered when we finally get our hands on the new machines later in 2026.

Dell has acknowledge an inalienable truth about its Area-51 gaming desktop, it was sorely missing an AMD Ryzen option from its config choices. At CES it has revealed the new Area-51 now comes with AMD Ryzen X3D processors, including the brand-new Ryzen 7 9850X3D.

I was as surprised as anyone at just how good Alienware's Area-51 gaming PC actually turned out to be. Its promise of an endlessly upgradeable Area-51 machine might be predicated on a supplemental $35 upgrade kit to allow you to use non-Dell parts in the future, but it had built a speedy, cool, and quiet gaming desktop.

I would have certainly preferred it had shipped with an AMD 3D V-Cache enabled processor from the off, instead of its purely Intel outlook. That was one of my few issues with its new premium PC (beside it's inevitable cost), but that flaw can now be crossed out from the cons column.

Now, I just need Alienware to package that $35 upgrade kit in the box gratis. It's really only needed to facilitate a motherboard's connection with the front panel and RGB illumination of the massive Area-51 chassis, so it'd be a neat thing to include from the off. Though I would guess precious few Area-51 machines will be upgraded down the line anyways…

Anyways, Matt McGowan, head of product at Alienware, introduced the new config at Dell's CES 2026 pre-briefing in December. Referring to the Area-51 itself, he calls it, "the king of performance in our portfolio… designed for enthusiasts who demand unwavering performance and the ability to make serious upgrades for years to come with ATX compatibility."

"But quite frankly it was missing one thing: it was missing AMD X3D processors."

The new configuration features an industry standard ATX Alienware X870E motherboard, with the option for either a Ryzen 7 9700X, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, or Ryzen 9 9950X3D chip. There will also be the option for the new Ryzen 7 9850X3D when that properly launches, with its 5.6 GHz boost clock and… er, not much change from the OG chip.

Otherwise, it's all still the same Area-51 goodness, with Nvidia GPUs from RTX 5070 to RTX 5090 options, and a determination that positive pressure airflow (where all the fans point inwards) is where it's at. Hey, it works on the Area-51, so maybe Dell knows a thing or two about PC building.

The best gaming laptop can mean different things to different people, but it's something we spend a lot of time thinking about and testing ourselves on PC Gamer. In fact, of all the hundreds of products we prod, poke, and benchmark throughout the year, gaming laptops make up around 10% of the total we test.

So, we know our silicon onions when it comes to mobile machines for making good with the gaming. Each and every gaming laptop that crosses our path gets put through the same rigorous process, where we test gaming and productivity performance with a curated set of benchmarks, and monitor power and thermals, too. And, because we test a ton of them, we can compare each against all the gaming laptops that have gone before.

In this list right here are all the highest-rated machines we've scored over 80% so far this year, with links to their full reviews, and all the benchmarking data you could wish for. And we'll keep adding them as they keep on making good ones.

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• Dell: Up to $500 off Alienware laptops

💻 RTX 5050 - Acer Nitro V 16 AI | $629 at Walmart
💻 RTX 5060 - Lenovo Legion 5 | $1,000 @ Walmart
💻 RTX 5070 - Gigabyte Gaming A16 | $1,180 @ Newegg
💻 RTX 5070 Ti - MSI Vector 16 HX | $1,299 @ Walmart
💻 RTX 5080 - MSI Vector 16 HX AI | $1,900 @ Best Buy

The laptop low-down

Simply the best

Dave's verdict: 90%

"This is the first gaming laptop that has been able to deliver the sort of all-round PC experience that would have me consider ditching both my work laptop and my desktop gaming PC. And that is saying something. The Blade 16 is a genuinely lovely device, that can deliver whether plugged into a wall socket or running on its battery."

Read our full Razer Blade 16 (2025) review.

A little surprise

Jacob's verdict: 89%

"This gaming laptop is ideal for those who want to be able to take their laptop around with them and use it for more than just gaming. Its subtle design and form factor make it very portable, and its RTX 5060 GPU has surprisingly strong gaming chops, especially with frame gen enabled. You can probably get a little better performance for cheaper, but probably not in such a great form factor and premium chassis."

Read our full Asus TUF Gaming A14 review.

Fastest around

Dave's verdict: 87%

"The new Legion chassis looks good, and the performance is absolutely top-notch. But it's the level of customisation that sings to me, allowing you to create a gaming profile that at once delivers the frame rates and the noise level you desire. Just a shame the battery life is still so weak."

Read our full Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 review.

Object of desire

Dave's verdict: 86%

"Razer's "aggressively priced" Blade still manages to be frustratingly pricey, especially in the face of cheaper, more powerful competition. But when it comes to actual use, it's a huge improvement over last year's model and there's now no other gaming laptop I'd want to have my digits on or spend my money on."

Read our full Razer Blade 14 (2025) review.

A classic

Dave's verdict: 83%

"A classic gaming laptop, that makes up for its lack of battery performance or pencil-thin chassis design with serious gaming frame rates even outside of its cacophonous Extreme Performance mode."

Read our full MSI Vector 16 HX AI gaming laptop review.

Second best

Dave's verdict: 83%

"The strangely inconsistent fan noise really takes the shine of this generation's G14, despite it still being a delicious device, with a beautiful OLED screen, and decent gaming performance. But with a new Blade 14 rectifying all the issues Razer's compact machine has had over the past couple of years, it certainly suffers by comparison."

Read our full Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025) review.

Sturdy

Ian's verdict: 81%

"A relative bargain among today's top-end gaming laptops, the 2025 Acer Predator Helios 16 offers solid performance and exceptional screen brightness with the usual drawbacks of running hot and having almost no battery life."

Read our full Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 AI review.

Budget boi

Zak's verdict: 81%

"Lenovo's hit the mark just right on three things in particular. The graphics card. The screen. The build quality. It's exceptional in those elements and delivers excellent 1080p gaming performance. Sadly, however, due to what are assumedly cost-cutting measures on the RAM and SSD front, it doesn't quite nail the landing with its entry-level model."

Read our full Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen 10 review.

That chassis

Jacob's verdict: 80%

"The Alienware 16 Area-51 is a great pick for someone looking to game primarily on a laptop and still have some semblance of portability. It lacks an OLED panel, which is its biggest miss, and performance is a touch slower than some we've seen. But it more than makes up for these with a price tag lower than others offering the same level of quality."

Read our full Alienware 16 Area-51 review.

Chonker

Nick's verdict: 80%

"With such a high price tag, you'd expect Alienware to pack this laptop with all the best goodies. For the most part, it has, and the performance and general experience are great. But the screen is disappointing, the unplugged performance isn't great, and the keyboard feels cheap. At least this gives Dell plenty of scope to make next year's version better."

Read the full Alienware 18 Area-51 review.

Our experts

If you're over the age of 30, you likely remember the Area 51-M. The progenitor of the gaming laptop I'm looking at today, the Area 51-M is unabashed in its appearance. It curved generously towards its front-facing controls and was offered in a truly garish colourway: fluorescent green. It shouldn't be appealing, but it is—I wanted one as a kid and I still want one now.

Alienware has made many attempts to recapture the Area 51-M's style. Often with more muted, and more Dell, trappings. It's had some decent-looking laptops over the years, but nothing to spark joy in me like the original unit. I dare say we'll never see Alienware brave enough to bring out the tins of fluorescent green paint again, but with the new Alienware 16 Area-51, it's closer than it's ever been to capturing the original's essence.

It's not just the metallic turquoise finish on the review unit in front of me that does it, though that helps. It's an anodised aluminium "carapace" in "Liquid Teal". The chassis slopes towards the edges on three out of four sides, and the rear-end juts out from behind the screen in translucent plastic, housing most of the IO, with vents very reminiscent of the original Alienware laptops and desktop PCs. The rear, fans and trackpad are all emblazoned with RGB lighting, and the screen protrudes from its hinge in a satisfyingly retro way.

On the trackpad, the RGB lighting here isn't a favourite of mine, but I have to say Alienware has managed to get it looking very consistent across the entirety of the pad. It's a smaller pad than many on the market today, however, and while very responsive, the mechanical left and right mouse button clicks are quite loud. The mechanical keyboard is pretty much the same deal—responsive but sounds and feels a little underwhelming. I'd rather mechanical Cherry switches than slimmer laptop switches, though.

The Area-51 sports a thick chassis at 28.5 x 365 x 290 mm (1.12 x 14.37 x 11.41 inches). Notably larger than, say, a Zephyrus G16, though Asus knocks back the performance to get to that slim profile, which Alienware hasn't had to do here. It weighs in at 3.4 kg, though I wouldn't say it's any less portable for its heft compared to others in this price/performance category. The Alienware 16 Area-51 comes in at $3,150/£2,949, which is actually a touch more affordable than others we've tested.

There's little about this laptop that's old-fashioned under the hood. The screen is a 16-inch, 240 Hz IPS panel. It's a vibrant panel with a matte coating, which keeps glare to a minimum, though this does enunciate the lack of OLED panel, which would offer deeper tones and a more impressive picture quality—the kind we've rated highly on competing laptops in this price range, such as the Razer Blade 16 (2025), Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025), and Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10. There's also no HDR support for this 500-nit panel. Despite this omission, the screen is a good fit for the laptop's components, which can make good use of the refresh rate with DLSS and Frame Generation enabled, or in less demanding games.

This review unit houses an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, with eight P-cores, 16 E-cores, and a top speed of 5.4 GHz. At 55 W base power and 160 W max, it pales only in comparison to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Mobile GPU alongside it, with a thirst of up to 175 W. Though for the high demands on the power and thermal solution in this laptop, Nvidia has rolled out some new features with the RTX 50-series for improved efficiency, which work a treat.

It's also possible to run only the Intel-provided iGPU when the dGPU isn't required, saving some power, which the system will do for you automatically using Nvidia Advanced Optimus technology. This dynamic switching with Optimus causes the system to visibly hang for a couple of seconds when switching between a game and the desktop, though once you get used to it, it saves some hassle manually switching or setting up preferences in the Windows settings on a per-application basis.

From the 96 Wh battery in the Area-51, it managed to run PCMark's gaming battery life test (a loop of the Firestrike benchmark) for 73 minutes. That's a decent amount of time away from the outlet, equalling the Legion Pro 7i Gen10.

This unit comes with 32 GB of removable SO-DIMM DDR5 memory, rated to 6400 MT/s, provided by SK hynix. The storage is a single 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD from Micron, the 3500 NVMe SED. The Alienware does something I'm yet to see many others do, however, in providing not one but two spare NVMe slots. That's excellent for easy upgrades or for cloning to a larger boot drive if required. Though 2 TB is pretty good going out of the box—I wouldn't want any less than that at this price—and it is enclosed in a copper heatsink as standard, with the other two spare slots ideally using thermal pads that aren't provided.

The rear comes off with a handful of surprisingly chunky Philips-head 1 screws and only light prying at the edges. Underneath sit four fans. Yes, four! All told, I'm very impressed with the innards of the Area-51. It's very well put together and everything is clearly marked, which we like to see, with some components such as the headphone jack and SD card reader on separate PCBs to the mainboard.

Comparing to other RTX 5080-powered gaming laptops at 1080p, the Area-51 easily outperforms the 120 W models, though underperforms by a touch other 175 W models. There's not too much in it, but it's a little more restricted and clock speeds suffer a little more than with other laptops. It's not necessarily a power budget issue, either, and I'd suspect thermals play a role here, as we've largely only tested high-end models with similar Intel HX-series processors that better keep temperatures in check.

The Area-51 hit 78 °C on average and a maximum of 80 °C during three runs of the Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition benchmark, with an average GPU clock of 2297 MHz. The Lenovo Legion 7i Pro Gen10 reached only 74 °C with a maximum of 79 °C, with an average GPU clock of 2375 MHz—a 78 MHz improvement on the Area-51. This just goes to show there's a little more you can get out of the RTX 5080 with the right cooling solution, and that's reflected in the in-game results.

Both the Area-51 and the Legion 7i Pro use the Core Ultra 9 275HX and both allowed it to reach a maximum temperature of 105 °C, the point when thermal throttling will occur to keep the temperature from going any higher. Though the Area-51 scores a point on the Lenovo here for keeping the average temperature of its chip down at 84 °C. The Legion 7i Pro only managed 94 °C.

In productivity benchmarks, I was seeing as much as 41% thermal throttling (the amount the core clock is being restricted after reaching the maximum junction temperature) as registered in HWInfo. In essence, yes, this Core Ultra 9 chip is being held back by high temps. That's not totally abnormal, but again, we've seen lower average temperatures for this same chip on other laptop models and that's reflected in the slightly higher scores elsewhere.

The laptop's native 1600p resolution isn't too demanding, at least, and seems a good pairing with the silicon inside. With DLSS and Frame Gen enabled, too, it's possible to reach up to lofty frame rates closing in on the screen's rated 240 Hz refresh rate, though not in any of our games for benchmarking—you'll have to play it smart in the settings to get that sort of fps out of any modern game.

As for noise levels when this thing is bearing down on 240 Hz in the latest games, it's not too loud. Well, considering how loud gaming laptops can get. I measured it at roughly user distance away with a sound meter and it hit 52 dB, which is roughly analogous to the noise produced by a good liquid cooler or air cooler at 100%. So, not particularly quiet, but it's a tone that I don't find particularly offensive, either. It's a steady whoosh, and as such, it's easily removed by any good noise cancelling headphones or earbuds. I'd recommend a pair with most gaming laptops, to be honest.

As for the extras, Alienware suggests two models of webcam are available on this machine, a 2 MP 1080p unit and an 8 MP 4K unit. It's tough to tell which you've got, or which you're buying, as the specs sheet often just refers to both, even on the store page. I managed to check Alienware support and found one small mention of this review unit having a 4K camera, within the screen specifications, but I have to say I thought it looked more like 1080p. Either way, it looks clear enough for meetings, but would fall short for streaming. It does offer Windows Hello support, at least, which is a feature I wish we saw a lot more of on gaming products.

Alienware might not have nailed world-beating performance here, and the lack of an OLED screen is a bit of a miss, but I find myself liking the Alienware 16 Area-51 regardless. The positives outweigh the negatives: the design is great, something just different enough to stand out without going overboard, and it has maintained a very high quality throughout. Any laptop that stuffs three NVMe ports under the hood has an easier time getting in my good books. While the price tag remains mighty at $3,150/£2,949, it is more affordable than the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10, and it's a fair bit cheaper than rival 18-inch laptops with similar specs. All told, I'd be happy with the Alienware 16 Area-51 if I had purchased it myself.

While this is nothing more than a guess, I'm pretty sure that the average Alienware buyer isn't interested in a gaming laptop that's discreet, understated, or like any other model they could buy. They want that alien logo glowing away, promising unearthly performance, and getting exactly that when they flip the lid open and fire up a game.

Well, that's certainly what you're getting with the new Alienware 18 Area-51 gaming laptop, although to be fair, it's not quite a lurid and ridiculous-looking as some of Alienware's older models. The chassis is really quite classy, and what looks like high-quality plastic is actually anodised aluminium, top and bottom.

It's a little hard to tell from the pictures, but the colour is a deep teal-green and in the right light, it's almost iridescent. The shell does pick up finger marks and grease rather easily, but that just gives you more opportunities to spend long hours carefully polishing your beloved new Alienware laptop. And given that this one costs $4,000, you'll certainly want to be very precious about it.

That's obviously a huge sum of money to spend on a laptop, and while portable PCs always carry a mobility tax, the Area-51 sits very much at the extreme end of that spectrum. For a similar level of cash, you could buy an RTX 5080 desktop gaming PC and an RTX 5070 Ti gaming laptop, so you'd expect the Alienware to be packing the very best hardware around.

It does and it doesn't. Starting with the good stuff, you've got an RTX 5090 mobile GPU, with a 175 W TGP, plus 64 GB of DDR5-6400, and a 2 TB PCIe 5.0 SSD. The RAM isn't super-fast, unfortunately, as it has timings of 52-51-51-102, but the storage is, and the capacities of both are very nice indeed.

The Area-51 has a top-tier price tag, and yet it doesn't pack Intel's very best mobile CPU. That would be a Core Ultra 9 285HX, but here you're 'only' getting the 275HX; however, given that there is just a 100 MHz difference between the two, it's more than good enough.

No, the main disappointments are the screen and keyboard. The former is an 18-inch IPS panel, with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 (16:10 aspect ratio) and a maximum refresh rate of 300 Hz. Peak brightness is a retina-searing 500 nits and yet it has no HDR support. That refresh rate can only be reached via the dGPU, as it's capped to 144 Hz via the iGPU in the Intel chip.

By default, the Alienware 18 Area-51 uses Nvidia's Advanced Optimus system to switch between the two GPUs, depending on whether you're running a game or not. It works fine, but if you were hoping for 300 Hz while spending all day working on the laptop, you'll need to switch it off in the Alienware Control Center app.

At this kind of money, I'd expect to see an OLED screen, but instead, you've got something that's actually too bright. While the colours in games are fine, dark areas are quite washed out, and the panel itself is overly reflective.

The review sample's keyboard is the optional Cherry MX ultra low-profile kit, and I have to say that while it looks very nice, the keys themselves clatter and squeak as you type, and the overall rattly nature to it feels decidedly cheap and cheerful.

If you plan on buying an Area-51 directly from Alienware, I strongly recommend that you save a bit of money and choose the standard keyboard instead. I don't know if it's any better, but it certainly couldn't be any worse. At least the trackpad is lovely, especially when it's all fully lit, and it accurately picks up multi-finger motions, taps and slides.

The aforementioned Alienware control app lets you configure all the RGB lights, along with the power modes and fan levels. There are five presets (Battery, Quiet, Balanced, Performance, and Overdrive), but it's easy enough to configure things how you want them. For the following benchmark results, all figures were taken while using the Performance preset, unless otherwise noted.

It's a $4,000 gaming laptop, so one would demand top-notch performance. Fortunately, that's exactly what you get. It handily outperforms the Razer Blade 16, though it was surprisingly sluggish in F1 25 when using upscaling and frame generation. We've not had many RTX 5090 laptops in the office, but we have tested a 5090 version of the HP Omen Max 16.

That laptop was marginally faster than the Area-51 in every gaming test, with the exception of Metro Exodus Enhanced at 1600p. This game is somewhat CPU-limited, even at that resolution, and I suspect Dell is giving the Core Ultra 9 275HX in its laptop a tad more juice than other vendors do. The large amount of DDR5-6400 will be helping, too.

So, for the most part, there's nothing about the gaming performance to complain about. Actually, there is, and it's when you yank the power cable out of the back of the laptop. Running the Area-51 on batteries only, every game is capped to a maximum of 30 fps, though you can essentially double that with frame generation.

I spent a good while delving through every setting in Alienware Control Center, Nvidia app, and Nvidia Control Panel, but there was nothing visible that could be changed to remove the limit. Of course, this isn't a gaming laptop that you can realistically spend long hours gaming unplugged on, as it only lasts for 80 minutes in a light gaming test, but it's bizarre to have such a limit in the first place.

Update: The 30 fps cap is caused by Nvidia's Battery Boost option. While this can be disabled in the Nvidia app (Graphics > Global Settings), the laptop is still unable to operate at full power when unplugged. In some games, this has a noticeable impact on performance, such as Cyberpunk 2077, but others run almost as well as when plugged in, if they don't tax the GPU too much.

Something worth noting is that the power presets make no difference to the performance when the laptop is plugged in and using Advanced Optimus; only by disabling the MUX and using the dGPU at all times can you adjust the power consumption directly.

Where none of this comes into play is productivity and content creation. The combination of the Core Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5090 ensure that the Area-51 is top-notch for these kinds of workloads. That said, in the Procyon Stable Diffusion benchmark, the Alienware laptop performed no better than the HP Omen Max 16 and MSI Raider 18 HX AI, and they sport RTX 5080 GPUs.

Thanks to the PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD, the Area-51 does barnstorm its way through the 3DMark Storage test, posting results so good that it makes the other laptops look like they're using old HDDs. Unfortunately, it doesn't translate into making the whole laptop any faster, as it boots no faster than a standard laptop, and applications and games certainly don't load any quicker.

If there's one thing that Dell has got absolutely right with the Area-51, it's the thermal solution. Drawing air in from the bottom and top, four large fans blast air over the heatsinks covering the GPU and CPU. Unlike most gaming laptops, there's a bit more room for the air to swirl about inside the chassis, as Dell has designed a so-called 'Cryo-Chamber'—basically a large-ish void, topped off with a Gorilla Glass panel, so you can see…umm, not very much.

The thermal results amply demonstrate that the whole shebang does a great job of keeping things cool, especially the GPU. Even the fan noise isn't too bad. Yes, it's very loud at maximum rpm, but the pitch of the noise isn't painful; think 'rushing gale of wind' rather than 'screaming banshees'.

The downside to Dell's cooling solution, though, is that there are hardly any ports on the sides of the laptop, just a 3.5 mm audio socket and an SD card reader. In place of the usual gamut of USB ports, the Area-51's cooler blasts air out through four large vents. That does mean if you park your mouse right next to it, your hand will slowly cook over a gaming session.

Connectivity options (two Thunderbolt 5 ports, three USB Type-A, one HDMI, and one Ethernet) are all along the rear edge of the laptop. Due to the sheer size of the screen and the Area-51's big booty, it can be a bit of a faff fumbling around the back trying to plug things in. If you're dead set on buying this laptop, I suggest that you also invest in a good Thunderbolt/USB hub to make it easier to use.

So what to make of the Alienware 18 Area-51? The price tag is ludicrously high, but then again, the Razer Blade 16 with an RTX 5090 isn't any cheaper and in the UK, the MSI Raider 18 HX AI with an RTX 5080 is practically the same price. In other words, Dell isn't really charging any more than what the competition is for a similar laptop.

And you're getting 64 GB of RAM and a 2 TB Gen 5 SSD, along with the most powerful laptop GPU you can buy right now. Unfortunately, you're also getting a mediocre keyboard (if you go with the Cherry MX option) and a rather underwhelming screen. The latter is okay, but it's not $4,000 okay, and nowhere near as good as that in the Razer Blade 16.

Given how critical the display and keys are to the entire experience of using a laptop, the Alienware 18 Area-51 is a bit like an overconfident runner who's led the field for almost the entire race, only to faceplant a handful of yards from the finish line.

It's far from perfect, though you are getting top-tier performance in a classy-looking chassis. If you can live with the screen and don't really care about the keyboard, then the Area-51 is certainly worth considering. The promise of the alien logo isn't entirely there, but it's not far off, and I reckon a 2026 refresh with an OLED panel would be very hard to beat.

The period between July and November is normally a bit of a wasteland when it comes to substantial discounts. With EOFY sales and Amazon Prime Day in the rearview mirror, and Black Friday a long way away, it must suck to urgently need, say, a new gaming monitor right now. Or so you'd think. The truth is, there are a small handful of Alienware 27 inch displays that are going cheaper than they've ever been, in Australia at least.

The highlights are two monitors we've reviewed very positively. The Alienware 27 AW2725Q QD-OLED is a terribly named but brilliantly endowed QD-OLED monitor which Jeremy Laird rewarded an 87 / 100 review back in March, wherein he praises its pixel density, silky smooth refresh rate (to the tune of 240Hz) and HDR chops. "Our tertiary taste of a 27-inch 4K QD-OLED monitor confirms that the overall experience is stunning, but not much of a step over 32-inch 4K OLEDs," he writes.

That monitor entered the market at AU$1,199 in Australia, but at the moment you can get it for AU$888.91 direct from Dell. If you click through to that link, you'll see the going price is AU$999, but once you apply the coupon code DNCPAU11% you'll see a nice chunk come off that price. Kinda like magic.

Given that monitor only hit the market five months ago, it's definitely the highlight of the trio, but we also liked the Alienware AW2723DF which, in case that clear-as-mud name doesn't help, is a 1440p gaming monitor with a 280Hz refresh rate on an IPS panel. Usually it goes for around AU$700, but right now you can get it for $444.47, using the same coupon code DNCPAU11%.

Finally, there is a third monitor on sale at a brilliant price, though we haven't actually reviewed it before, so I can't wholeheartedly endorse it. For what it's worth, our sibling site GamesRadar+ liked the Alienware 27 AW2724HF back when it released in 2023, especially its ultra-fast 360Hz display. The HD screen used to go for around AU$600, but with the same DNCPAU11% coupon code, the current price of AU$349.80 drops further to AU$311.32.

If you're looking for a new display but don't like Alienware, check out our list of the best gaming monitors.

I wasn't adequately prepared for just how massive the new Alienware Area-51 is in the flesh. It's frankly enormous, especially compared with the rather meek little Aurora desktops of the last Dell gaming box refresh.

Those Auroras just felt like pretty standard mid-tower machines, with a rather dull, very Dell design. This Area-51, however, is a gaming PC absolutely in FULL TOWER MODE. And, you know what, I'm kinda into it. I don't know if it's just that I'm a little intimidated by its sheer presence—so maybe I'm feeling the need to be nice about it otherwise it's coming for my lunch money—but it's certainly an impressive thing when you pull it out of the box and turn it on.

I dig the smooth curves of its outer shell, the blue LED ring around the front intake area, and those absolutely massive twin intake fans. And that huge glass side panel giving unfettered visual access to the insides, where the amount of space somehow makes the portly RTX 5090 this system ships with look like a regular graphics card.

Oh yes, this is the Area-51 given the full Alienware beans. So, the review system I have next to me is pretty much top-of-the-line across the board. On the one hand, ooh, this is the fastest gaming PC I've had on the test bench, on the other it's so hard to get anything that isn't the absolute top spec out of the company for testing. And I don't have the deep pockets to drop a couple grand on a mid-range version to see how that might turn out by comparison.

Still, this is a fitting spec for such a monstrous PC; there's the RTX 5090 for a start, working cheek-by-jowl with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and 64 GB dual-channel DDR5-6400, with a 2 TB PCIe 5.0 Sk Hynix SSD doing the storage dance for you. And… er… yeah, the price. There's none of Razer's moment of clarity on its own slightly destructive laptop pricing; Alienware is still wearing its premium branding like some sort of armour against any consideration of sensible pricing.

This is a $5,300 gaming PC.

With the RTX 5090 itself costing around the $3,000 mark at the moment—though with deals that is starting to edge downwards again—that makes it maybe an understandable, if not at all acceptable price for most of us PC gamers.

Worth noting also that Corsair's Vengeance PCs, systems generally also labouring under high price premiums, are sitting well over the $5K price point for RTX 5090 machines, too. Feels slightly ludicrous for that to make the Alienware price par for the course, but here we are. And hey, with a PC of this size, you are at least getting a tremendous sense of value.

It does at least perform like a $5,000 gaming PC. This thing is lightning quick, from its PCIe 5.0 SSD cold boot time, to the pace at which it can chew through games. The only misstep is in Baldur's Gate 3 where you can see what benefit you can get from having a Ryzen 3D V-Cache CPU inside your rig instead of being restricted to an Intel Arrow Lake chip. Otherwise it's plain sailing for the Area-51 in anything you throw at it.

With all our PC testing carried out at 1440p, the Area-51 is top of the class in terms of any prebuilt PC that we've looked at in recent times. And, well, ever. The only other machine we've seen that can beat it is a system we put together for a previous feature which packed an RTX 5090 inside a case with a Ryzen 9 9950X—and even then they trade blows.

You could maybe go faster with a Ryzen 3D V-Cache chip, such as the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, especially in Baldur's Gate 3, but this machine is about as fast a gaming PC as you can get in Intel trim. It's not just in gaming terms that the Area-51 can top the class, either, because that Intel Core Ultra 9 can also deliver when it comes to heavily multi-threaded workloads, too. And, even if I'm not sold on the config, the cooling does a great job of taming the CPU's heat demands.

Something else I've been really impressed with are the noise levels. Stick it in Performance mode and it will push both the CPU and GPU to their fullest, and during heavy operation you will certainly hear those fans spinning up. But, drop it to the Balanced mode in the Alienware Command Center (ACC) app and it will dial back the CPU while keeping the graphics core running hard.

With the CPU and its cooler being the hottest and loudest component pairing, that means you get a quiet system without compromising on gaming performance, and that is a bit of a win, for sure. The little bit of configuration nuance allowed by the Alienware Command Center software means you're getting a system that is actually pre-tuned in a way many other prebuilt PCs might not be out of the box. With something like Corsair's Vengeance machines not shipping with an iCUE configuration, that makes the ACC app a welcome little bit of bloat on the otherwise clean OS install.

But this is Alienware, so we have the ever-thorny issue of proprietary parts. The good news here is that, essentially, the new Area-51 is harking back to the days of upgradeable Alienware machines, when once there was the option to simply use off-the-shelf parts to modify your PC down the line. All the old Auroras would let you swap out GPU, memory, and storage, but they regularly had weirdly sized and laid out motherboards that looked like they were ripped right out of some bizarre Dell corpo PC box. Because they probably were.

Now, the motherboard in the Area-51 is still pretty industrial-looking, with a million tiny chips and chokes on display, like miniature cyberpunk cityscapes, with only a few stylised heatsinks covering things up. We've become used to all that being hidden by modern mobos and their flashy shielding, not so with the Intel board inside the Alienware. But it is at least of standard ATX scale, with the same screw points as every other off-the-shelf motherboard. So, mobo upgrades are a doddle, then. A win for Alienware and one of the biggest issues we've had with its PCs dropped in one fell swoop.

Except, not quite.

The chassis itself isn't all that compatible, because there are still proprietary connections if you want to be able to do such things as change the AlienFX RGB lighting or, y'know, turn the damned thing on. To be able to connect all the front panel, case cooling, and lighting gubbins up to a third-party motherboard you'll need to pick up a $35 conversion kit, which comes with all the cables and adapters you might need.

Well, not exactly all, because the beefy 1500 W PSU this machine ships with is of the ATX12VO variety which ditches all the largely unnecessary 5 V connections and gives you a much smaller motherboard power connection. Which is great, except you're going to struggle to find another third-party motherboard that will take that connection, and there's no safe adapter on the planet that will help. So, you're going to need to pick up a new PSU, too.

How much of an issue that actually is will only be something you can answer yourself. Me? I have a tendency to do in-place platform upgrades on my PCs rather than pick up a whole new system from scratch, but I know that's not everyone. Especially not everyone who might buy a $5,000 Alienware in the first place.

The DIY market is loud, but small. And the notion of future-proofing your build, with the potential for in-place upgrades down the line, actually only caters to a vanishingly small minority of PC gamers. And I wonder how many $5,000 PCs from any manufacturer actually end up having their motherboards ripped out and replaced by the original owner even if they're entirely off-the-peg, like a Corsair Vengeance. I would wager precious few.

What I will say is the motherboard in there is relatively well appointed for an Alienware rig. There are only a pair of M.2 slots for internal storage (one PCIe 5.0 and one PCIe 4.0), but I've never seen a system with quite so many USB Type-C ports on it. There are a pair on the front panel of the machine, with another four on the back panel of the board itself. Two of the six are Thunderbolt ports, while the rest are 10 Gbps sockets. There are a further six Type-A ports, though with only one of them designated as 5 Gbps, on the rear and another two USB 3.2 Type-A 5 Gbps ports on the front panel.

And it all feels very well put together, from the super rigid bracketing keeping the RTX 5090 in place and from dragging the PCIe slot down with it, to the cable routing in the rear of the machine. There are power and data cables already tidied into place around the spare 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drive bays in case you want to jam in some ancient SATA SSDs or spinning platter storage, which is a welcome touch.

That impression somewhat changed when I started checking out the cooling. It actually cools the system impressively well—running on Performance mode, yes it gets chatty, but stays chill and in Balanced mode it's quiet but still delivers on gaming frame rates. But I'm not sure I'm into Alienware's cooling config.

In a gaming PC, good airflow is a positive thing. And when you've got a ton of fans in a rig it's important to make sure they're blowing in the right directions, which normally means not having them all blowing in the same direction. The twin 180 mm fans on the front are intake fans, pulling cool air in to help cool the system as a whole, then there are a pair of 140 mm fans set just above the PSU ostensibly to pull cool air in from the bottom to pass up and across the GPU.

Finally, there are three 120 mm fans atop the 360 mm radiator. In most modern builds, those are used to pull the hot air out from the PC, over the radiator drawing more heat from the coolant to help chill the CPU itself.

Except that's not what Alienware is doing. It's working with complete positive pressure, with every fan in the rig pointing inwards, drawing cool air in with no active exhaust.

"Our engineers conducted countless simulations with different fan orientations and determined that, for this chassis, having all fans point inward optimizes cooling and acoustics while scaling for even higher wattages than what is available today," Alienware told me when I queried the configuration. "By having all fans point inward to create positive pressure, Area-51 desktop can omit an exhaust fan and operate at low noise levels while effectively cooling the most important components (CPU and GPU)."

The company cites 45% quieter operation and 25% more airflow than previous Aurora chassis, but I did swap the fans around myself to test the difference. Mostly because I initially thought it was a mistake on the part of the PC builders, with the printing on the chassis seeming to indicate the direction of airflow out the top of the case.

In my testing I've seen the CPU running at least a couple of degrees cooler during heavy, sustained usage, and the graphics card running either the same or sometimes a little cooler, when the radiator fans are set to exhaust the hot air. I'm sure Dell has carried out a ton of thermal testing on this setup, but I'd be far happier having at least some of the fans dedicated to shifting out that hot air.

Total positive pressure means air gets heated up inside the chassis and can only escape through the gaps passively. This means hot air sticks around longer, getting hotter and insulating your components with toasty air. Of course the air can get out, but isn't going to move as quickly as if there's something actively pushing it out. With all that hot air trapped in there, it's also harder to get cool air squeezed in, so the fans have to work that bit harder.

It is a pretty cool and quiet machine anyways, I just feel it could just be a bit cooler. But then, I've not conducted countless simulations…

There's one other issue on the fan front, and that's the rear most fan above the PSU. One of them is literally above the power supply itself, and there is zero clearance between it and the fan, which renders its existence pretty much pointless. With no real possibility of pulling in cool air itself, that fan is aesthetics, pure and simple.

My concerns about the fan configuration aside, this is the most impressed I've been with an Alienware PC in a long time. In both games and creative applications it performs as well as you would expect from the components the company has jammed inside, and whatever my misgivings might be it does it all in a quiet restrained way. Well, as restrained as any PC of this scale can.

It's a scale I can dig, though, with a solid, accessible design that allows easy access to most of the parts inside. Is it the easily upgradeable Alienware we were promised? Not quite. Honestly, I can kinda forgive the $35 upgrade kit of cabling for integrating the chassis design and cooling into a future third-party motherboard replacement, but the ATX12VO PSU choice is going to make that 1500 W power supply it ships with a pain to replace if and when you do want to upgrade.

Which means I'm always going to come back to why would you want the Alienware Area-51 over an equivalently specced and equivalently priced PC from another vendor? I appreciate the tuning via the Alienware Control Center app, which means you can run a chilled system out of the box without having to tune it yourself, and I like the curvy chassis. And if it weren't for the pain of a PSU upgrade down the line I'd say it all evens out. Especially as Dell has a propensity to discount its gaming PCs on the regular; our standing advice about not paying full price for an Alienware machine remains.

What would have me pausing on the Alienware more than its potential upgrade hiccups, however, is the choice of CPU supplier. Dell has decided that its Area-51 range, at least for the moment, are entirely Intel-based. In a world where AMD is currently the top-dog in gaming chips, that would probably have me looking elsewhere if prices are the same.

So, there is still a little grit in the eye of this beholder as I gaze upon the beauty of this Area-51 gaming PC, but I could probably blink that away quite happily once I started gaming on this behemoth.

Up front disclosure: I'm a sucker for 34-inch ultrawide monitors, I reckon they're still the sweetspot for sensible-money gaming. With that in mind, you'd think Alienware's newly updated 34-inch ultrawide OLED monitor, the Alienware 34 AW3425DW, is odds on for a very high score.

After all, we loved the OG Alienware 34-inch ultrawide, the Alienware 34 AW3423DW. Its lower priced sibling, the Alienware 34 AW3423DWF, was even better thanks to a glossy panel coating. The new AW3425DW takes things up a notch with an upgrade to 240 Hz from the 175 Hz and 165 Hz of its predecessors while maintaining essentially the same $800 price as the old "F" model (it's actually available for $770 on Dell's website as I tap out these words). What's not to like?

As it turns out, this new Alienware is a little harder to love than its progenitors. Partly, that's because it's actually a bit too familiar, based as it is on the same first-gen Samsung QD-OLED tech as the older AW3423DW that launched over three years ago.

So, it has essentially the same performance characteristics, save for the elevated refresh rate. It even has the same 1800R panel curvature and, thankfully, the same glossy panel coating as the old "F" model. By many measures, that's all good. The 0.03ms pixel response hardly needed improving, ditto the per-pixel lighting control of all OLED monitors. It's so much better than any LCD monitor in that regard, even one with the most advanced local dimming hardware.

Equally, however, there's no improvement to full-screen or peak HDR brightness. The latter is arguably plenty punchy enough at 1,000 nits. But the full-screen brightness of 250 nits is more adequate than excellent, especially in the knowledge of new OLED panel tech from both Samsung and LG that promises to bump that up to the 350 to 400 nit range in the near future.

The carry-over panel tech also means that the various issues remain. For starters, it has the same sub-optimal subpixel structure which means fonts suffer from a little fringing and lack of clarity. Then there's the usual QD-OLED issue with ambient light.

As with all other QD-OLED panels from Samsung, and particularly with regard to models with glossy panel coatings like this one, there's a tendency to look a bit purplish and grey in strong ambient light. If you're only ever going to use this thing in a room with limited ambient light, it's not a problem. But if your desk is near a large window, for instance, the result can be compromised black levels and contrast.

The "QD" bit of the QD-OLED tech, specifically the quantum dots, probably also contribute to the familiar overly warm colour temperature of all these panels. When we first experienced QD-OLED gaming monitors, such minor flaws were easy to overlook in return for incredible response and HDR performance. But three years later, expectations are inevitably higher.

The broader feature set is similar, too. You get DisplayPort and HDMI inputs, for instance, but no USB-C. There's is USB-C on the lower bezel, along with USB-A. But that's part of the USB hub for peripherals. It's not a display input, so there's no single-cable option for laptops.

So, what exactly has changed, apart from the refresh rate bump? Most obvious is the physical design. Alienware has applied the same AW30 aesthetic as the Alienware 27 AW2725Q I reviewed back in March.

Implemented to celebrate 30 years of Alienware hardware, it's said to be inspired by extra-terrestrial phenomena and the Aurora Borealis. and ditches the black and white plastics used for previous Alienware monitors in favour of a dark blue hue known as "Interstellar Indigo".

When I reviewed the 27-inch 16:9 aspect AW2725Q, I said, "the curved, organic shapes of the rear of the chassis and also the stand and base are definitely a departure for Alienware and give it a slightly dated '90s vibe." That applies just as much to this ultrawide model. It's a subjective call, obviously, but I prefer the old look.

In terms of the actual viewing experience, for the most part you'd struggle to distinguish it from the Alienware 34 AW3423DWF (the original AW3423DW is a little different thanks to its matte screen coating). For sure, the smoothness is slightly improved by the 240 Hz refresh (provided you have a decent GPU that can push out frames fast enough). But the overly warm colour temperature is immediately apparent, too.

Of course, so is the general vibrancy. This is a pretty punchy monitor, despite the relatively modest full-screen brightness capability. QD-OLED colours really zing. Alienware has implemented a ABL or automatic brightness limiter in SDR mode which means the brightness remains constant and doesn't, for instance, dip when you open a large, white application window.

SDR content is actually a little brighter in HDR mode, but some brightness variability is visible, albeit only just. Fortunately, it's not terribly distracting. In terms of HDR in games, the peaks are pretty stellar.

Let's say you're playing an indoor game scene. Highlights like light sources or explosions really pop against the dark background, especially in HDR 1000 mode. No LCD monitor comes close. The catch is that the HDR 1000 mode is noticeably dimmer for brighter outdoor game scenes compared to the DisplayHDR 400 mode, which gives more outdoor pop while slightly capping that peak HDR sizzle. Long story short, there's no single ideal HDR mode, which is a little frustrating.

More generally, I'm a little less convinced by this overall form factor when applied to OLED gaming that I once was. Most of all, the modest 3,440 by 1,440 resolution on a 34-inch panel means that the pixel density isn't great, especially not now that 4K OLEDs can be had in 27-inch and 32-inch form factors.

The impact of that goes beyond just text rendering. The in-game visuals lack detail and sharpness compared to the 4K alternative. What's more, upscaling technologies like Nvidia's DLSS don't work as well when mapping to a relatively low resolution like this.

Upscaling in quality mode on a 4K or 3,840 by 2,160 resolution panel generally means a base resolution of 2,560 by 1,440, which is comparable to this monitor's native res. For this Alienware, the base resolution will be well below that, even in quality mode and it shows. Of course, the lower resolution makes it much easier to run native on this panel and get frame rates comparable to quality upscaling on a 4K monitor, but you're not getting comparable image detail.

Anyway, the overall upshot is that I felt the impact of the mere 1440p-class resolution even more with this new Alienware 34 AW3425DW than its predecessors. I prefer the 34-inch ultrawide form factor offered here, but I also want the superior pixel density of the 4K alternatives.

To put it another way, where I used to think the modest pixel density was problematic on the desktop but fine for gaming, I'm now beginning to feel it in games, too, thanks to the unflattering comparison with the stunning detail offered by 4K OLEDs. Now I've had that crispy 4K OLED experience, I can't unsee it. So, yep, I've gone from being very pro 34-inch ultrawides to slightly less convinced.

As I understand it, LG and Samsung have 34-inch 5K2K ultrawide OLED panels in the works, which will have the same pixel density as a 27-inch 4K monitor. In the meantime, all 34-inch ultrawide OLED gaming monitors have the same 3,440 by 1,440 resolution as the OG Alienware offered back in 2022.

Still, if you are generally sold on the prospect of a 34-inch 1440p OLED monitor this Alienware is plenty appealing. It may be first-gen QD-OLED tech, but it's still spectacular. I just think it's a slightly hard sell when you can get a 32-inch 240 Hz 4K model for similar money, or even cheaper if you forgo a few Hz.

All of which means, if the whole 1440p versus 4K thing doesn't resonate with you, fair enough, here's the bottom line: This is a minor update to a really good OLED monitor. You get higher refresh for essentially the same price. The catch is that the market has moved on in the last few years and that means the Alienware 34 AW3425DW is decent value, but it's not a stellar deal right now.

A possible Arm-based Nvidia APU, created in collaboration with MediaTek has been on our radar for quite a while now. Its existence was previously all but confirmed, but we hadn't seen any sign of what could be a production or close-to-production version in the wild. Until now, that is, as we have our first seemingly close to production benchmark of an Nvidia Arm processor.

The Geekbench entry (via X user Olrak29_ and VideoCardz) shows an Nvidia N1X processor with a 20-thread Arm CPU and base clock of 2.81 GHz running in a HP system with the Ubuntu Linux distro as its OS. It achieves 3,096 single-core and 18,837 multi-core scores in Geekbench. (There's since been another listing that I spotted with slightly lower scores.)

This is a much more reasonable score than we saw in previous N1X Geekbench results, which was presumably a very early engineering sample. These latest results hint at much more mature engineering samples, possibly even ones that are close to production, as the scores are similar to laptop and desktop processors. You can see a Razer Blade 16 with Intel Core i9-14900HX, for instance, achieving slightly less than the N1X here within Windows 11.

Arm chips don't usually have simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) so it's reasonable to assume that this is a 20-core chip. This would be in-line with what we previously thought, because Nvidia had hinted that the GB10 chip in DGX Spark would be brought to end-users, and the GB10 has 20 Arm cores. This previous hint wasn't perfectly clear, but this Geekbench result is: It looks like the Nvidia chip will be using Arm-designed cores rather than Nvidia-designed custom Arm cores.

If it ends up being practically identical to DGX Spark then we might expect RTX 5070-level performance since that's what's on offer with the Blackwell GPU there, too. Which would corroborate the longstanding rumour that the Nvidia Arm chip will offer RTX 4070 mobile performance—in fact, it would offer more than this. Though there isn't any guarantee that it would ship in its full-fat DGX Spark config—it could get cut down to size for cheaper and more power efficient versions.

The system configuration running here for Geekbench apparently has 120 GB of memory, which is much more than we'd see in a gaming laptop of course. But given DGX Spark is a mini AI supercomputer, it might be that Nvidia is planning on bringing N1X to home systems for AI development first. This wouldn't rule out Nvidia also bringing it to market in the form of gaming laptops, though.

It's this latter prospect that excites us, of course. It's one that isn't entirely spun out of thin air, as we've heard consistent rumour that an Alienware laptop will sport the all-Nvidia silicon at the end of 2025 or the start of 2026.

Although this Geekbench result is running a Linux OS, if and when the Nvidia N1X comes to market in consumer gaming laptops, we'd expect it to be running Windows, which means running Windows on Arm.

I recently spoke to Arm's client lead and he implied that the future of PC gaming on Windows on Arm depends on game developers baking in native Arm support. The incentive for game devs to do that, however, is at present questionable.

But one of the most exciting things about Nvidia N1X is that if and when such chips start rolling out with Windows on Arm for gaming, that could change. Nvidia might be able to help to get game devs to bridge that gap. Hey, I never said I was immune to wishful thinking.

Alienware has just announced a couple of new gaming laptops that go by 'Aurora' and have a rather simple and clean design. We're talking rounded corners, a single, simple logo, a "chamfered" (sloping) front edge for one-handed opening, and no thermal shelf at the rear.

I quite like it, but I know some find such a minimalistic style boring. Admittedly, these laptops aren't minimalistic by non-gaming standards, but by Alienware's standards? These are as modest as can be. Their design is a pretty big departure from its usual MO, though we still don't know if they're going to be good enough to make a dent in our best gaming laptop lineup.

The laptops are following the company's 'AW30' design language revealed earlier this year, which is "inspired by extraterrestrial phenomena" (for Alienware? You don't say). According to Alienware, this is a "brand-new design language … crafted to evoke a sense of mystery and transcendence that is undeniably Alienware."

Things get a little confusing, though, when Alienware says that its Area-51 laptops incorporate the AW30 design language, and yet the company wants to distinguish these from the new Aurora line:

"Moving forward, you’ll see two distinct tiers across Alienware desktops and laptops: Area-51 [is] our flagship tier designed for those who demand maximum performance and premium features in a durable, robust design. Aurora [is] our versatility tier offering strong performance within a sleek, streamlined form factor."

Whatever the wider strategy, with these Aurora laptops—Alienware 16 Aurora and Alienware 16X Aurora—we know what we're getting on the design front. On the specs front, the 16X looks to be the more powerful version with up to 64 GB (rather than 32 GB) of DDR5 RAM , newer Core Ultra chips, RGB (rather than single-colour) lighting, and a 240 Hz (rather than a 120 Hz) refresh rate. The non-X will, however, offer more options than the RTX 5060/70 the 16X will, too, on the lower end at least, down to an RTX 3050.

In addition to the sleeker design, this laptop has a 'Stealth Mode', which "enables users to quickly transition [by pressing F7] to a quiet operating mode with reduced lighting and fan noise, catering to professional environments and extending battery life."

If thermals are a concern, especially given the lack of a thermal shelf sticking out behind the screen hinge, Alienware assures us that this "thermal package" is now underneath the device. It "strategically takes advantage of unused space where a tall rear foot would normally be located. Coined Cryo-Chamber, this solution helps maximize airflow intake and expel heat efficiently through strategically placed vents."

I know not everyone is into such simple designs, but I'm a bit of a sucker for it. The "Interstellar indigo" colour scheme, top-of-keyboard mesh speaker, and rounded edges hit all the right spots for me. Though much will depend on what pricing looks like, because right now we just know that "select configurations of Alienware Aurora Laptops will launch in EMEA on May 27, 2025 starting at £899" and "additional models will arrive soon after."

A starting price doesn't tell us much, considering configurations will go down ones with to an RTX 3050. We'll have to wait and see. They should be out for testing at PAX East this weekend at booth #12019, if anyone fancies a look.

Alienware is infamous for putting out snazzy rigs with limited upgraded paths. This CES, we thought the gaming brand had turned a corner with its new fully upgradeable Area-51 desktop rig but there's an asterisk next to that saying 'only if you pay $35 more'.

On Dell's website, the AlienFX board cable conversion kit has gone live and for $35, you get a power switch wiring cable, fan power bridge wiring cable, USB dongle extension, and a bag with three nuts. This can be used to 'convert' your motherboard of choice for use in the Area-51 AAT2250 case.

We were told about the new upgradeable rig at CES but no mention was made of a special set of cables to actually get it all running. The page for the new conversion kit says it "enables connectivity between the Area-51 chassis and a 3rd party motherboard while enabling all of the features specific to the Area-51 chassis such as AlienFX lighting, fan controls, Front I/O functionality, and powering on the system".

If your upgrade choice isn't an ATX12VO motherboard, you will need to also buy a new power supply. However, any ATX12VO ATX or mATX motherboard will work, as long as you have the cables.

However, if you happen to own an old Area-51 rig, the new conversion kit won't work but we haven't seen an Area-51 rig since the R4 model in 2017 and the new Area 51 case is very different to what we've seen before.

This announcement leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth, which is a shame as the new Area-51 desktop rigs look pretty impressive. Alienware claims it is "our most quiet, coolest running, and highest performance desktop" due to better thermals and stronger performance. Equipped with the latest RTX 50 series cards, the chassis reportedly has positive pressure airflow, which is where more air is being brought in than exhausted. This means dust and hot air isn't sucked back in as a result.

The new Area-51 rigs are said to run up to 13% cooler and 45% quieter than previous models. It seems like, if you plan on one day upgrading your rig with a new motherboard, you just have to factor the cost of that extra $35 onto the final price of the rig.

GPU, RAM, and SSD upgrades don't seem to have restrictions like the motherboard and each part has a QR code next to it, to show you how to upgrade. These are all very neat touches on a rig that looks very pretty, but the motherboard is the one let down for a rig that sounds very good in concept.

This feels like a two steps forward, one step back approach for Alienware. Any amount of modularity to a rig is still better than nothing, and there are some good upgrades here, but it's not quite fully upgradeable out of the box.

The new Alienware 27 AW2725Q QD-OLED is not the first 27-inch 4K OLED we've reviewed. That singular honour goes to the MSI MPG 272URX. Surprisingly for Alienware, however, which tends to plump for premium pricing, the AW2725Q undercuts that MSI panel by fully $200, coming in at $899. Yup, that's right, an Alienware that's cheaper than the competition. Weird, eh?

Okay, that's still not exactly throw-away money. But it's a solid saving given you're getting exactly the same Samsung-sourced 27-inch QD-OLED panel with a full 4K resolution, 240 Hz refresh and 0.03 ms claimed response times. Why wouldn't you go with this Alienware?

Well, one reason is that the MSI has a USB-C input with 98 W of power delivery for single-cable connectivity. Admittedly, that's not a high priority for gaming, not least because 98 W isn't enough to keep a high-performance gaming laptop juiced. But it is a pity for all-round and long term usability.

The other obvious spec shortcoming, on paper at least, is the AW2725Q's DisplayPort 1.4 interface as opposed to DisplayPort 2.1 with UHBR 20, which the MSI notably offers. The latter allows 4K at 240 Hz without Display Stream Compression (DSC). The Alienware's DP 1.4 interface and its HDMI 2.1 ports all need to run DSC to hit 240 Hz.

The thing is, DSC is visually lossless and adds virtually no latency, so the higher-bandwidth interface is a theoretical advantage in this context. It really doesn't matter. Specs-wise, then, you're not losing much in return for the $200 discount.

As for design, the Alienware 27 AW2725Q QD-OLED debuts the brand's new design language, dubbed "AW30". Said to be inspired by extraterrestrial phenomena and the Aurora Borealis, it ditches the black and white plastics used for previous Alienware monitors for a new hue known as "Interstellar Indigo".

It's a largely uniform dark blue infused with a hint of metallic fleck. Make of that what you will, but the curved, organic shapes of the rear of the chassis and also the stand and base are definitely a departure for Alienware and give it a slightly dated '90s vibe. Overall, the only obvious holdover from earlier Alienware monitors is the brand's signature RGB-lit alien head logo.

Getting back to that 27-inch 4K QD-OLED panel, as we discussed with the MSI MPG 272URX, the nomenclature around Samsung's QD-OLED tech has become a little confused. But this is Samsung's very latest OLED panel, whether you want to call it 4th Gen or five-layer tandem OLED.

Either way, it's as good as Samsung does and brand new for 2025. In larger TV panels and indeed in 27-inch 1440p monitors, the five-layer tandem OLED tech delivers a significant brightness boost.

However, for this 27-inch 4K implementation, apparently the higher pixel density of 4K crammed into a 27 inch panel as opposed to the 32 inches of previous 4K OLEDs, like Alienware's own 32 AW3225QF, puts a cap on brightness. Long story short, this new 27-inch 4K OLED tech ends up with identical 250 nit full screen and 1,000 nit peak HDR in a 3% window ratings as pretty much all previous QD-OLED monitors.

Other aspects that haven't changed with this new panel tech include the internal reflectivity of the panel itself and the pixel substructure. The former means that the slightly purple-grey tint of the panel in strong ambient light that's been characteristic of QD-OLED tech remains. In really bright ambient conditions, it does compromise perceived contrast a little.

The subpixel structure, meanwhile, is likewise still triangular as opposed to a conventional trio of vertical stripes—red, then green, then blue—that's known as RGB and is used by most LCD monitors.

In some previous QD-OLEDs, that created issues with font rendering and visual sharpness. With 32-inch QD-OLEDs those foibles were mostly put to bed. With this even higher density 27-inch 4K tech, fuzzy fonts can be classed as a solved problem. Tech sharpness and overall image clarity is just fab.

But what about the rest of the image performance? Well, just like the MSI MPG 272URX and the Asus ROG Swift PG27UCDM, it's mostly fabulous. Seeing all the usual benefits of QD-OLED, including perfect per-pixel lighting, virtually infinite viewing angles and outrageously fast pixel response combined with 166 DPI pixel density is certainly a sight to behold.

The caveat to that would be that the 140 DPI density of 32-inch 4K panels barely looks any different in terms of image detail and sharpness. But you will notice the larger, more immersive and cinematic overall vibe of the 32-inch panel. In fact, you very much could argue that 4K is overkill for gaming on a 27-inch monitor.

That said, the performance of this monitor is generally excellent. HDR visuals in particular absolutely pop, in part thanks to the glossy screen coating. Once you've seen, say, the precision of a bright neon light being rendered on a dark background with eye-popping contrast, you won't want to go back to LCD.

Frankly, no LCD comes close when it comes to contrast and lighting precision, and that includes panels with full-array dimming. With this panel tech, you get perfect sharp edges between bright and dark objects. There's no bleed, no halos, no dimming zones popping on and off. And of course, you've got 240 Hz for low latency combined with the aforementioned super-zippy pixel response all combining to make for a seriously quick display.

If you're looking for shortcomings, well, the full-screen brightness still isn't absolutely stellar. That means that brighter outdoor games scenes can lack just a little punch and vibrancy. It's when rendering game vistas with mixed bright and dark elements that this monitor really delivers. It's stunning.

One word to the wise on brightness. You'll get better full-screen brightness in HDR mode than SDR, even for SDR content, albeit with a touch of ABL or Automatic Brightness Limiter variability. SDR content in HDR mode is pretty well calibrated, so my personal tendency would be to run this panel in HDR mode all the time to ensure maximum SDR punch.

Another relative weakness is the slightly warm overall colour balance. Generally, it's well calibrated, though if you favour sRGB or DCI-P3 by default you'll find those presets are particularly well buried in the OSD. It's the kind of very slight quirk which you quickly forget, but for the record that signature QD-OLED warmth is definitely visible.

All of which means our third taste of Samsung's new 27-inch 4K QD-OLED tech is awfully similar to our first. The increased pixel density is certainly nice. But the real-world benefits for gaming over a 32-inch 4K alternative are slim to none. And given you can get 32-inch 4K OLEDs for similar money, that would be our clear preference.

Still, if you do favour 27 inches, perhaps because desk space is tight or you are particularly sensitive to or just a really big fan of maximising pixel density, well, this Alienware is every bit as good as the more expensive MSI, just $200 cheaper. That leaves you with the conundrum of whether a USB-C input with power delivery is worth $200. And that, ultimately, is your call.

Alienware has announced a pair of new OLED gaming monitors and—huzzah!—one of them marks a new low price point for the brand. The new Alienware 27 AW2725D is a 27-inch 1440p panel running at 280 Hz and it's yours for just $550. Oh, and Alienware also has some new more affordable LCD models, to boot.

The other new OLED option, which arguably is more appealing, is the new Alienware 34 AW3425DW, a 34-inch ultrawide model that hits 240 Hz. That's up from 175 Hz maximum from its existing 34-inch ultrawide OLED monitors.

That one comes in quite a bit higher, at $800. Notably, however, we've seen those ultrawides routinely discounted from their launch MSRPs. So, hopefully the AW3425DW will soon be dipping below $700, at which point it will be quite compelling.

Going by the specs Alienware is quoting, these new monitors are using existing Samsung QD-OLED technology rather than the fancy new panel tech announced at CES this year with boosted brightness and durability.

That said, the numbers are still decent. As in 0.03 ms response decent and 99.3% coverage of DCI-P3 decent. Alienware says the 34-inch model hits 250 nits full-screen brightness and 1,000 nits peak HDR in a 3% window, the same as all previous Alienware QD-OLED gaming monitors.

For now, the brightness numbers for the 27-inch AW2725D haven't been finalised, but it's a fairly nailed on certainty that they'll be the same. Inputs include DisplayPort and HDMI, but not USB Type-C with laptop charging. The 34-inch goes on sale today, with the 27 incher arriving later this summer.

If those OLEDs are a bit rich for your wallet, Alienware also has some new LCD-based monitors. The Alienware 34 Gaming AW3425DWM is a 180 Hz 34-inch ultrawide with a VA panel for $400, the Alienware 32 AW3225DM is a 16:9 1440p model running at 180 Hz for $320, while the Alienware 27 AW2725DM is even cheaper at $270, shrinks things down to 27-inch but gets an upgrade to IPS panel tech and hums along at 180 Hz.

For the record, all three offer VESA DisplayHDR 400 certification for entry-level HDR support and top out at 400 nits. None of those LCD-based models are ground breaking, obviously. But they do make Alienware a bit more accessible than before and look like decent real-world gaming propositions.

On a final note, Alienware has one other new OLED monitor that was announced earlier this year, the 27-inch 4K AW2725Q. As it happens, that has just landed on my desk. Watch this space for more...

Alienware has been taking a run at the high-end peripheral market recently with its Pro line of gaming accessories. Following the Alienware Pro Wireless keyboard and Alienware Pro Wireless mouse, we now have the Alienware Pro Wireless gaming headset, presumably completing a line up of peripherals that Alienware hopes will tempt buyers away from other offerings and towards its ever-recognisable xenomorph branding.

This is a wireless ANC gaming set, and I first got a sneak peak at one during Gamescom all the way back in August of last year. The Alienware team was very keen to point out the graphene-coated drivers, the concessions to comfort, and the overall build quality of what is hoped to be a set that makes a splash in the fiercely competitive gaming headset market.

For $230/£222 it's quite a pricey affair as gaming headsets go, so I was keen to get my hands on one and put it through the ringer myself. There's some tough competition available for under $230, so it needs to swing for the fences if it's going to make its mark.

If there's one word I'd use to describe my initial impressions of the Alienware Pro when I pulled it from the box, it'd be squidgey. If there was another word I'd use to describe this supposedly all-black model, it would be grey. It's a difficult thing to show in photos, but I handed this set around the office to check it wasn't just my ageing eyes, and we all agreed it was a blue-grey sort of finish rather than a black one.

It's not a big deal, I suppose. But as someone who's previously asked Alienware to send me black Pro peripherals for review after an onslaught of dirt-revealing white ones, the irony isn't lost on me that I was finally sent something that's supposed to be black (or "Dark Side of the Moon" in Alienware-speak), but doesn't really look like it.

Anyway, back to squidgey. The memory foam earcups have a significant amount of give to them, which makes them very pleasing to put upon your lugs. The inner headband material is the same, so overall it's a very comfy, slightly bouncy, somewhat comforting thing to wear.

It's also quite light, which means you can happily wear this set all day without noticing it's there.

The clamping force is fairly well-judged too, so there's no worries about it falling off while you hunt for a cable—although it might be a little tight for those of you with larger heads. Not that you'll need to plug it in often, as the Pro features a 75-hour battery life.

That's up there with other premium headsets, although not a patch on the 300-hour battery life of our favorite wireless gaming headset, the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless. I still don't know how HyperX has managed battery life that impressive while others languish, but I reckon 75 hours is still pretty good regardless for a premium set of phones.

The Alienware Pro also features dual wireless connections, both 2.4 GHz RF and Bluetooth 5.3. Included in the box is a tiny blue-LED-lit USB Type-C wireless dongle along with a USB Type-A adapter—which comes as a merciful relief for someone like me who still only has one proper USB Type-C port on the back of their machine.

This is a noise-cancelling set, and the effect is excellent. It doesn't provide complete silence, but it mutes the clack of a mechanical gaming keyboard nicely and provides some much-needed respite on the odd train journey, too. In fact, thanks to the included Bluetooth connection, the Alienware makes for a decent set of travelling headphones.

I'm all for multi-usage headsets, and this one's got a lot of desirable features for exactly this sort of real-world use.

Connects, disconnects, microphone mutes and more are announced by an irritatingly cheery voice, with the same sort of smooth tone that a hotel receptionist would use to tell you they can't find your booking. This is the most minor of critiques, but I would describe this set as quite chatty. Perhaps it's just the upbeat nature of the vocals grinding against my ears, but the Pro does seem to announce what it's doing more often than some.

Speaking of sound, there's some odd audio tuning at work here—and it's had me wrinkling my nose at points. The 50 mm graphene-coated drivers are quite capable of delivering some seriously punchy bass at low to medium volumes, and for gaming this means whomping great menu effects, weighty explosions, and chonky gunfire. All very enjoyable.

However, at higher volumes things become chaotic, with the bass dropping back and the mix suffering overall. Run The Jewels' "out of sight (feat 2 Chainz)" is a go-to on my headphone testing playlist for huge gobs of skull-rattling low-end, and the initial synthesised kick drum hits deliver a promising amount of sub-bass weight.

As soon as the track hits full swing and you crank the volume up, though, the low-end mix disappears, and other frequencies higher up the scale start to break up.

The Pro Wireless can become properly loud, and as a volume-enjoyer, this is much appreciated. Many modern headsets leave me wanting, but this one can push to eardrum-destroying levels. It's just a shame the low end disappears with it, meaning you only really get the full weighty effect at around 40% volume and below.

On this particular set, that's still pretty loud, and probably more than enough for many—but should you wish to push things to higher levels, be prepared to hear a messy sonic result, with some perceptible distortion, too.

It's all a bit crunchy at the top, like the drivers are being pushed beyond their limits too early on the scale—so the much-appreciated headroom goes to waste.

I'm often criticised by my partner for listening to music too loudly on my headphones. As a result, I've probably got a skewed metric as to what volume most people regard as acceptable, but I've got a feeling the Alienware's 40% cut off is probably it.

It's still fairly loud, and you get all the weighty chonk without sacrificing the quality of the treble or the mix overall. But I'm forced to wonder why these drivers are allowed to push themselves into frequency-crushing ranges in the first place.

The microphone is a removable boom unit, and I'd describe it as muffled, at best. The Alienware Pro shows up as two different audio devices, labelled Wireless Game and Wireless Chat, but no matter which I set it in, the results are poor. A shame, although it's still not the worst gaming headset mic I've heard.

Still, as my testing shows, it's pretty awful by default—although it does come with a fairly aggressive noise cancelling feature that I've turned off for the test recording, as it has a tendency to clip a little too easily. Regardless, however I play with the settings (beyond breaking out the VST plugins, which seems a step too far for a headset mic) the results are disappointing.

Taking all this into account, there's still plenty to like about the Pro. It's a very comfortable gaming headset that, if the volume is left in reasonable ranges, performs well when it comes to overall sound. And while I'm not a huge fan of its blue-grey looks, it's still discrete enough that you can wear it in public without inviting comment.

But those high volume issues are disappointing, there's no denying it. I've still been enjoying using the Alienware Pro as a daily driver while I work, as that's the time I listen to music at a respectable level so as not to distract myself too much from my train of thought. For this usage it's performed with aplomb, and it's a comfy companion for some late-night gaming, too.

But I'd still rather have the superb battery life and excellent audio handling of the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless for a fair bit cheaper. Or, if you can stretch your budget further, the supreme sonic excellence of the Audeze Maxwell.

The Alienware Pro exists in a bit of a no-man's land, where it's expensive enough that its flaws can't be ignored, but still possesses enough merit when it comes to comfort, design, and reasonable-volume listening to be worthy of some consideration.

Still, every time a track I love appears on my playlist and I reach for the volume knob, I can't help but wince. And, while this set has something to recommend it for, I can't get past the idea that, for $230, you'd be better off looking at something that can handle its liquor, so to speak, a little better than this.

If there's one thing sure to draw the ire of PC enthusiasts, it's proprietary parts. One of the great joys of our beloved hobby is upgrading an older machine with the newest components, but Alienware gaming PCs have previously featured non-standard sized motherboards, PSUs, and coolers that have made that process more painful than it needs to be.

No longer it seems, as the new Area-51 machines boast standard ATX motherboards, industry-standard power supplies, and even a smattering of QR codes designed to help inexperienced users upgrade.

Alienware says the Area-51 is "our most quiet, coolest running, and highest performance desktop" thanks to a focus on thermals and overall performance. Beyond the new standardised parts, the chassis has been designed to have positive pressure airflow, meaning that all fans point inwards—which Alienware says negates the need for a rear exhaust fan.

Hmm. I'd be keen to test that out for myself, as it seems like a lot to ask of positive pressure to passively eject substantial amounts of heat without the help of a rear fan.

Still, the new Area-51 is said to run up to 13% cooler and 45% quieter, while providing up to 25% more airflow overall compared to previous models.

There's room for up to a 450 mm long GPU up to four slots wide, with an included graphics retention mechanism and holder that can be positioned to accommodate various lengths of card. The top, bottom and front of the case include removable fan filters, while the AIO trays can scale to fit up to 420 mm heat exchangers.

The new chassis can support mATX motherboards as well as regular ATX models, and there's support for up to six total storage drives spread over the two 2.5-inch storage caddies, one 3.5-inch, and three available M.2 slots.

The specs sheet lists a raft of Intel Arrow Lake CPU options, from the Core Ultra 7 265 up to the Core Ultra 9 285K. These processors are paired with 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB DDR5 RAM configurations, along with Nvidia GeForce "next-gen desktop GPUs", although as to which one, we'll have to wait to find out.

As you'd expect, AlienFX lighting is once again a heavy focus, with the front "Stadium Loop" able to display a dazzling array of morphing, breathing and spectrum RGB effects. PSU options range from an 850 W Gold rated ATX12VO unit for models featuring a 240 mm AIO, all the way up to a monstrous 1500 W Platinum rated power supply for top-spec models with a 360 mm cooler.

Presumably, that's leaving plenty of overhead for a potential RTX 5090 option, too. Overall the chassis looks outwardly similar to the existing Alienware Aurora, but all that internal refinement looks like good news for those planning on buying a rig that's easy to upgrade in future.

Not least because of those QR codes dotted all over the chassis next to specific components. Scan one of these with your phone, and you'll be linked to online video reference guides that show you exactly how to perform various upgrades and maintain your system.

Quite a good idea that, I reckon. Upgrading a component can be quite intimidating for first-timers, so those of you who have eschewed a screwdriver out of fear of messing something up will likely appreciate a specific tutorial showing exactly how to replace the part sitting in front of you.

As someone who's built many a PC over the years, my first piece of advice to new builders and upgraders is simply to get fiddling inside your case (please turn off the power first, I hasten to add)—but a tutorial showing you exactly what goes where will likely go a long way towards instilling confidence in your budding abilities.

So, it looks like Alienware has been listening to its customer base and gone all-in on the upgradeability of the Area-51, although it's worth noting the new Alienware Aurora seems to have no such concessions. You can't have everything I suppose, but while the Area-51 looks built for future upgrade paths, the Aurora looks like a more standard Alienware affair. So it's not a sea-change, more a step in the right direction, it seems.

Still, buying a prebuilt gaming PC is often the first step towards creating a lifelong enthusiast, so anything that encourages users to break out the toolkit and extend the lifespan of their machines is a good thing in my book. But DIY-friendly and Alienware? I reckon these will likely fly off the shelves—if they're not priced to the moon and back.

We've suspected that Nvidia's making an Arm processor for over a year, now, but how it will be built, what form it will take, and what market it will target are questions that have remained somewhat of a speculative mystery. Now, however, there's possibly good news for us gamers because, rumour is, these chips will be used for relatively low-power but decently performing gaming laptops.

This rumour does come from tech YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead (MLID), so prepare to to crank those the salt and pepper grinders. Apparently, though, a source from an Nvidia partner says the chip is "targeting up to 80 W", and MLID quotes another unknown source as saying, "Behind the scenes, Nvidia is comparing their new APU to an RTX 4070 laptop GPU running at ~65 W in gaming performance."

That's not all, though, because again according to MLID, the previously quoted Nvidia partner also claims Nvidia is "at least partnering with Dell under the Alienware brand" for the new Arm-based APU. What this would mean, presumably, is a low-power but high-performing Alienware gaming laptop using an Nvidia CPU + GPU and Arm on Windows.

MLID also quotes an Nvidia source as saying "we're trying to rush this thing out by late 2025 or 2026 at the latest". That ties in with what we'd heard previously, that an Nvidia APU should be entering production in 2025.

The Nvidia source also reportedly says this chip's going to be a "direct competitor to AMD's Halo APUs" and will have a "powerful NPU". And MLID clarifies that "they think it will be at Strix Halo performance at most, maybe a little lower".

Regarding the NPU: Of course it's going to have one. Because Nvidia and AI go together like Cherry and Bakewell (or Apple and Pie for the Americans in the audience). But an Nvidia APU with RTX 4070 mobile-level performance that will compete with AMD Strix Halo? That's the real surprise, here, and it certainly tickles my fancy.

AMD's Strix Halo chips (AKA Ryzen AI 300 Max chips) are going to be the company's most powerful mobile chips to hit the market, featuring a healthy dolloping of RDNA 3.5 compute units. The latest leaks point towards at least three such chips, with the top-end one, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, featuring a whopping 40 RDNA 3.5 CUs and 16 CPU cores.

For context, the Z1 Extreme APU found in handhelds such as the Asus ROG Ally X has 12 RDNA 3 CUs and 8 cores, and although it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, the RX 7700 XT has 54 CUs.

With Strix Halo, then, we're looking at close to high-end discrete GPU performance in a mobile chip. If this is what Nvidia's competing against, it might make sense for them to ensure their upcoming Arm APU delivers graphics performance akin to an RTX 4070 mobile GPU as these latest rumours suggest.

Whether the chips themselves will be built by Intel or TSMC is still an open question, but with Microsoft's Qualcomm-only Windows on Arm deal rumoured to be ending soon, we might not have to wait long to find out. If this deal is running out soon, it certainly makes sense that Nvidia's said to be partnering with Qualcomm rival MediaTek for production of these chips.

Another potentially exciting element of this, if it's true, is the Alienware aspect, and that's because an all-Nvidia Alienware gaming laptop could surely only work if Windows on Arm is up to snuff.

According to MLID's supposed Nvidia source, "there's a HUGE effort underway to make it work". I can kind of buy it, too, given all kinds of improvements are underway, such as an Insider build of Windows now supporting AVX and AVX2 instructions that should get more games up and running on Windows on Arm. Could Nvidia's APU prompt a proper transition to Arm x Windows gaming? Let's wait and see.

One small letter. But a whole lot of difference. Last week, we looked at the Alienware AW2725QF, the brand's new dual-mode 4K/1080p panel. This week it's the turn of the Alienware AW2725DF. But if you're assuming that swapping out the "Q" for a "D" makes this a minor revision, well, think again. This is a totally different beast.

Out goes the 27-inch dual-mode IPS 4K panel. In comes a QD-OLED 1440p display from Samsung which shares the same 27-inch diagonal, but that's literally it. Okay, the styling and look of the chassis is pretty much the same between these two 27 inchers. But the actual display technology couldn't be more different.

Of course, one of the most immediately obvious differences is pixel density. 1440p on a panel this size works out to about 109 DPI, where 4K comes to 163 DPI. That's a dramatic difference you can't miss. On the Windows desktop, fonts are much less crisp and sharp, and there's generally less detail. You have fewer options for scaling the desktop interface to make that trade off between legibility and usable space, too.

However, in-game you could argue the delta isn't nearly as obvious or important. 1440p still makes for very detailed gaming graphics and arguably sidesteps the whole 4K versus 1080p thing for gaming pretty neatly.

Indeed, this monitor can do the same refresh at 1440p, namely 360 Hz, as its dual-mode sibling achieves at 1080p. The catch is that 1440p is about 75% more pixels than 1080p, and so you'll need very roughly 75% more GPU power to hit the same frame rates.

Anyway, if you've got the GPU hardware, this OLED isn't just a match for that IPS panel when it comes to latency. It's easily got the measure of it when it comes to outright speed thanks to superior pixel response.

The dual-mode IPS is rated at a zippy 0.5 ms. But that's only zippy for IPS. This QD-OLED clocks in at 0.03 ms. On paper, it's an order of magnitude—plus some—faster. In the real world, the gap isn't quite so substantial, but where you can just see the limitations of that IPS monitor when it comes to response if you look really closely, it's essentially a solved problem with these modern OLED monitors. They're just so fast.

The other really obvious advantage is HDR and contrast performance. This QD-OLED panel absolutely destroys the dual-mode IPS alternative by those measures. This is Samsung's latest OLED technology, and it really delivers with HDR content. The peaks really sizzle, while the black levels are basically perfect and controlled on a per-pixel level.

Frankly, even with full-array dimming, IPS monitors don't come close, and the AW2725QF doesn't even have that. Even better, Alienware has calibrated SDR content really pretty nicely in HDR mode. So, you can essentially toggle HDR mode and leave it like that. There's no need to jump between HDR and SDR modes depending on content type.

Well, there is one exception to that. By default the SDR mode has a brightness limiter that's designed to ensure the overall panel brightness doesn't fluctuate depending on the specifics of what's being displayed.

You do get a bit of that in HDR mode. But it's pretty subtle and on balance, the panel generally looks that little bit punchier and zingier in HDR mode. Whatever, you have the choice. If you want absolute consistency for SDR content, and for the record the sRGB profile is pitch perfect, then you have that option available.

Anyway, for gaming it's pretty hard to fault a modern QD-OLED panel like this. They're just so fast, the lighting is so perfect, the viewing angles so faultless. Funnily enough, it can actually be when you glance at a panel like this by accident from across the room that it's OLEDness, for want of a better word, really hits home.

Where an IPS panel looks a little translucent thanks to light bleed and imperfect viewing angles, these OLED panels are just so, well, solid. It's very hard to go back to a wishy-washy IPS panel once you're used to OLED, that's for sure.

The one caveat to that is the characteristic greyness of QD-OLED panels specifically in bright ambient light. You can see it here just as you can with all other QD-OLED monitors. We don't think it's a major issue, but it's something to bear in mind if for whatever reason you game in a really bright environment.

Of course, the real catch here is price. Alienware wants an extra $200 for this OLED over the already expensive dual-mode IPS alternative. The consequent $800 is just so much for a mere 1440p 27-inch monitor, even one this good.

Oh, one other aspect this OLED panel shares with its dual-mode doppelganger is connectivity. And that's not a particularly good thing. You get DisplayPort and HDMI, plus a USB hub that includes a USB-C port on the bottom bezel. But there's no USB-C upstream for single-cable laptop connectivity.

Again, that's somewhat forgivable for a dedicated gaming display. But this is still a $800 monitor and who knows what you might want to do with it a few years down the line. Even right now you might want to share with across both a desktop gaming rig and a laptop. Surely for that kind of money it should have USB-C support for laptops and other devices?

Anyway, pricing remains the killer for monitors like this. It's simply very hard to get your head around paying this much cash for a mere 27-inch 1440p panel, even one this good. That's doubly true when you consider that you can have a 49-inch ultrawide QD-OLED like the Gigabyte Aorus CO49DQ for only a little more money. Okay, it won't be fully 360 Hz. But in all other regards, it'll be literally twice the screen for the same price. And that disparity in quality just doesn't make sense for this display.

Two "native" resolutions. One screen. Can it ever work? We've seen plenty of attempts at dual-mode panels before, most recently in the LG UltraGear 32GS95UE. But where that LG had plenty more to mark it out, including LG's latest 4K OLED tech, the new Alienware AW2725QF leans into its dual-mode status a little more emphatically.

This is a 27-inch 4K IPS monitor that runs at up to 180 Hz in UHD mode. Make no mistake, it's a very high-spec panel. But it doesn't have full-array local dimming or any other really cutting-edge feature. Except, that is, for the dual-mode shizzle.

In simple terms, what Alienware is doing here is the same as other dual-mode screens, namely pixel doubling. In other words, you double up in both vertical and horizontal directions, which results in a quartet of pixels acting as one. 

Of course, 4K is precisely four times the overall resolution of 1080p. So, what you end up with is a 1080p display in which each "native" pixel is actually made up of four smaller pixels. In other words—boom!—you've got a "native" 1080p and you can run higher refresh rates. In this case, the Alienware AW2725QF hits 360 Hz in 1080p mode, a hefty step up from its maximum 4K refresh and with consequent benefits in response and latency.

In principle this all makes sense and means you no longer need to interpolate a 1080p image over a 4K pixel grid when rendering 1,920 by 1080 pixels on a 3,840 by 2,160 pixel grid. What's more, if you drill down into the structure of any actual individual pixel on a modern, standard flat panel display, you'll find it is in fact composed of multiple subpixels itself. So, how native is native anyway?

With that in mind you might think, great, done right this alternate 1080p mode should be just like an actual 1080p panel. Indeed, accessing the 1080p mode is quick and easy, even if it does cause the monitor to resync with your PC. 

But it gets more complicated from there. The main problem is that subpixel structure actually matters. By way of example, Windows' font rendering addresses pixels at a subpixel level in order to achieve the smoothest and sharpest text possible on any connected screen.

More specifically, Windows renders under the assumption of three subpixels—red, green and blue, and in that order. In a pixel doubled display, you've actually got two rows of red, green, blue, red, green, blue. Well, you do in an IPS display like this Alienware. OLED panels arrange their subpixels differently—and that's different between panel manufacturers, too—which only adds to the problem.

Anyway, long story short this difference in subpixel structure impacts image quality. So does the shape of and spacing between pixels. For any given panel size, a true native 1080p pixel tends to be a little softer and rounder and certainly has more space between it and the next pixel.

When you start with a much denser 4K pixel grid and then combine four pixels into one, the gap between each resulting pixel is tighter and the edges and shape of the pixels sharper. Put all these elements together, and the final consequence is that a pixel-doubled 4K panel running an alternate "native" 1080p will never look exactly the same as a panel of the same size that's actually 1080p.

However, it doesn't automatically follow that a dual-mode monitor will look worse. Just that it will be different. With all that convuluted pixel/subpixel chatter in mind, what does this 27-inch 4K monitor look like when running in its alternate 1080p mode? Just like the LG OLED monitor mentioned above, you would not mistake this for a conventional 1080p panel.

Compared to the LG, the results are a little crisper and sharper. That's both a pro and con. It means this monitor avoids the slightly soft and blurry look of the LG. In-game, it actually looks pretty good much of the time. In fact, you'll often forget that it's not truly a native 1080p panel.

However, some graphical elements catch the pixel-doubling approach out. It's most obvious in fine details. A common example is grass and other foliage with fine lines. In 1080p mode, they can look horribly rough and pixelated, think about what it's like running an upscaler like FSR in its lowest quality setting, and you'll get the idea.

Back on the Windows desktop and it's even more apparent that you're not looking at a true native panel. Where the relatively large spacing and rounded edges of a typical native pixel soften the image a little, this pixel-doubled display is harsher and less forgiving. Arguably, that doesn't matter as the dual-mode feature is only really designed for gaming.

Overall, it's an intriguing and worthwhile, but definitely not a killer feature. If you're really, really serious about competitive online gaming and achieving the lowest latencies, you're likely still going to want a dedicated high-refresh display. But for everyone else, it gives you a very usable option for upping the refresh rate when you're in fast and furious fragging mode and without compromising image detail and pixel density the rest of the time.

Speaking of the rest of the time, we've kind of forgotten to discuss what this Alienware AW2725QF is like as a plain old 4K panel, which in reality is how it's usually going to be used. In short, it's mostly really lovely.

The core colour calibration in SDR mode is gorgeous and the panel is super punchy and bright, as you'd expect given the 450 nit peak SDR rating. Even more impressive is the response. This monitor is hella quick.

You get three different levels of pixel overdrive to accelerate response. There's a touch of overshoot and ghosting in the fastest mode. But the other two are just really fast. In fact, this might just be the quickest IPS panel I've seen. It's certainly up there with the very best, and quick enough that I'm not sure the theoretical advantage of OLED panels, when it comes to response, translates into a terribly obvious subjective difference.

Where OLED panels do murder this monitor, however, is HDR performance, contrast, and black levels. The Alienware AW2725QF has HDR 600 certification, but it's only edge-lit rather than offering full-array dimming. So, there's lots of light bleeding through the panel and relatively poor contrast compared to OLED.

To be clear, this monitor is no worse than any similar IPS panel. But once you've seen OLED, displays like this do have very obvious shortcomings in these areas, there's just no getting round it.

Of course, as a 27-inch 4K monitor, the pixel density is fab and everything is uber sharp and detailed. The 180 Hz refresh in 4K mode will likewise be plenty for most gamers when it comes to response and latency. All of which means this is a seriously nice all-round gaming panel.

The only other snag worth mentioning is the lack of USB-C connectivity and therefore no single-cable option for laptops. There is a USB-C port on the lower front bezel, but that's just for the USB hub that needs a separate cable. Oh, and there's no audio line out for, say, headphones.

Is that all fine for a gaming display? Probably. For sure, the limitations of USB-C power supply mean you can't really keep a gaming laptop fully juiced with a USB-C cable. At the same time, USB-C would still make for a more versatile display, enabling you to share this panel between a gaming desktop and a laptop. Moreover, with USB-C, you simply have more options. Who knows what you might want to do with this monitor in future and at this price point, USB-C really ought to be a given.

Yeah, the price point. For a regular 4K gaming panel without full-array dimming, the Alienware AW2725QF is undeniably expensive. Whether it's worth the premium for the dual-mode feature is a tough call. It's a very nice panel even without dual-mode, it's punchy and very, very fast. So, the overall value proposition is reasonable. But if you're not interested in the 360 Hz 1080p mode, you can have a similar experience for quite a bit less cash.

I'm a big fan of Ridley Scott's Alien, a 1979 sci-fi classic that pits a crew of space miners against the now-famous xenomorph, a gigantic beastie stalking the hallways of the good ship Nostromo. I mention this for two reasons: One, it's a good excuse to link Alienware to one of my favourite films of a similar name, and two, because the late-70's futuristic aesthetic of that film cemented a much-copied standard in sci-fi design.

Certain rooms in the Nostromo are full of white hardware, rounded edges, and clacking, clocking keyboards. The Alienware Pro Wireless Keyboard seems to wear that influence on its sleeve, as it wouldn't look out of place tucked into the console of a stasis pod in the film.

What we have here is a 75% keyboard with decent specs. With hot-swappable Alienware linear mechanical switches fitted as standard (you can swap in both 3-pin and 5-pin models with the included tool), 1 KHz polling over 2.4 GHz wireless, a Bluetooth 5.1 connection, and a USB Type-C port, the Alienware certainly has a lot of the must-haves of a modern wireless gaming keyboard covered. And at $200/£162, it certainly isn't cheap, but right out of the box it screams premium design and build quality.

There's nary a flex out of the chonky bottom plate, the tilting feet have a lovely soft-click locking action, and switching it on for the first time with the excellent-feeling rear-mounted switch reveals an impressive light show. Something about the Pro Wireless' timeless look makes this sort of RGB lighting a surprise, and the lettering lights up consistently over every key, including longer ones like the Shift and Enter caps. Logitech Pro X 60, take note.

I see so many RGB-lit keyboards these days, it's not often I stand back and admire the show. This combination of old-school looks and pin-sharp lighting, however, really does create an impressive visual effect. My Lunar Light—or more simply, white—model softens the underglow very nicely. 

In fact, I'll go one step further: It's the only white peripheral I've seen so far that's made me really want one in this particular colour.

It's also available in Dark Side of the Moon, or as it's more traditionally called, black. Ah go on, when pushed, I'd still have the black one. It's a close run thing though, and given my particular tastes, that means something. It's a stylish looking device, and something I reckon most people would be proud to have adorning their desks.

Here's the real kicker though: the sound. The Pro Wireless creates a very pleasing tocking sound while typing, and it immediately gives me a wave of nostalgia every time I reach for the keys.

I grew up using cast-off beige keyboards from the early '90s on my first machines, and there's something about that noise that brings back memories of late-night DOS gaming in my pyjamas.

Again, I think of the clacking, clocking keyboards of the Nostromo. Was that a hissing behind me, and a shadow over my shoulder? Must be nothing. Moving on.

In terms of typing feel, the linear red switches are exactly as you'd expect. Smooth, easy to press (with a 40g actuation force) and a good amount of travel. These are factory lubed, and slide under your fingertips with a good combination of accuracy and slight resistance that leads to a positive overall feel.

Being a 75% board, you don't feel like you're missing out on any vital keys, either. There's a proper row of function keys, some useful media control keys off to the right hand side (that also double up as Print Screen, Scroll Lock etc when holding the function key), and a stylised 'P' located at the top right of the board allows for profile switching.

All these sorts of shenanigans are handled by the Alienware Command Center. Here you can assign per-key lighting, key binds, and various other settings to the profile switching key. I recently reviewed the Alienware Pro Wireless gaming mouse and extolled the virtues of the simple nature of the software, and here it's much the same story. Everything's well laid out, easy to configure, and customizable to your heart's content.

Where the mouse fell down, however, was a matter of two key points: some squishy, mushy feeling side buttons that sacrificed quality for low weight, and the price. On the first, the Alienware Pro Wireless Keyboard has no such issues. Everything about it feels very high quality, as it makes no such pretensions towards lightness. This is a meaty, solid-feeling affair, with excellent switch feel and an overall robustness that lets you know your money went towards a premium product.

The price, however, is still where things get difficult. At $200, it's a full $20 more expensive than our current pick for the best gaming keyboard, the Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless. That's unfortunate, as there you're getting a full-sized board with included wrist rest, a brilliant adjustable multimedia control wheel, and some of the best switch feel we've ever tested.

You also get sound dampening that, as our Jacob puts it, really works. While the Alienware Pro also has sound dampening layers, that distinctive tock is a love it or hate it kind of affair. While I'm a fan, I have noticed that when someone else is using the Wireless Pro, I can hear it in every room of my house.

While my walls are thin, that sound does have a tendency to carry, and some are going to find that it sets their teeth on edge—rather than providing the appropriate nostalgia hit.

So, the Asus is still the better buy. But what if you want something more compact? Well, then it runs into the might of the Keychron Q3 Max. That particular keeb is $14 more expensive, but it's got an achingly cool blacked-out aesthetic, a control knob, and a typing feel that's truly fantastic thanks to its Gatreon Jupiter Red switches.

Oh, and it sounds "creamy". I won't pretend to know exactly what that means, as its terminology for true keyboard obsessives, of which I am not yet one. The Alienware doesn't seem like a candidate though, for what it's worth. If we're going for dairy-based analogies, the sound of the Pro Wireless is more like whole milk. Not for everyone, but I get a kick out of it, and I'll be damned if you're changing my mind.

Overall though, the Alienware Pro Wireless is an excellent keyboard, with a pleasant action, nostalgic sound, and sci-fi style good looks. Price-wise, though, It's just a little too expensive for what you get compared to the competition, despite its brilliance.

A fantastic addition to any gamers setup, no doubt, but just a touch too expensive for the feature set on offer to put it into the hall of all-star greats. That being said, If Alienware were to skim a little off the top—and maybe tone down the noise a tad more—it'd be a real contender for a top spot. 

Now, back to my emails. You'll find me here in the corner, tocking away like my life depended on it.

There's a lot to be said for the simple things in life. Bread and butter. A cold beer on a sunny afternoon. My brain on a Wednesday. Alienware seems to agree, as its latest mouse is not what you'd call jam packed in the features department. In fact, pulling it from its packaging, it almost seems simple to a fault.

The Alienware Pro Wireless gaming mouse is, on first appearances, just that—a wireless gaming mouse. Available in black or white finishes, it's got a left click, a right click, a scroll wheel (with, of course, a click), two side buttons, and a hidden one underneath opposite the power switch. That's your lot, for the low, low price of $150/£127.

Wait, that's not a low price for a gaming mouse, is it? You can pick up a Razer Deathadder V3 Pro for roughly the same money, and while it currently sits at the top of our list of best gaming mice, we did point out that it's still a lot of cash for a mouse with a limited number of buttons.

As you would expect, however, just like the Razer, what you're paying for here isn't customizability, or flashy aesthetics. Instead, what Alienware is offering are claims of refined, super-fast performance, courtesy of up to 4 kHz wireless and 8 kHz wired polling rates, which works out to 0.25 ms and 0.125 ms response times, respectively. With an optical sensor capable of 26,000 DPI movement resolution and some magnetic key plates for quick clicks without sticky buttons, everything about this mouse's spec sheet screams speed.

The first thing you'll notice, though, is the glide. Sitting on the underside are two sizable PTFE feet holding the Pro Wireless aloft, and they're as smooth as the proverbial silk when paired with a decent mouse mat. So much so, in fact, that it's quite a pleasing experience just sliding this mouse around for the sheer tactile nature of the effect.

Helping out that smooth movement is the weight, or in this case, the lack of it. I tend to prefer a heavier mouse, but the Alienware Pro comes in at a mere 59 grams, making it so light that —in combination with those gliding feet—the merest hint of finger movement sends it smoothly in the appropriate direction. Alienware may have created the first hover-mouse, or at least one that does a good approximation of it.

Customisation and settings are handled by the Alienware Command Center, which sounds like it prepares the little mouse for its first trip to space, and unfortunately, doesn't. Instead, the straightforward settings interface allows you to rebind the limited buttons, set macros, and adjust DPI profiles and polling rates, along with sleep mode settings, lift-off distance adjustments, and battery-saver settings.

It's actually remarkably clearly laid out, with a shades-of-gray aesthetic that's mercifully clean to read and easy to use. Again, simplicity. Simple can be good.

Battery life comes in at 32 hours for the 4 kHz setting, or 120 hours at 1 kHz polling. It's easy to switch between the two in the app, and as a result I've been keeping it at the lower setting for day-to-day usage and switching it to the faster polling rate for gaming duties.

Now then. Super-fast polling rates and ultra-speedy sensors. I've ranted before about my dislike for esports-focused gaming peripherals like this, making the argument that unless you have the reaction times of a gnat, you're paying for performance you really don't need. Has the little Alienware changed my mind?

No. Not really. That being said, the smooth glide in conjunction with the accurate feel of this mouse is undoubtedly pleasing to use in fast-paced shooters. There's a lot of things about this little squeaker that on paper, I don't particularly like, yet in usage come together to form a package that actually does feel pretty good—and extremely responsive— underneath your fingertips. 

The Mouse Tester graphs show a reasonable result, as the closeness of the dots indicates the consistency of the movement reporting from the sensor (although I'll admit, the smoothness of my motions could do with work). In practice the Alienware Pro feels plenty accurate in the games I've tested it in, even if the fleshy-meat-thing behind it isn't the most skilled.

It's light, quick, pleasingly tactile for the most part (the left and right mouse buttons have a particular clicky-bounce combo that does feel very satisfying once you've become accustomed to it), and well-behaved. Not once has it stuttered or lost connection, and the quick-charge capabilities in combination with the simple DPI switching means it's easy to keep on top of the battery.

What I don't like, however, comes in two parts. The first relates to the two side buttons. For a mouse that seems so refined in many aspects, the two side-clickers have a squidgy quality that feels a bit ick, along with a hollow feeling underneath the action that betrays a lot of weight saving efforts going on behind the mechanism.

I get it's supposed to be light, but I would gladly add another 5 grams or so for the sake of two (for my personal usage, fairly vital) buttons that don't feel quite so mushy when I press them. There aren't a lot of buttons on offer here, so two of them feeling a bit cheap and nasty is a no-no as far as I'm concerned.

The second is the price. Yep, it's time for me to tap that esports sign once more: $150 for a mouse that's all about super-speedy reaction times instead of useful added functionality still strikes as paying for speed you don't need. Yes, the Razer Deathadder V3 Pro is just as expensive, but it looks and feels a bit more like a premium object, what with its micro-texture coating, stylish, flared-out button design, and side buttons with more of a positive action.

It's got a higher-rated sensor too, 30,000 DPI, if ultimate speed and accuracy really is your thing. Horses for courses and all that. Or the Razer Viper V3 Pro for that matter, a mere $8 more but with a 35,000 DPI sensor. The Viper can handle 8 kHz wirelessly too, thanks to Razer's Hyperpolling system.

All that being said, however, the Alienware is so refined in most respects, it almost feels polite. Aside from the shiny silver alien head on the top, there's nothing here to tell you this is a high-performance gaming mouse. For some, that's a boon, and for others, perhaps, a bit of a disappointment.

Once you start sliding it around however, you will actually feel where some of that money went. If only a little more had gone into the side buttons, and perhaps the coating (it feels fine, but unremarkable), this would really feel like a more premium object. But putting that aside for a second, the Alienware Pro Wireless gaming mouse is simple, well-behaved, and for the most part, well thought out.

The thing I struggle with most is still that price tag. There's fierce competition in the super light and speedy mouse market, and it's not just Razer making tempting models. The Logitech Pro X Superlight 2 weighs a mere gram more, retails for roughly the same money, and yet, like the Deathadder V3 Pro and Viper V3 Pro, also has side buttons that feel substantial. That's three similarly priced mice, without that significant drawback.

I'd still have either of the Razers if I was going for something pricey, but ultra-fast. At least there, the whole package is as premium as the MSRP suggests.

All new technologies come with a learning curve. And with the cataclysmically desirable new Alienware 32 AW3225QF, we're definitely learning some lessons about OLED as a display solution for PC gaming. 

This is not, in fact, the first of the brave new 4K OLED generation we've sampled. A few weeks back, I cast my beady, desiccated peepers across the Asus ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM. That's another 32-inch 4K panel running Samsung's latest QD-OLED tech, albeit with the flat option where Alienware has chosen curved. And what a stunner it was.

But as we clock up the hours with this new format, the sheer wow factor is increasingly accompanied by familiarity. And with that comes, well, a slightly more grounded sense of what these monitors offer gamers. This is an incredible display. But like its Asus competitor, this Alienware is an elusive angstrom or three away from perfection. Living with these 4K OLED panels is just a tiny bit complicated.

However, let's kick off with the basic speeds and feeds. Again, we're talking 32 inches of 4K QD-OLED glory. That matters because, until these new panels arrived, you couldn't have both OLED visuals and nice, tight pixel density. Previous OLED monitors were derived from relatively low-DPI TV panels.

For this 4K option, Samsung has invoked a new ink-jet printing technique to pack 4K into a 32-inch panel. LG has its own 32-inch 4K offering incoming, but retail availability of monitors using that panel are a few months behind the Samsung QD-OLED. Watch this space for coverage of the LG alternative.

Anyway, despite the new manufacturing technique, the specs look familiar. Response is rated at 0.03 ms, peak HDR brightness at 1,000 nits, full screen brightness at 250 nits and colour coverage comes in at 99 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut. That's all pretty much identical to existing QD-OLED monitors based on the earlier low-DPI panel stock, like the 34-inch ultrawide Alienware AW3423DWF.

The subpixel structure also remains the same. In other words, it's still not a conventional RGB stripe, but a triangular RGB arrangement. That mattered in the past for sharpness and font rendering, because Windows addresses monitors under the assumption of the RGB stripe. 

But with the increased 140 DPI density of this new 32-inch 4K class of OLEDs, it's no longer an issue. Yes, if you look very, very closely you can just see some text fringing. But in normal use it vanishes. Fonts look nice and crisp.

The other headline feature is the 240Hz refresh, of course. Obviously you'll need one heck of a GPU to feed all those pixels at 240Hz. It's worth noting that LG is promising a 1080p 480Hz mode for its 32-inch 4K panel using integer doubling to achieve supposedly native-quality 1080p pixel definition on a 4K panel. It'll be interesting to see how that pans out, though all previous attempts at integer doubling to achieve lower resolutions have ultimately not delivered on the claimed "native" experience.

Other features of note include DisplayPort 1.4 plus two HDMI 2.1 connections and a USB hub. What you don't get is USB upstream for video input or laptop charging. Nor is there an audio out for connecting headphones or speakers, which is a slightly odd omission. It likewise lacks the KVM switch of the Asus competition.

Rounding things out are a dash of the usual AlienFX RGB lighting and Alienware's signature aesthetic, with the familiar Storm Trooper-style white cladding on the rear of the chassis. I'm not a huge fan of the look. But it's nicely slapped together and a bit more resolved than the hard-edge, dated and adolescent Asus alternative.

If that covers the look of the hardware, what about the image quality itself? No surprises, it's a stunner. The triple whammy of perfect per-pixel OLED lighting with 4K pixel density and a glossy panel coating is to die for.

Notably, in SDR mode there's no brightness variability at all. You can jiggle around or resize windows as much as you want, the brightness stays pegged at the same 250-nit level. That's good because the variability on some OLED panels can be very distracting. Early LG OLED monitors suffered really badly, with brightness nose-diving if you dared to maximise, say, a mostly white browser window.

That said, the Alienware 32 AW3225QF has even more pop in HDR mode. And that applies to SDR content, too. To achieve the brightest SDR results, you actually have to enable HDR, and then max out SDR brightness in the Windows display settings tool. 

That achieved, you will then notice some panel brightness variability when resizing windows and the like. But it's only slight and you really have to look for it to notice. Whatever, that's not the only little foible you need to be aware of.

The Alienware 32 AW3225QF gives very, very different results depending on which of the no fewer than nine HDR modes you choose. There are six of what you might call conventional HDR modes, plus three Dolby Vision HDR modes.

It's all a bit baffling, to be frank. Making matters worse, when switching between some, but not all, of the HDR modes, the display may resync with your PC. For starters, that takes time which makes it harder to make a comparison and choose between modes. It also kicks you back to the desktop if you're in game, which can cause some titles to crash. What a palaver.

Then there's the fact, for instance, that the HDR 400 mode looks best for outdoor scenes, but crushes details for darker indoor and nightime game scenes, while HDR 1000 looks utterly spectacular for the latter, but rather dull for brighter images.

In other words, there's not a single optimal setting for HDR. It depends on the game you're playing and even the scene in question. That's arguably true for any display. It's just that much more acute here.

All that said, this panel still positively rocks. If anything, the calibration feels even punchier here than the same QD-OLED 4K tech does in the Asus ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM. I don't even mind the slight panel curve, something that normally feels a but redundant on a 16:9 as opposed to an ultrawide monitor.

As if all that wasn't enough, you also have to contend with the whole OLED burn-in thing. Alienware covers the panel for burn-in for three years. So, that's a decent chunk of reassurance. But you still have to put up with burn-in mitigation measure prompts popping up now and then and generally stress over whether you should be toggling the "Pixel Refresh" or "Panel Refresh" protection algorithms.

Put it this way, life was a whole lot simpler with an SDR LCD monitor, that's for sure. The upside, of course, are visuals that no LCD display can match, not even the latest and greatest IPS models with full-array local dimming.

The contrast this Alienware delivers is just awesome. There's a scene in Cyberpunk 2077 with an underground bar that's plastered with neon strip lights and signage. On this monitor, it really does look like those neon lights are real. They absolutely pop out of the panel, while the pixels around them remain inkily, effortlessly black.

Then there's the bonkers-fast pixel response. There's a clarity to movement on these OLED screens that LCD panels can only get close to with backlight strobing. And backlight strobing does horrible things to brightness and colours.

So, this is undoubtedly a seminal gaming experience. It's as good as 16:9 gaming currently gets. The increased pixel density also means this, along with its Asus nemesis, is the first OLED gaming option that also makes for a great all-round PC monitor. The pixel density is finally there, as is the full-screen brightness.

Of course, if you prefer the ultrawide gaming experience, and we're with you if you do, then the 16:9 aspect may feel just a bit dowdy. For instance, you can actually get Samsung's epic 49-inch ultrawide OLED G9 panel for less money. It's not as good an all rounder, but it feels like a lot more monitor for the money.

In an ideal world, there would be a 5K2K ultrawide OLED option. At which point, you could arguably put the whole gaming monitor thing to bed. The latest roadmaps imply that is indeed coming. But in the here and now, and despite the slight complications, this is as good as OLED gaming gets.

Alienware introduced the latest version of its desktop gaming PC, the Aurora R16, in the middle of last year, marking a radically non-radical shift away from its Giger-inspired origins. This release goes beyond a mere plexiglass window addition, presenting an entirely new chassis design that will elicit either love or disdain. 

According to Alienware, the redesign responds to the desires of loyalists seeking a simpler chassis that seamlessly fits into their setups and more easily accommodates aftermarket components. Alienware probably did too good a job on one front, making a machine that looks decidedly more earthly than Alien, but still failed on the other with a machine that still isn't as upgradeable as PC enthusiasts would like. 

The new Aurora R16 starts at $1,300 (£1,349 and $2,800 AUD) and in typical Dell fashion, you can configure the machine with as low as a 13th Gen Intel i7 with Nvidia RTX 4060 all the way up to a range-topping 14th Gen Intel i9 14900F, RTX 4090, 64GB DDR5 and 8TB SSD for an absurd $5,300. 

My review unit came furnished with a liquid cooled Intel Core i9 13900F, 32GB DDR5-5600 memory, a 512GB SSD, and 1TB 7200RPM HDD. Graphics power is provided by an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 though I couldn't make out exactly what brand is supplying Dell from the blank shroud around it. There's a new 240mm heat exchanger at the top of the case and a 120mm exhaust fan at the back. 

Upgrading even this latest Alienware system can still be a bit tricky due to its proprietary motherboard and bespoke 1000w power supply. The motherboard offers only two DDR5 RAM slots and two M.2 SSD slots without heatsinks. It's quite basic, lacking necessary features, and the RAM and SSDs from Alienware come without heat spreaders, being simple barebones chips.

And speaking of those storage drives, Dell is being remarkably stingy when it comes to SSD capacity. Stuffing just a 512GB SSD into a machine that costs nearly three grand is not a good look at a time when 1TB drives are the minimum we would recommend for PC gamers.

Heading back outside to the case design, I'm not a fan of what Alienware did there. Cover the signature alien head logo and this could be any other RGB case from around the internet. Note that this is the first showcase of the company's new Legend 3 industrial design, and it's far from the more stylish Legend 2 Design Language that made the R15 and X16 laptops such standouts. 

The new chassis comes only in black and is 40% smaller than the previous model, measuring 16.5 x 7.8 x 18.1 inches. Despite its compact size, it maintains a 25-liter capacity, accommodating large RTX 4090 GPUs. This makes it more convenient for my setup or theoretically even for a living room TV. The R16 features an acrylic side panel with a stylish honeycomb vent design for improved airflow while concealing cable clutter. However, the panel's sliding latch release system on the back, secured by a Philips-head screw, could certainly be simpler.

The front of the Aurora has an inch-wide gap that cleverly hides a front air intake while still giving you a solid panel with three 5Gbps USB Type-A ports, one 10Gbps Type-C, and an audio combo jack for easy access. The signature RGB ring can easily distract you from the gap and of course you can customize the glorious lighting. 

There's a bunch more ports at the back, too, with a pair of 5Gbps USB-A, one 10Gbps USB-C, one 20Gbps USB-C, and four USB 2.0 plenty of audio outputs and an Ethernet 2.5Gps port—so connecting all your peripherals is rarely going to be an issue. The R16 supports WiFi6E and comes with a stocky, puck-like antenna which has great reception. 

The standout feature of the new R16 design, however, is its significantly improved thermal performance. Unlike its predecessors, the R16 operates quietly even under heavy loads, maintaining this low noise level even in Performance mode. During stress tests and demanding benchmarks, such as Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K with Psycho ray-tracing, the R16 remained remarkably quiet, with both CPU and GPU temperatures comfortably below 70°C.

The caveat here, though, is that Alienware appears to be limiting the power limits of the Aurora R16's processor to be able to hit those low thermal and acoustic levels. Although my benchmark scores generally align with expectations, I have noticed the CPU performance in Cinebench and Geekbench was noticeably lower than a Lenovo Legion PC running a Core i7 13700F.

That might also explain the choice of F variant CPUs over the K-series, which allow overclocking.

In terms of gaming performance, though, the Aurora R16 still excels. It not only operates much quieter than previous models but also sustains this performance effortlessly. For my gaming and high-productivity tasks, such as video editing, the new Aurora R16 proved to be a seamless experience—everything runs incredibly smooth and honestly delightful. 

That power limit only issue only really raises its head when you're testing for raw benchmark numbers, and not necessarily when you're just gaming on it. Balancing the power and the actual experience might well be a worthy compromise for many PC users, though it does sting a little knowing you are absolutely leaving potential performance on the table.

Despite its seemingly ordinary appearance, for me it stands out as the best gaming PC Alienware has ever produced. The performance is near top-notch, and the acoustics are genuinely impressive, maintaining quiet operation even during the most demanding of tasks. But that doesn't mean it's the best gaming PC; there are faster, better value gaming PCs out there that don't come with the needlessly proprietary nature of Alienware, and those are where we would recommend PC gamers spend their money.

But while I have some reservations about its upgradeability, it's worth noting the target audience for this machine likely prioritizes the core experience over tinkering and even raw performance. However, the real Achilles' heel for me is the warranty and service aspect, with Dell offering only a modest 1-year coverage. In a market where many smaller PC builders provide 3 years or more, Alienware could enhance its offering in this department to better cater to customer expectations.

Alienware has always had a reputation as a brand that leans towards some of the more aesthetically interesting choices in gaming hardware design, but its new Alienware x16 R2 gaming laptop announced at CES 2024 might just take the cake. While the chassis design may look familiar, nestled underneath that per-key backlit keyboard on the higher spec models is an RGB multi-touch trackpad, and it's twisting my melon, man.

While light-up trackpads on Alienware laptops are nothing new, this one is much more controllable thanks to an array of 100 micro LEDs, which should mean the customisation options will be fairly comprehensive. More than that, rather than being a simply tacked on (and potentially tack-y) accessory, on the x16 R2 this sort of thing just looks so much more right, what with the RGB ring around the rear exhaust vents and the glowing Alienware logo on the lid courtesy of what the company calls its "AlienFX" lighting.

Stepping away from the showy design for a moment, the specifications for what Alienware says is its most premium gaming laptop are also rather impressive. You get a choice of Intel's new Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 or 9 processors, a QHD 240Hz refresh rate screen, a selection of Nvidia 40-series GPUs ranging from the RTX 4060 all the way up to the RTX 4090, and Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos support including 6 speakers for 3D-positional audio.

Cooling wise the x16 R2 will make use of Alienware's Element 31 thermal interface material made of a "gallium silicone matrix", which in combination with the vapor chamber cooling solution and that substantial rear end should hopefully keep all that high-end hardware running cool, although we'll have to wait to test one for ourselves to find out.

It's a glowy, showy machine this, and if you're going to make one of those it's probably best to lean in a bit. Opinions will differ of course, but for me it weirdly fits. While I've never been a fan of laptops with a stick out rear chassis design, there's something about those smooth science fiction lines in combination with that glowy pad that really suits the aesthetic overall.

Alienware lappys are supposed to be a little (and sometimes more than a little) over the top, and here it looks like they might have struck a decent balance between the sublime and the ridiculous. 

That light-up RGB touchpad will be limited to the more expensive RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 configs, which if you ask me is a bit of a selling point for the top-tier models although still not enough to make me desire an RTX 4090 in a laptop chassis. Still, it's an impressive looking and well-specced machine on paper, and one that's likely to shift a lot of units given Alienware's popularity amongst gaming laptop buyers. 

Alienware hasn't given us a release date for the x16 R2 just yet, but pricing is expected to start at around $2,100 for the lower end spec.

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PC Gamer's CES 2024 coverage is being published in association with Asus Republic of Gamers.

We knew it was coming, but it's still exciting to see Alienware announce its new 32-inch 4K OLED gaming panel, the Alienware 32 AW3225QF. Alienware has also pulled the wraps off a new 27-inch 1440p OLED monitor running at fully 360Hz.

But first, that new 32-inch beauty. As with previous Alienware OLED gaming monitors, it uses Samsung's QD-OLED panel technology. So, the main novelty here is pixel density. At 140DPI, this new panel is much more dense than any existing OLED gaming monitor, which all currently max out at around 110DPI for various 34-inch ultrawide and 27-inch 1440p models, including Alienware's own panels like the Alienware 34 AW3423DWF.

Alienware says the new AW3225QF will hit 1,000 nits of HDR brightness, but it's not clear how this new high density OLED panel compares to existing QD-OLED monitors for full screen brightness. 

One other feature that's not clear is the panel coating. The spec sheet says "anti-reflective" which might imply a matte rather than glossy coating. But then Alienware uses the very same language for both the glossy and non-glossy versions of its 34-inch OLEDs. So, we'll have to wait and see.

Elsewhere, the specs look fairly familiar if fairly fantastic, with response rated at 0.03ms and color coverage coming in at 99% of DCI-P3. Oh, and we forgot to mention one other thing. It runs at 240Hz. So, yeah, that's a 4K, 240Hz, 32-inch OLED, which is kind of what a lot of people would class as the ultimate gaming monitor.

The Alienware 32 AW3225QF will not, of course, be alone in offering a 32-inch 4K OLED monitor. There's an army of panels coming, some of which will be based on LG's WOLED technology. But Dell and Alienware tend to be pretty quick out of the block with panel tech, so with an actual availability date of January 11, the AW3225QF could well be the first you can actually buy.

As for pricing, you're looking at $1,199. That's actually less than Alienware priced its first 34-inch ultrawide OLED at launch in early 2022. Now you can grab one of those for $800. So, there's some hope that pricing on the new 32-inch model might come down fairly quickly.

If the 32-inch 4K model is arguably the most exciting new OLED from Alienware, the new Alienware 27 AW2725DF is no slouch, either. It's a 27-inch 1440p model optimised for speed. It gets the same 0.03ms response as other Alienware OLEDs, but ups the refresh rate to 360Hz.

That should make for a pretty unbeatable combo of low latency and sharp pixel response. It's priced at $899 and has the same January 11 on sale date.

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PC Gamer's CES 2024 coverage is being published in association with Asus Republic of Gamers.

We're just weeks away from the biggest tech jamboree of the year, the Consumer Electronics Show or CES. It's expected that 130,000 attendees and 3,500 vendors will descend on the sprawling complex of exhibition centers and show floors across Las Vegas for the event, which opens on January 9.

Among them will be our very own Jacob, battling through the hordes to bring you the very best PC gaming tech from the show. But exactly what will he find at CES 2024?

Everything AI, all at once

Yo dawg. Heard you like AI. So we took some AI and made it intelligent and artificial and then ran it all through a large language model. Probably. Basically, if you're not into AI, steer clear of CES 2024. It's going to be everywhere. Actually, that's Intel's Marketing tag line that will be hammered to death at CES, literally "AI Everywhere".

The rest of the tech giants will almost certainly have an AI message to sell, too. How much any of it translates into tangible products and real-world benefits, especially for PC gaming, remains to be seen.

Nvidia super sizes

Of the big noises in PC tech, Nvidia will probably be alone in rolling out something genuinely new in the shape of "Super" branded updates for its existing RTX 40-series line of gaming graphics cards.

We've done the rumours to death, but we're expecting an RTX 4070 Super, and RTX 4070 Ti Super, and an RTX 4080 Super. Of those three, it's the RTX 4070 Ti Super that promises to be the biggest step forward. That's because it's rumoured to make the jump away from Nvidia's AD104 chip to the bigger AD103 GPU, the latter used by the RTX 4080, currently.

The RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4080 Super are thought to be smaller upgrades using the same silicon as existing non-Super GPUs. Perhaps just aas important is the question of what will happen to those existing GPUs. Will they disappear? Or could they get a pricing haircut?

Either way, what you won't see is Nvidia's next-gen Blackwell GPUs, probably to be branded RTX 50-s Series. They won't appear until at least the end of 2024 and maybe not until early 20225.

As a final outside, could Nvidia begin talking about its rumoured ARM CPU for PCs at CES? 2024 is the year that we're expecting to see some serious movement on high performance ARM chips for PCs, so it's just about possible.

Intel Meteor Lake's deep impact

You've seen the previews, but CES should see a slew of Meteor Lake based laptops all touting Intel's new chip. Early previews of the new chip are a little underwhelming. But maybe Intel can make a bigger impact with Meteor Lake and the new Core Ultra Series of laptop CPUs at CES.

More broadly, Intel will be bigging up the AI capabilities of Meteor Lake under its "AI Everywhere" banner during CEO Pat Gelisgner's CES keynote. Will we see some killer new apps to take advantage of the NPU in Meteor Lake? Maybe, but more likely are a few slightly meh tech demos running something like local AI image generation on the NPU and then a load of positive but vague sentiments about the transformative power of AI.

Everything AMD FSR, all at once?

Sorry for the repeat gag, but AMD has already announced that its FSR 3 upscaling tech is going open source, making it easier for anyone to add support, including community-based modders. You could argue what FSR really needs is more polish and work from AMD itself, not a load more games with slightly rough around the edges scaling support.

Speaking of more polish, AMD has been announcing more games with FSR 3 support and the addition of variable refresh support for its fluid motion frame generation technology within FSR 3. So, there's more in- house work going on, too. Expect to see AMD flesh out further improvements to FSR 3 at CES.

AMD will also be making an AI pitch courtesy of its new Hawk Point laptop chip, which is really just the excellent Phoenix chip already used in everything from laptops to gaming handhelds. That's probably fine, because it's a great chip. Anyway, it's branded Ryzen 8000 series, which is a little misleading, but contains the same AI-accelerating NPU as existing Ryzen 7000 laptop APUs, allowing AMD to make that all-important AI pitch at CES.

Finally, there's a tiny chance AMD may wheel out a refreshed version of its N31 GPU, as seen in the Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX graphics cards, to address Nvidia's Super Series graphics. If so, it'll be the same silicon running a little faster, not something actually new.

Qualcomm's new killer CPU

We're not expecting to be able to actually buy a laptop with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite Arm-powered CPU until June. But it's odds on Qualcomm will show some devices running the chip at CES. 

Snapdragon X Elite looks to have competitive processing power compared to the best x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD, but could offer much better efficiency. Think of it as bringing something like the balance of performance and efficiency of Apple's M series chips to the PC and you will have roughly the right idea.

With Nvidia and possibly AMD also expected to be bringing Arm-powered CPUs to the PC in the next year or so, the long awaited transition of the PC  from x86 to Arm might just be upon us and CES 2024 could be a key punctuation point along the way.

Ole, ole, OLED

Expect to see plenty of new OLED gaming monitors at CES. A key new segment will be 32-inch 4K models using both LG and Samsung OLED panels. However, with news that TCL is also bringing up production of its own OLED panels for monitors, it'll be interesting to see if any new final monitor products in the 32-inch 4K space based on TCL's new low-cost inkjet printed OLED tech are shown off at CES.

We're also hoping to see lots of new gaming laptops with OLED screen technology from lots of the big brands.

TeeVee tech

CES also debuts a mountain of new TV tech and model ranges. For us, they're mostly interesting because the panel tech seen in these new TVs usually finds its way into PC monitors sooner or later.

Hopefully, CES 2024 will see progress from OLED panels in terms of full-screen brightness. We'd also love to see some new lower-cost displays using microLED technology, but that is probably still years away.

Cooler-running PCIe 5 SSDs

As we reported, Phison has a new fanless PCIe Gen 5 controller for SSDs. It's not quite as fast in terms of peak throughput as its existing controller, the hot and hungry E26, but critically it can run without the need for active cooling. CES should see numerous drives with the new chip debut. 

Silicon Motion has its own new PCIe 5 SSD controller in the works and it's claimed to be at least 30% more energy efficient than the Phison E26 while offering essentially the same bandwidth. It's not clear if the Silicon Motion controller needs active cooling for peak performance, but we may find out at CES.

Weird and whacky prototypes

Of course, it wouldn't be CES without a few weird and whacky prototypes. Back in 2008, Alienware wowed the world with a prototype curved PC monitor with an ultrawide 21:9 aspect. Could you imagine such a thing?

Actually, back then it used DLP rear projection, so it was genuinely weird, even by today's standards. But it certainly provided a glimpse of the future. As did the handheld gaming PC that Alienware showed off at CES 2020. It looks just like the recent bevy of AMD-powered handhelds including the Asus RoG Ally.

2017 saw a triple-screen Razer laptop, while more prosaic concepts include new case and motherboard form factors, and new cooling technologies. Last year was all about foldable screens, so it will be interesting to see what themes emerge in 2024's show. How about a laptop PC that can successfully sleep without draining its battery or hanging? Now that would be a technical marvel!

Oh and while you're waiting for this year's show, why not peruse our preview from last year see how much we got right…

The best gaming PC is a thing I've been wrestling with since I came back to PC Gamer many years ago. It's impossible to test every single configuration and maker of gaming PC that is on offer, and so we can only ever offer a snapshot based on the machines that we have physically tested ourselves, and then give you a good idea of how effective other configurations might be based on our own experience.

For myself, I've been testing PC gaming hardware for nearly twenty years now, and yes, that does make me feel old, and no, I don't want to have a nice sit down, grandpa. But that means I have a wealth of experience testing—and building—gaming PCs, so I know what makes a good one, and what components you should be picking to fit a certain budget.

We have a host of machines we've tested in this guide, and a ton of new systems on the way from various manufacturers to keep it topped up with fresh potential winners. Right now, the HP Omen 35L is the best gaming PC, with the oft-discounted Lenovo Legion Tower 5i as the best budget gaming PC.

The quick list

The best gaming PC $1,000 - $2,000

Our favorite config:

A good gaming PC isn't just a selection of powerful components slapped together in a serviceable chassis. The whole package should be well-balanced, from the choice of the hardware inside to the build quality overall, and the price tag in relation to the performance you end up receiving. The HP Omen 35L manages to pull off that balancing act with aplomb—making it the best gaming PC overall.

Our test machine makes use of an Intel Arrow Lake chip, the Core Ultra 7 265K, in combination with an RTX 4080 Super, 32 GB of speedy DDR5-6000, and a 2 TB Gen 4 SSD. That's a pretty darn powerful combination, but it's just one of many you can configure for yourself on the HP store.

So, if an AMD chip is more your speed, or perhaps you're looking to snag yourself one of the new RTX 50-series cards, then HP has you covered. It'll come in the same chassis we tested, however, and it's a good 'un. Black and white options are available, and it also manages to perform a balancing act of its own between size and room for all those high-spec components.

It's a subtle-looking thing, but there's plenty of cooling on offer, provided by an AIO liquid cooling unit for the CPU and a plethora of RGB-lit case fans. Okay, so it's not that subtle, but it's a nice hybrid of non-offensive design combined with a bit of gamer flair.

Plus, it's fairly quiet under duress. That makes a change from many other prebuilts we've tested, which tend to go heavy on the cheap fans and the associated woosh and hum that might distract you (and your living companions) while you game.

We found our particular review unit to be very well-built, and the components inside performed exactly as we expected—with one notable exception. The Western Digital Gen 4 SSD didn't quite live up to expectations, although it was unclear whether this was down to a badly-seated pin or perhaps a faulty drive.

Still, one small snag aside, the HP Omen 35L makes for a compelling line-up of configurable PC options, most of which are very attractively priced. RTX 50-series cards are just starting to creep into the configurator, so I've picked out a combo above with the RTX 5070 Ti, an excellent GPU that represents the best value-to-performance proposition you can get out of a new Nvidia card right now.

Gaming PCs can be expensive, but with the HP machine, you're receiving all of what you want for a price that's competitive with the cheaper options on the market, from a trusted manufacturer. That makes it the gaming PC to beat right now, if you ask me.

Read our full HP Omen 35L review.

The best alternatives:

The best gaming PC around $1,000 or less

Our favorite config:

The Legion Tower 5i is my pick as the best budget gaming PC I've tested because it knows what it is and does what it does very well indeed. As I say in my review, it's resolutely, uncompromisingly just a PC. There are no over-the-top gamer frills to eat up extra dollars, just a simple, well-put-together gaming rig for a good price.

Most of the time.

That's the issue here; while you will almost always find the Legion Tower 5I on sale with a healthy discount, putting it below the $1,000 mark, there are times when Lenovo tries to get away with selling this budget PC at a price that doesn't make sense.

But when you do find it on sale for the right price, this is an ace little gaming PC. It's not filled with proprietary parts—yes, I'm looking at you, Alienware—but you are getting OEM versions of the components on show here. So that RTX 4060 is an unbranded version, but it's a sweet little boi, though, being a seriously small form factor version.

Which is great because the budget Ada GPU doesn't need a ton of power or cooling to do its thing, so it doesn't need to be a hulking brute of a graphics card.

In fact, that's one of the things that impressed me while I was testing the Legion Tower 5i: its cooling chops. The CPU chip chiller is super basic, and the GPU is small, but there's a healthy amount of airflow in the case, and when gaming, I never saw either go above the 76°C mark.

Despite its mid-tower scale, Lenovo has used an OEM mATX motherboard inside it, which is something to be mindful of should you decide to do a big platform upgrade in the future. You'll need to go for a motherboard that fits the space.

But as Lenovo has used standard, if OEM parts, those sorts of upgrades are eminently possible. Even smaller in situ upgrades are possible, with a second SSD slot on the barebones motherboard it ships with. Though a big GPU update might be a stretch, as the 500 W PSU would struggle with anything beyond an RTX 4060 Ti.

As a budget system, its performance targets are all 1080p, though interestingly, we did get some decent 1440p figures out of it with DLSS and Frame Generation enabled. Realistically, though, 1080p should be your res de jour.

The thing to say, however, comes back to that price argument. You will absolutely be able to find cheaper gaming PCs with the same specs if you shop around—and we've provided alternatives we like down there👇—but if you want a name brand and a rock-solid build out of the box, the Legion Tower 5i will hit the mark.

Read our full Lenovo Legion Tower 5i review.

The best alternatives:

The best gaming PC $2000 and above

Our favorite config:

Corsair's Vengeance A7500 is the best high-end gaming PC because it's much more than just a pretty face. The Corsair 3500X mid-tower case has plenty of glass on the front and side, which actually gives a lovely look at those gorgeous internals. With a couple of light-up fans, lighting in the RAM and liquid cooler, flick the on button, and it beams with light.

Inside our test machine sat an RTX 5080 and an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The RTX 5080 may offer a relatively iterative bump over the RTX 4080, and MFG doesn't offer universally better performance in all games, but it's still a mighty impressive card.

Crucially, though, the RTX 5080 offers an upgrade over the previous generation without the price bump to go with it, and this price point isn't entirely restrictive either. We saw it regularly performing similarly to the RTX 4080 Super.

Then, that CPU is a bit of a marvel. The 9800X3D is unquestionably the best gaming CPU right now, and our tests show the A7500 is a good performer too. That does mean it lacks in the productivity side somewhat. It's certainly not a bad rig for productivity work, but you can get better and cheaper if gaming isn't a major focus.

The A7500 is also an easy rig to set up and use. It comes with zero bloatware, so you don't have to worry about programs taking up your resources or screen space (except the ones you choose to download). This does make the setup a tad strange, as you may want to grab Corsair's software within a few hours of booting it up, but getting that freedom is certainly refreshing.

Our test rig managed to get 85 fps running Cyberpunk 2077 on RT Ultra in 1440p natively, and it managed pretty impressive feats like this while still staying relatively chill. Other Intel rigs we've tested outperformed in Cinebench, but we expected as much going in.

It pairs this with a Corsair RM850e PSU, 2 TB of SSD storage and 32 GB of DDR5-6000 memory. This is all to say, while it costs a pretty penny, you are getting a very beefy rig in return, and arguably the best value on a high-end rig out there. If you want something powerful, but can't stomach the thought of paying RTX 5090 prices, the A7500 is our recommendation.

Read our full Corsair Vengeance A7500 review.

The best alternatives:

The best small form factor gaming PC

Our favorite config:

The venerable Velocity Micro Raptor ES40 has been around for a while now, but for my money, it's still the best small form factor gaming PC you can buy as a prebuilt. The chassis may not be as immediately arresting as something like the Corsair One, but it's a far more practical machine.

The ease of access to the insides of the Raptor ES40 is very welcome, with a tool-less pair of side panels, and the straightforward design of this own-brand mini ITX chassis means it's easy to get at everything inside if you want to fiddle. And I'm a fiddler, for sure.

It's a super tidy build, with nothing feeling cramped inside that small chassis. I reckon I could even get an RTX 4090 in there if I really tried. It almost fit when I was messing around in the office, only the front intake fan made squeezing Nvidia's biggest card an issue.

But you are getting the RTX 4070 Super inside this machine, so you'll be okay on the GPU front for a while, especially if you are sticking to the 1440p level where this card feels most at ease. It's capable of delivering excellent frame rates at that level, especially when you start getting busy with DLSS and Frame Generation.

The CPU is right up there, too. The Ryzen 7 9700X is one of the latest and best non-X3D chips you can buy from the recent Zen 5 generation. And this is one of the reasons that the Raptor ES40 has a tendency to post higher gaming frame rates than the iBuyPower machine that tops this guide right now.

My only real concern is the motherboard that Velocity Micro has shipped this machine with. We've tested the Gigabyte A620I AX and have found it a decent budget mini ITX board, but it's not the sort of motherboard I would have expected to find in a gaming PC that costs well north of $2,000.

It's not that it affects gaming performance; it clearly does not, but the upgrade potential and usability definitely are affected. There is only a single M.2 slot on this board, so if you want to improve the storage on offer, you either entirely replace the boot drive or you buy an old, slow SATA drive.

It is also a bit lacking in connections on the back panel, though that is almost par for the course with mini-ITX motherboards. What's maybe more concerning is the weak 5+2+1 VRM setup, which is going to make it a struggle getting a more power-hungry CPU installed in the future.

That 750 W EVGA SFX power supply, however, won't be the thing standing in your way of an upgrade. You could go all the way up to an RTX 4080 Super with this bad boi. If you can get it to fit in the chassis.

Read our full Velocity Micro Raptor ES40 review.

The best alternatives:

Alienware

Our favorite config:

Alienware is one of the biggest names in gaming PCs, with a heritage stretching back to the dawn of time. Well, 1996 anyway. With a penchant for stylish designs and high-performance hardware, it cemented its place in the burgeoning sphere of gaming-focused PCs. In 2006, it was bought wholesale by corporate PC giant, Dell, and that helped bring an economy of scale to the brand that it previously didn't have access to.

But that hasn't necessarily meant those economies of scale have been passed on to the consumer, as Alienware has always kept itself as a premium-tier brand within the Dell portfolio. Which was fine when it was offering a premium experience to the people who bought its PCs.

When I was a whelp, I used to hanker after Alienware PCs and laptops, but as I've gotten older, so has Alienware changed. It's become more and more like its corporate Dell overlord, and far less tantalising a prospect.

The Alienware Area-51 was billed as a return to form of sorts, with an upgradable approach, and even that price doesn't feel totally ridiculous when you consider the price of individual parts inside it right now. Surprisingly, we've seen similar prices from competitors for similar rigs, which is a bit of a rarity for Alienware.

Unfortunately, the upgradability is a two steps forward, one step back approach for Alienware. Most of the parts can be swapped easily, but the PSU has a very limited range of compatible motherboards, so changing that will likely require ripping out the PSU, too.

We also noticed a rather bizarre fan setup, with all fans pointing inwards. This runs counter to the generally accepted advice that pushing out hot air results in a cooler PC. We flipped some fans around and did spot slightly cooler temps, but we also don't have the testing labs Alienware do, and it ran practically frosty for us in gaming tests.

Our test rig housed an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, RTX 5090, 64 GB of DDR5-6400 memory, and a 2 TB SSD. It is a bit disappointing that there's no AMD option here, especially when Team Red make the best gaming CPUs right now. We did notice some quite impressive scores, though. Black Myth Wukong on Very High settings, run on 1440p got an average fps of 91, and a minimum of 64. Cyberpunk 2077, on RT Medium with Quality upscaling and FG on, got all the way up to an average of 256 fps. Needless to say, this rig is a beast

I will reiterate my mantra: never buy a full-price Alienware. Rigs get regularly discounted, so we still wouldn't recommend this at over $5000, despite it being really rather good. However, with a little bump off the top of that price, this Alienware rig is worth considering, should you have the will (and the cash).

Read our full Alienware Area-51 review.

The best mini PC

Our favorite config:

The Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT is our pick as the best mini PC for gaming, simply because it comes in a tiny form factor, with excellent cooling, and a seriously impressive CPU and GPU combo. Packing the 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX means that you get stellar levels of processing power, making it an eminently portable workstation.

But for us, it's the inclusion of the Radeon RX 7600M XT (yes, it's all AMD here) that tips this system over the edge of standard mini PC-dom and into the realms of gaming PCs. Sure, you're not going to get the same sort of gaming performance as you'll see in the hyper-expensive Asus ROG NUC with its mobile RTX 4070, but it's also cooler and quieter for it.

You're still getting mighty 1080p gaming performance from the AMD GPU, and way beyond what you'll see from any integrated GPU you could mention.

The elephant in the room is arguably that light show on the side of the AtomMan G7 PT, but don't let that put you off this excellent, very PC Gamer mini PC. You can turn it off, don't worry. And once the primary-colored badges are disabled, it's a more restrained system, but only in aesthetics. You're still getting a supremely powerful AMD Ryzen 9 CPU, with 16 full Zen 4 cores and 32 threads of processing power.

You're also getting a discrete RX 7600M XT GPU inside, which is capable of delivering excellent 1080p gaming performance in a pint-sized package. For simplicity's sake, we recommend picking up the variant that comes with 32 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD with Windows 11 pre-installed on it. It's only $200 more than the barebones version, and to get the same package would likely cost around the same if you were to shop around yourself.

The AtomMan G7 PT is potentially the most PC Gamer of all the mini PCs we've tested in recent times, and that's because of its gaming prowess and barebones nature. You can pick it up with 32 GB of DDR5 and a 1 TB SSD with Windows on it, and that is the straightforward choice, but if you wanted to go rogue and slap 96 GB of DDR5-5200 in there, you could. You could also go with two separate SSDs, too, as it ships with both PCIe 5 and PCIe 4 M.2 sockets.

Read our full Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT review.

The best alternatives:

How we test gaming PCs

We spend a lot of time testing gaming PCs to ensure that we know what sort of experience you would get should you spend your hard-earned cash on one. Experience is an important factor—you want to know when pulling your new rig from its box that it's going to work as soon as you plug it in, and let you get up and gaming as soon as possible.

But the general feel of using a PC is merely one part of it. It's also important to get the relative performance numbers to be able to see how a given machine performs in games compared with other systems. We run a selection of benchmarks to gauge CPU performance, storage performance, and, of course, gaming performance.

We have a new gaming PC benchmarking gauntlet, which we're putting every new system we get through. We test native gaming performance as well as upscaled, and with frame interpolation, too.

The games we test are:

• Avatar: Frontier of Pandora
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Baldur's Gate 3
• Black Myth: Wukong
• Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

We use Frameview to capture both the average and 1% Low frame rates, to help us highlight how smooth the experience might be, or how janky in some cases. We also use it to capture temperatures on both the CPU and GPU in gaming scenarios.

In terms of the wider system performance, we use 3DMark Time Spy Extreme and Storage benchmarks to check CPU, GPU, and SSD performance with the industry-standard UL benchmarking suite. We also use Cinebench 2024 and Blender 4.2.0 to test CPU rendering performance and Handbrake to test video encoding. We also test file handling with the built-in 7-Zip benchmark.

We get inside the machine to see how well built it is, and how well the builder has tidied up the mass of cabling that always lurks inside a gaming PC. It's also important to know how much of an upgrade path a system might have, whether there is space inside for extra storage, or more memory, etc.

Value is also a key concern for us. A gaming PC represents a large outlay, and no matter whether it's a $900 or a $5,000 machine, it still needs to be able to justify its cost by the quality of the build and the components inside it.

Check out how we test all PC gaming hardware.

Selection criteria

Our selection criteria for picking the best gaming PC come down to the brands we've used and have had good experience with, and the ones that we know consistently put together good-value, well-specced machines.

It's not possible to review every single gaming PC on sale, but we have tested PCs from all the major manufacturers and have experienced the shipping processes they use.

But the biggest thing is always going to be the mix of core configuration and the overall price. If there's a machine with a great GPU and CPU combination but is priced well beyond the competition, then it's not going to get the nod from us. Equally, if a PC maker consistently pairs its gaming PCs with single-channel memory (*cough* Alienware* cough*) or reliably sticks 512 GB SSDs in with $1,500 systems, they're not going to get a recommendation from us, either.

How to choose a gaming PC

As a PC gamer, your primary point of reference for picking your new gaming PC should be around what graphics card it has inside it. That is the key component when it comes to getting the highest frame rates for your games and is the first decision you must make... once you know what budget you have to work with.

Check out our list of the best graphics cards for a rundown of the current state of the GPU market, but we've also got our graphics card hierarchy list below, where you can see in a quick snapshot how they perform against each other.

Once you've got your GPU picked, then it's about finding the best-value gaming PC sporting that graphics card. And, as I said before, you want to make sure you get a balanced PC for all that you might want to focus on the GPU at its heart. You need to have a processor that can keep your graphics card fed with data, and memory enough that your system doesn't collapse under a weight of Chrome tabs.

The minimum we would recommend on the memory front today would be 16 GB, but we would also suggest making sure that comes in two separate sticks (often denoted for a 16 GB kit as 2x8 GB). That ensures you get the highest memory bandwidth possible from so-called dual-channel memory. With a single stick of memory, you will only get half that bandwidth.

While you do need to have a processor, or CPU, that's able to keep your GPU running at optimal pace, that doesn't mean you need to have a million cores to do it. Unless you're engaging in a lot of video editing or 3D graphics work, a CPU with six or eight cores will absolutely be enough for a gaming PC. Don't be desperate to bag a 16-core chip if all you're going to be doing is playing games. We've picked the best CPUs for gaming from the current chips available, so it's worth checking out any build you're interested in against that list.

Finally, storage. This is an area where a lot of system integrators cheap out on, and with games taking up an inordinate amount of capacity today, it's worth making sure you're set from the off. The minimum today—unless it's a super bargain rig—should be a 1 TB SSD. It's the easiest upgrade, but one you don't want to have to be doing as soon as you set up Steam on a new machine.

GPU hierarchy: How do the GPUs stack up?

The most important component for any gaming PC build will always be the graphics card. That will give you the best idea about how one machine matches up with another just in terms of raw gaming performance.

Below, we've listed the slew of GPUs we've had over the past couple of years in terms of their Time Spy Extreme index score as a way to put them in some consistent hierarchy.

This doesn't cover the performance difference between graphics cards in every instance, as differences in how they handle ray tracing and other graphical effects can play a part. But this is a handy one-shot method of getting a rough idea of how the various cards from these various generations of GPUs stack up against each other.

Gaming PC reviews

Gaming PC FAQ

This is what can only happen after 67 corporate Teams meetings, 208 slide deck revisions and input from at minimum 38 "stakeholders" (barf). It's a new Alienware gaming rig with an Intel Arc A770. And it's yours for the hilarious price of $1,949.

We give you the latest Alienware Aurora R15 Gaming Desktop, from Dell. Along with the Intel Arc A770, you get a fittingly last-gen Intel Core i7 13700F, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. A770 GPU aside, it's far from actually being a terrible config. But, seriously, where on Earth has the money gone?

That Arc GPU is at best $290's worth of hardware. We've seen Arc A770s go for as little at $250. Well, you get the bespoke Aurora R15 case, liquid cooling for the CPU and Alienware's Lunar Light 750W PSU. But, still. Where has the money gone?

For Intel, who always work closely with Dell to the extent that you'd be pretty confident they signed off on this thing, the appeal is presumably the simple fact that the high-profile Alienware sub-brand is now pitching a pure Intel rig with the A770 GPU as a bona fide gaming machine.

For our money, the upsides of that implied gaming credibility are at least matched, if not more so, by the downsides of being associated with such a badly positioned PC. Ultimately, it's hard to see how something so over priced is going to improve Intel Arc's rep with gamers.

It's a pity, because at the right price an Alienware with the A770 could be an intriguing buy. And if any OEM has the clout to position an Arc-powered pre-built at the right price, it's Dell's gaming sub-brand.

The most laughable aspect of all is the use of Dell's usual fake discounting schtick. As is the case across Dell websites, this Alienware is advertised with an "Estimated value" with a strike-through price of $2,149.99 and the actual $1,949.99 sticker just below. It's Dell's rather feeble way of sidestepping advertising regs and implying a discount without actually falsely claiming the rig is on sale when it's not.

Needless to say, whoever did this particular "estimation" deserves to be buried alive under a pile of old boxed copies of Windows ME. Almost as amusing is Dell's Price Match Guarantee. "Find a lower price online? We'll match it," says the bumpf. Finding pre-builts with the A770 isn't all that easy, let alone any priced as high as this silly Alienware box.

Of course, Dell and other OEMs have form with this kind of thing. This sort of nonsense tends to be driven by marketing narratives and distorted as the corporate decision making process and various "stakeholders" stick their oars in, incrementally interfere with and then outright ruin what might have started out as a sensible idea.

The aforementioned 38 stakeholders, 67 Teams meetings, and 208 slide deck revisions later and you get an Alienware gaming rig with a $250 Arc GPU being pitched at $2,000 and somehow everybody has agreed it makes sense. That's big corporates for you. Once the moment builds for this kind of nonsense, it becomes unstoppable.

Those of you that were strapped into the back of your parents car when you were younger and taken on the yearly family road trip will remember a marketing technique as old as time itself. Take a regular everyday object, create an obnoxiously large model of one, and plaster billboards everywhere claiming it to be the "world's biggest x". Yes, it's a cheap stunt and yes, it was always somewhat disappointing, but you still begged your family to pull over, didn't you?

Well, joining the ranks of the world's largest chest of drawers and the world's largest toilet comes the latest marketing effort from Alienware, a truly massive 16-foot keyboard and mouse combination (via Tom's Hardware) that is supposedly the largest ever made. However, before your eyes roll entirely into the back of your head, it's worth pointing out that unlike the aforementioned examples these peripherals are actually fully functional, and to prove it Alienware asked its "Team Liquid" DOTA 2 esports team to play some matches using them against an actual opponent.

Apparently the idea to create this monstrosity of epic proportions was created by a simple thought experiment, ie, "what if we took the exact 3D-scanned proportions of an AW420K keyboard and AW720M mouse and multiplied them by a factor of 14?" The answer, predictably, is that you'd end up with some designs for a very, very big set of peripherals. 

But working out how to make them actually functional created a whole host of engineering problems the team had to solve.

The 3D printed keys themselves ended up measuring almost a full foot across with four inches of travel, which meant the team had to build giant mechanical switches out of PVC pipe with rubber bands used for resistance instead of a traditional spring. 

To create the "click" at the bottom of the action a small piece of metal tape measure was added to the end of the plunger, so not only do these switches sound like traditional mechanical models but they recreate some of the feel as well. In total, 86 of them were created, and yes, they're RGB backlit as well.

Of course all of this remains a technical exercise until you bring in some players to actually use these oversized gaming devices, so Alienware flew in its "Team Liquid" esports team, who were supposedly blissfully unaware of the true size of the task in front of them until the very last moment. We'll suspend our disbelief on that for a moment. After some nervous giggles the team quickly set about testing the devices, including drawing some vague squiggles in Paint and challenging themselves to a word count typing test. 

It doesn't take long before they're challenged to defeat their team DOTA coach Blitz, who is given the rather serious handicap of playing without glasses and at a low-resolution from 5 feet away. Nevertheless, given the sheer size of the devices in front of them this is no easy challenge, and while we won't give away the eventual outcome the results are not entirely surprising.

This isn't the first time we've seen ridiculously huge peripherals created as technical exercises, and in fact there are some manufacturers selling oversized devices that may actually have a practical advantage for those with disabilities. Here though we are firmly in the realm of the PR gimmick, and while it's tempting to be dismissive, the actual engineering on display is certainly worthy of note. 

Perhaps we may be looking at the beginning of a new marketing arms race, in which every peripheral manufacturer tries to "out-biggen" the rest in order to jump to the top of the headlines. If this is the case may I make a request for the world's biggest sim-racing wheel. I'm envisioning something the size of the Empire State building, with force-feedback so strong it causes minor earthquakes when you hit a curb. 

Come on Logitech, you know you want to. We'll write about it. We absolutely promise.

Those of you in the market for a new monitor may already be aware of the almighty AW3423DWF, an OLED ultrawide that continues to sit at the top of gaming monitor recommendation lists including our very own best gaming monitor guide. Given its continued success it's no surprise that Alienware are looking to take advantage of that momentum and add more QD-OLED monitors to the range, and it looks like they've teased just that in a recent livestream at TwitchCon 2023.

According to Wccftech, the first of these monitors is called the AQ322QF and is a 32-inch curved 4K QD-OLED display with a 240Hz refresh rate and a three-year burn-in warranty. It shares the now-familiar Alienware black and white aesthetic with its cousins, while also featuring AMD Freesync Premium support for a super-smooth gameplay experience. We've already seen a 32-inch 240hz 4k display crop up in an Asus monitor at Gamescom this year, so it's likely to be the same panel used here.

The second may be of most interest to competitive gamers, as Alienware are calling it the "World's first 360Hz QD-OLED display". It's called the AW2725DF, and while its flat panel may be on the smaller side at 27-inches, Alienware say they've designed the stand so you can get close up to the screen and appreciate all its 1440p high-refresh rate goodness. This display also benefits from Alienware's three-year burn-in protection..

Full specifications and prices will be revealed at CES 2024, but in the meantime these look like two solid options for those looking to get in on the QD-OLED goodness without committing to the desk-dominating behemoth that is an ultrawide. Alienware seems keen to highlight the 3-year warranty support on both these new displays, likely as an attempt to mitigate one of the biggest concerns about buying into OLED tech. Namely, the fear of waking up one morning and realising your fancy new monitor has the dreaded ghost of something you played heavily the night before.

When Jeremy wrote his AW3423DWF review in May of this year he found it to be, in his own words, "absolutely farking fabulous", and those who have seen one in person will likely be inclined to agree. Alienware certainly seems to be making a commitment here towards QD-OLED technology, and now that high-refresh rate panels are starting to be manufactured in gamer-friendly sizes, we expect to see a push to market of all kinds of different display formats from various manufacturers in an attempt to see what sticks.

It's an exciting time to be in the market for a new monitor, and if these new panels are anything to go by, this may be just the beginning of an OLED display dominance yet to come.

OLED gaming displays are finally being released in droves, and we've reviewed heaps of them to offer advice on the best OLED gaming monitor you can currently buy. Incredibly fast response times, per-pixel lighting, and deep black rendition mean that OLED panels are highly prized as gaming monitors.

Currently, there are two main suppliers of OLED panels that go into OLED monitors from all brands, namely LG's WOLED tech and Samsung's QD-OLED. Samsung's QD-OLED tech probably had the edge in the first couple of generations. But LG's latest revision of WOLED has closed the full-screen brightness gap while avoiding some minor QD-OLED issues, such as the slight greyness of black tones in bright ambient light.

However, it's a very close call and that's why our best overall OLED monitor remains the MSI MPG 321URX QD-OLED. The latest QD-OLED panel offers a crisp 4K resolution and unrivalled vibrancy, but in this particular monitor, you can get it for less. If you prefer refresh rate over resolution, the best 1440p OLED gaming monitor is the MSI MPG 271QRX, which is capable of an incredibly quick 360 Hz. Still, if money is absolutely no object, the LG UltraGear 32GS95UE with its stunning WOLED panel is the absolute best of the bunch. For now.

The Quick List

Best OLED gaming monitor

Well, we're now living in a world where multiple, brilliant OLED monitors are most definitely a thing. But the problem is, the prices are still sky-high. While this particular display is still not what you'd call cheap, it's significantly less than the competition, and best of all, it uses the same panel as some of our very favorites. That makes the MSI MPG 321URX the best OLED monitor you can buy right now.

It's not like you're getting a whole lot less for your money, either. While the chassis isn't exactly the most stunning piece of design we've ever seen, it's decently made and looks subtle enough that it won't stand out on most people's desks. What will stand out, however, is the fabulous color reproduction when you turn it on.

OLED displays are famous for their vivid colours, and the MPG 321URX is absolutely no exception. Thanks to a glossy coating and that Samsung-sourced panel, it really does invite all those monitor reviewer clichés: Zap, zing, pop, pow. It's a fabulous-looking thing.

Brightness is a bit of a downside of OLED tech, but with a full-screen rating of 250 nits, this screen is still plenty bright enough for most. DisplayHDR 400 mode provides the most punchy picture, but you can switch to a 1,000-nit mode for darker scenes with better highlights. HDR is still a pain on a Windows machine, and we wish you didn't have to mess around with the settings like this, but the MSI is far from the only display with this issue.

What's much less of an issue than many OLEDs here is the text display. OLEDs can color fringe and blur text quite badly, but the MPG 321URX is much better than most, meaning it makes for a fine productivity monitor as well as a gaming and media beast.

Burn-in is always a concern on any OLED display, but here, MSI has mitigated it with plenty of tech, alongside a three-year burn-in warranty that should provide some reassurance. All OLEDs need a bit of special care in this regard, but these sorts of warranties are now common.

As with all OLED monitors, the price isn't low, but you can often find this monitor for $899 or less, which means the MSI handily undercuts its competition, with very little drawback. That makes the MSI MPG 321URX the best OLED display we've tested to date—and as it so happens, the best gaming monitor overall—and the one we'd buy with our own money.

Read our full MSI MPG 321URX QD-OLED review.

Best 1440p OLED gaming monitor

The best 1440p OLED gaming monitor is the MSI MPG 271QRX. This 27-inch screen swaps resolution for speed with a mahoosive 360 Hz refresh rate, alongside an excellent 0.03 ms response time more commonly found across OLED panels.

Broadly speaking, a 27-inch 1440p gaming monitor is the most sensible blend of size, resolution, performance and price for PC gaming. The 271QRX isn't sensible, however, with its extreme refresh rate, response time and frightfully massive price tag.

But before you get too put off by the price, the Samsung-made panel within this MSI monitor is excellent in its response, vibrancy and contrast. It's the same panel as many of the best OLEDs, so expect nothing less from this for its rapid-fire response.

It's also much easier to drive the 271QRX than almost any other OLED in the guide. The standard 1440p resolution is relatively easy-going for most mid-range graphics cards, though if you think that means you can save some cash, think again.

This monitor is extremely expensive versus other 1440p panels, but that's the price you pay for that lovely, luscious OLED. You can almost forgive a high-end OLED with a 4K or ultrawide resolution for its large price tag, but a 27-inch 1440p is a much tougher pill to swallow. That slim resolution may net you a high refresh rate, but it does suffer from text fringing worse than higher-resolution screens.

MSI offers some interesting burn-in protection features on the MPG 271QRX, including logo and taskbar detection. These both auto-dim specific elements on the screen when they're present, to prevent the risk of burn-in on frequently displayed things. That's handy, as it means you don't have to bother with auto-hiding your taskbar or anything like that. Plus, this panel has quite a bit of overprovisioning, which is another boon to the longevity of the panel.

While we prefer other OLED monitors for the price, if you really must chase the best monitor for competitive gaming, the MSI MPG 271QRX is definitely in the running. The natural benefits of its OLED panel with a focus on speed make for a mighty impressive screen, even if it's anything but cheap.

Read our full MSI MPG 271QRX review.

Best ultrawide OLED gaming monitor

For pure gaming immersion, it's hard to beat an ultrawide monitor. Add in the blistering speed and incredible colors that OLED offers, and you've got a fantastic combination. If that sounds just the display for you, then you'll want to know that the best ultrawide OLED gaming monitor at the moment is the Gigabyte MO34WQC2.

It's a relatively new model on the market, but when Gigabyte launched it back in May 2025, it wasn't aiming to cover new ground in the world of gaming monitors. In fact, on paper, the MO34WQC2 just seems like every other 34-inch 1440p 21:9 OLED. You get a 3rd-generation Samsung QD-OLED screen, with a 240 Hz refresh rate and 0.03 ms response time, with an average brightness of 250 nits. Just like so many others.

There's a very gentle 1800R curvature to help wrap gaming worlds around you, but that's pretty common, as well. However, the MO34WQC2 does sport more features than the competition: two HDMI 2.1, one DisplayPort 1.4, and one USB Type-C input ports, plus a KVM switch with USB 3.2 upstream/downstream ports.

That USB-C port also provides 15 W of charging, but that's barely enough to warm up a watch, and the 3 W integrated speakers aren't worth using. But they're countered by the excellent stand, which offers 130 mm (5.1 inches) of height adjustments, along with 60° swivel and 25° tilt.

In other words, it's just a great, all-round ultrawide OLED gaming monitor. What stopped us from recommending it right from the start, though, was the price tag at launch. At $800, it was just too expensive for what you're getting, but Gigabyte has hacked a big chunk off that now, and if you hunt around, you can find the MO34WQC2 for as little as $600.

Yes, that's still a big chunk of money to hand over for a monitor, but even if all you care about is immersive gaming, it's still worth every penny. You'll be hard-pressed to find anything better at this price.

Read our full Gigabyte MO34WQC2 review.

Best budget ultrawide OLED gaming monitor

Our previous pick for the best overall OLED gaming monitor and the best ultrawide OLED monitor, the Alienware QD-OLED AW3423DWF, still earns a place as the best budget ultrawide OLED gaming monitor. It's still fantastic and, importantly, often discounted.

This big 34-inch curved display has a glossy coating that really makes the excellent colours and silly-deep contrast pop, unlike the Alienware 34 QD-OLED AW3423DW. It might sound like a small thing, but this deceptively simple tweak turns a fantastic OLED gaming monitor into a truly stupendous one for gaming.

The refresh rate is a speedy 165 Hz, and like most other OLEDs, what really counts here is the sublime pixel response time, which is silly fast at 0.1 ms.

The Samsung QD-OLED used here is a real stunner. Not only does it deliver fantastic overall performance, but it delivers much more consistent brightness performance with a 1,000 nits peak, although admittedly not over the full screen. Newer screens, such as the Asus ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM, use moderately improved QD-OLED panels than the one used here, but it's really not a dealbreaker for us.

Full-screen brightness has always been a bit of an Achilles' heel for OLED displays, but at least the Alienware has a better brightness limiter than most, and its lack of aggression compared to the competition means you can hardly notice it adjusting. That makes a big difference in day-to-day usage and serves as a real feather in the big Alienware's cap.

Speaking of feathers in caps, let's talk about that curve. While curved displays are always going to split the room, the gentle 1800R curve in combination with the 3,440 by 1,440 resolution used here really makes for an immersive experience. Even if you're not a fan of bendy monitors, once you game on this one, we reckon you'll be impressed.

There are always drawbacks, especially in OLED displays, and other than the already mentioned full-screen brightness issue, it is worth pointing out that the pixel density could be better for productivity tasks. While font rendering is not bad by any means, it's not the sharpest nor the crispest we've seen. The 4K OLED panels are better on this.

All OLED monitors are quite expensive, unfortunately, but we've seen some good deals on the Alienware, and it's often a lot cheaper than competing panels in this guide. Nonetheless, if you're looking for the best OLED displays, you're going to have to open your pocketbook pretty wide. Still, at least here you're getting an OLED gaming monitor that really does deliver image quality and gaming performance that's worth the money.

Yep, the Alienware 34 AW3423DWF takes our top spot as the best budget ultrawide OLED gaming monitor for a reason, and that reason is visual lushness, with far fewer compromises than most, for less than the competition. It's a centerpiece of a display, all wrapped up in a handsome package with a glossy coat that'll make your games simply sing.

Read our full Alienware 34 AW3423DWF review.

Best WOLED gaming monitor

The reign of Samsung's 4K QD-OLED is over. For now. Enter the new king, the LG UltraGear 32GS95UE. This WOLED is quite simply better than the Samsung QD-OLED gang. That includes the likes of the Alienware 32 AW3225QF, Asus ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM, and MSI MPG 321URX, plus Samsung's own Odyssey G8 OLED G80SD.

On paper, the LG has little to no advantage. Whether it's the 32-inch size, 4K native resolution, 240 Hz refresh or 0.03 ms response times, it's all pretty much identical to the QD-OLED group.

However, when you get into the details and also the actual experience, LG has gone that little bit better. For starters, LG's latest WOLED panel tech is just a touch brighter at 275 nits full screen compared to 250 nits. It also doesn't suffer from the overly warm color balance of QD-OLED panels. LG's WOLEDs also don't go grey in bright ambient light, detracting from perceived contrast. That's something that the 4K QD-OLED alternatives all do.

OK, that's detailed stuff. There's no massive slam-dunk advantage. But then, these are megabucks displays. So the margins matter. Speaking of which, money is this LG's greatest problem. At $1,400, it's expensive even for a 32-inch 4K OLED model. You can get a version of the MSI mentioned above, just with a lower-specced USB-C interface, for as little as $900.

Can this LG really be worth $500 more? That's a tough call. We've seen it briefly discounted to $1,200. But even at the original price, it's an absolutely stellar display. The HDR experience is the best we've ever seen, with eye-popping highlights and those classic inky, pitch-perfect black tones only OLED can achieve.

Of course, this is a mega-quick monitor, too. The pixel response is beyond sensible reproach. Any more speed by that metric is probably redundant; it really is that quick. Add in the 240 Hz refresh for nice, low latency, and it's a very strong package.

What's more, you also get an alternative 1080p mode. It's meant to be a sort of alternative native mode that uses pixel doubling to achieve the lower resolution and combines that with a 480 Hz refresh. Admittedly, you'd never mistake the slightly blurry image quality for native when enabled. But it's probably better than traditional interpolation, and the 480 Hz makes for even lower latency.

If you're looking for issues, well, one possible snag is the matte panel coating. Glossy has been the go-to for OLED panels because it accentuates contrast. But somehow, LG gets away with a matte coating on this monitor. It still absolutely sizzles. In fact, it's not just HDR content that zings. Thanks to strong full-screen brightness and deft SDR calibration, pretty much everything looks great.

Even better, LG has calibrated the SDR color balance in HDR mode nicely enough that you can run this panel in HDR mode 24/7. Short of proper pro-quality content creation workflows, there's no need to jump between SDR and HDR. Meanwhile, the 4K pixel density means that fonts look fab, whatever you're doing. That's not something that lower-res OLEDs can claim.

All of this means this is comfortably our new favourite WOLED monitor with one obvious qualifier, the price. If you can easily afford it, this is the obvious pick.

Read our full LG UltraGear 32GS95UE review.

Best 27-inch OLED gaming monitor

The best 27-inch OLED gaming monitor is the Alienware 27 AW2725Q, and that's primarily because it's cheaper than its competitors and offers pretty much the same experience. That experience is one of incredibly sharp visuals thanks to cramming a 4K resolution's worth of pixels into a 27-inch display.

The whole 27-inch 4K OLED thing is very new and is all thanks to Samsung's new 4th Gen OLED panels. While these new panels are brighter than previous generations pound for pound, sizing them down to 27 inches keeps them to the usual 250 full-screen nits.

With this monitor, you're also getting a glossy screen, a wonderful HDR experience, and all the usual benefits of OLEDs—fast response time, deep blacks, and sharp images. Plus the 240 Hz refresh rate, of course.

The main benefit of this monitor compared to other OLEDs, though, is its sheer pixel density, although you'll need sharp eyes to really notice the difference between this and, say, a more standard 32-inch 4K OLED. But if you do have such sharp eyes and want the sharpest monitor to match, this is it.

I suppose, too, that if the now very minor text fringing issues on larger OLEDs still bother you, you can be sure the pixel density of this AW2725Q resolves that issue, too.

The MSI MPG 272URX is another 27-inch 4K OLED option, but it's a fair chunk more expensive, and all you really get for the extra money is USB-C input with power delivery. You get true 240 Hz at 4K with the MSI, too, thanks to DisplayPort 2.1 ports, but you can get that with this Alienware with the help of Display Stream Compression (DSC) on its DisplayPort 1.4 ports. This barely adds any latency and is visually lossless, anyway.

So yes, the Alienware is actually better value than the MSI, unless you need USB-C input. Its 'interstellar indigo' colouring on the stand and rear of the screen (dark blue with some flecking) is a rather nice departure from Alienware's usual aesthetic, too.

While many people will prefer the immersiveness of a bigger 32-inch OLED to the pixel density of the Alienware 27 AW2725Q, if you want things as sharp as possible or perhaps just lack screen space, this Alienware is where it's at. It's certainly the best value 27-inch OLED on the market right now.

Read our full Alienware 27 AW2725Q QD-OLED review.

Also tested

How we test gaming monitors

Where to buy a gaming monitor

Best OLED gaming monitor FAQ

Jargon buster - gaming monitor terminology

Refresh Rate (Hz)
The speed at which the screen refreshes. For example, 144Hz means the display refreshes 144 times a second. The higher the number, the smoother the screen will appear when you play games.

V-Sync
Graphics tech synchronizes a game's framerate with your monitor's refresh rate to help prevent screen tearing by syncing your GPU frame rate to the display's maximum refresh rate. Turn V-Sync on in your games for a smoother experience, but you'll lose information, so turn it off for fast-paced shooters (and live with the tearing). Useful if you have an older model display that can't keep up with a new GPU.

G-Sync
Nvidia's frame synching tech that works with Nvidia GPUs. It basically allows the monitor to sync up with the GPU. It does this by showing a new frame as soon as the GPU has one ready.

FreeSync
AMD's take on frame synching uses a similar technique as G-Sync, with the biggest difference being that it uses DisplayPort's Adaptive-Sync technology which doesn't cost monitor manufacturers anything.

Ghosting
When movement on your display leaves behind a trail of pixels when watching a movie or playing a game, this is often a result of a monitor having slow response times.

Response Time
The amount of time it takes a pixel to transition to a new color and back. Often referenced as G2G or Grey-to-Grey. Slow response times can lead to ghosting. A suitable range for a gaming monitor is between 1-4 milliseconds.

TN Panels
Twisted-nematic is the most common (and cheapest) gaming panel. TN panels tend to have poorer viewing angles and color reproduction but have higher refresh rates and response times.

IPS
In-plane switching panels offer the best contrast and color despite having weaker blacks. IPS panels also tend to be more expensive and have higher response times.

VA
Vertical Alignment panels provide good viewing angles and have better contrast than even IPS but are still slower than TN panels. They are often a compromise between a TN and IPS panel.

Curved Panels
Curved panels can make games feel more immersive and the amount of curvature is given by a number such as 1500R or 1800R. The smaller the number, the more tightly curved the screen will be.

HDR
High Dynamic Range. HDR provides a wider color range than normal SDR panels and offers increased brightness. The result is more vivid colors, deeper blacks, and a brighter picture.

Peak Brightness
This refers to the maximum brightness of a monitor or television and is measured in nits. For decent HDR gaming, you want more than 400 nits, ideally near the 1000 mark.

Ultrawide
Shorthand for monitors with aspect wider aspect ratios like 32:9 or 21:9

Resolution
The number of pixels that make up a monitor's display, indicated by height and width. For example: 1920 x 1080 (aka 1080p), 2560 x 1440 (2K or 1440p), and 3840 x 2160 (4K).

Remember when a new Alienware PC was something exciting? Yes, yes, you almost certainly weren't going to buy one. Even if you could afford them, Alienwares of old usually weren't actually the fastest PCs you could buy. But a bit like a Lamborghini that isn't actually as quick as a cheaper Porsche 911 Turbo, Alienware rigs didn't need to actually be the fastest. They always had that critical air of the exotic.

In short, the mere existence of Alienware PCs made the world a more interesting place. Well, not any more. Alienware's assimilation by the Dell corporate collective is now complete. The latest Alienware Aurora R16 has arrived and it's a generic mid-sized box.

In other words, it's absolutely nothing like Alienwares of yore, such as the slightly bonkers triangle-shaped Area-51. And it even lacks the somewhat bespoke aesthetic of the outgoing Aurora R15 and the similar R14 before that.

To be sure, the Aurora R15 was ultimately the same sort of machine as the new R16 inside. Indeed, the R16 offers exactly the same 25.2 liter internal volume as its predecessor and we believe the actual metal frame is the same with both systems. It's just the external plastic cladding that's changed.

Alienware says it's refined, streamlined and more space efficient. Certainly, the R16 is smaller and lighter. But it's also just another box. Bummer.

More to the point, what you now have is a generic looking box with Dell-Alienware style proprietary components that make future upgrades tricky. Kinda the worst of both worlds. At least when the chassis design was weird and wonderful you could slightly forgive elements like motherboards that didn't conform to the standard ATX definitions.

Anywho, apart from the now plain-vanilla proportions, what do you need to know about the new Aurora R16? Alienware says the optimised design delivers up to 10 percent lower CPU temps and six percent lower GPU temps. The machine is likewise said to be the quietest Aurora rig yet.

You also get three RGB lighting zones, each composed of numerous individual LEDs. As standard, there's Wi-Fi 6E and an 80 Plus Platinum rated PSU in either 500W or 1000W spec. CPUs are Intel 12th and 13th gen items and graphics, predictably, is Nvidia RTX 40 series clobber.

Front ports comprise 10Gbps USB-C, three 5Gbps USB-A sockets and a 3.5mm headset jack. Round the back you get a 20Gbps USB-C port, another 10Gbps USB-C connection, two 5Gbps USB-As, and a pair of USB 2.0, along with 2.5Gbps ethernet and an array of audio out.

Prices start at $1,750 for an air-cooled Core i7 13700F plus Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics and scale from there. That base specs buys you 16GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD. A 13900F adds $150, while an upgrade to an RTX 4070 Ti is $200, so pretty much in line with the standard price delta between a 4070 and 4070 Ti.

For now, there are no higher GPU options, but they'll be added in due course.

Of course, one can legitimately query the practical value of Alienware's legacy designs. Was the quirky triangular chassis of the Area-51 actually the benefit to thermals that Alienware claimed back in 2014? Probably not. But it definitely looked cool, pun absolutely intended.

The new Aurora R16, by contrast doesn't look bad. It just doesn't really look like an Alienware. And exotic looks were, ultimately, what Alienware PCs were mostly about. And now we're not really sure what the brand stands for.

Alienware laptops certainly are stylish, and though they don't always offer top value for money, sometimes they really do. Now is one of those times. This is one of the best Australian laptop deals we've seen for a machine with an RTX 3070 Ti graphics card.

But just saying the m17 R5's got a good GPU is doing it a disservice. AMD's Ryzen 7 6800H is a powerful CPU, and one that's known to be power thrifty. Though a 17-inch laptop isn't likely one you'll carry to the office or campus every day, if you do, you'll get great battery life. You can even game with it for more than a few minutes - something that can't be said for all gaming laptops - thanks to a 97Wh battery.

Other key specs include 16GB of DDR5-4800 memory and a 1TB NVMe SSD. That means you'll be able to store a game library of dozens of AAA to hundreds of indies, 158 seasons of the Simpsons, and a PDF or two.

Be warned that this is a chunky laptop, as all 17-inchers are. Although while it looks big, it's not as heavy as you might expect, weighing in at 3.3KG. Weight aside, a big laptop comes with a big screen, and this 1080p 165Hz IPS panel with Nvidia G-Sync support means you'll get buttery smooth gameplay, even when playing the latest games.

Gaming isn't the only use case for this Alienware though. It's got a comprehensive set of connectivity options, including a Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 2 port that supports Display Port 1.4 and Power Delivery (5V/3A) capabilities. Add to that another two Type-A Gen 1 ports, a HDMI 2.1 output, headset and Ethernet ports and there's no reason the Alienware m17 R5 won't happily function as a desktop replacement with an extra monitor or two for productivity purposes.

Prefer an Intel rig instead? If so, Alienware's not the only one with a great 17-inch gaming laptop deal this week - the below Gigabyte Aorus 17 has a fundamentally similar spec, but comes with an Intel Core i7-12700H CPU instead of the Alienware's Ryzen.

Though it costs a couple of hundred more than the Alienware m17 R5, the extra is arguably well worth the money because this Gigabyte unit includes some truly tasty additions. 

We've got a comprehensive review of the Gigabyte Aorus 17 XE4  if you want the full rundown, but to quickly summarise why we like this one, the i7-12700H at the heart of this laptop packs in plenty of cores and a high clock speed. It offers a total of 14 cores, made up of six Performance cores and eight Efficient cores, giving you 20 threads of grunt for gaming or productivity. A 1TB SSD and 16GB of DDR4 memory are standard too.

The RTX 3070 Ti remains the same, offering plenty of pixel pushing power, but in this case, the screen is the differentiator. The Aorus 17 offers an incredible 360Hz IPS screen. It's not easy to hit 360FPS at the best of times, but if you're one of the millions enjoying the likes of CS:GO, Apex Legends or Valorant, you'll appreciate the smooth and responsive performance of the Aorus 17.

Gigabyte says the thin bezels of the Aorus 17 make is slightly smaller than a comparable 17.3-inch laptop, but it's the weight that stands out: at just 2.7KG, it's not all that heavier than 15-inch gaming laptops, though its sheer size may preclude true portability.

Whichever laptop you go for, both the Alienware m17 R5 and the Gigabyte Aorus 17 XE4 are big and powerful units with loads of gaming prowess, quality feature sets, desktop replacement capabilities and for a limited time - big discounts.

Image quality or speed. Pick one, peeps, because you can't have both when it comes to gaming monitors. At least, that used to be the dilemma gamers faced. If you wanted really high refresh rates of 240Hz and above, your only option was a 1080p panel. And only recently could you get away from a TN panel. Yuck.

That might be okay for all-out esports, but 1080p for all-round gaming? No so much. The good news is that you can now combine 1440p with 240Hz and beyond. Give it up for the Alienware AW2723DF, a 27-inch 1440p panel with 240Hz refresh.

Actually, it's good for 280Hz, the final 40Hz accessed via an "overclocking" option in the OSD, which is essentially a gimmick. It's not as if you can have a crack at 500Hz and . The 280Hz is just the highest of the available refresh rates. Overclocking? Whatever.

That minor gripe aside, what of the AW2723DF's broader vitals? Alienware has, unsurprisingly, opted for an IPS panel which is rated at 1ms for the most extreme of the monitor's three overdrive settings. As for HDR support, you get DisplayHDR 600 certification with local dimming.

If that sounds decent, we're talking 16 edge-lit zones, which is the lowest form of local dimming and has always been an essentially pointless checkbox feature that does little to improve HDR performance. 16 zones isn't even nearly enough resolution to adjust the backlighting in any meaningful way.

Color coverage, meanwhile, comes in at 95% of the DCI-P3 gamut and for connectivity you get DisplayPort 1.4 and a pair of HDMI ports. The two HDMI ports are limited to 144Hz, so it's only the DisplayPort interface that delivers the full 280Hz.

There's also a four-port USB 3.2 A hub, with two sockets on the lower bezel and two on the back panel, but no USB-C connectivity. Alienware's AlienFX RGB lighting also features and adaptive sync support  takes the form of AMD FreeSync Premium Pro and Nvidia G-Sync compatibility.

Design-wise, it's the usual Alienware fare with a mix of black and off-white plastics, a characteristically "Portal-ish" sci-fi vibe and also a contemporary slim-bezel look. It's definitely a slick, expensive feeling monitor.

That's just as well given the fairly hefty $600 price in the US and £540 in the UK. It is on sale at the moment for $550 at Amazon though, which takes some of the edge off. That said, 1440p 144Hz monitors can be had for under $300 these days. Gigabyte will do you a 240Hz 1440p panel for about $100 less, too, albeit with HDR 400 rather than HDR 600 certification. Likewise, at this price point you also have the option of a 144Hz 4K monitor.

All of which means, you really would have to value the additional refresh pretty highly, even if LG's 27-inch 1440p 240Hz OLED monitor runs around $1,000. It's pricey, then, and yet far from the most expensive 1440p panel around.

But is it actually any good? It's certainly a high quality example of the 1440p IPS breed. Capable of 600 nits, it's punchy right out of the box running in default SDR mode, with nicely calibrated colors and good viewing angles. For just browsing the web and getting stuff done, it's a nice panel.

Enable HDR and the good news is that SDR content still looks great. So, you don't need, for example, to routinely switch between SDR and HDR modes for video or games and then switch back for web browsing.

The actual HDR experience, meanwhile, is about as good as you can reasonably expect for this class of display. Which is to say it's not a true HDR experience, but there is a touch more visual punch and pop than an SDR monitor with a strong backlight.

The problem with that punch and pop is that it doesn't make for great contrast or black levels. Darker tones are pretty washed out and shadow detail is lost compared to an OLED monitor running in HDR mode. The matte anti-glare coating doesn't help with that, either.

Bottom line, the black levels are what you'd expect for a bright IPS panel that lacks true local dimming. They're not great. Part of the problem is that we've been spoiled of late by Philips' new OLED panel—the Philips Evnia 34M2C8600—and its fabulous HDR performance. It's more than twice the money, but it does underline the obvious limitations of this Alienware's HDR experience. It isn't even in the same zip code by comparison.

On the other hand, this is still a really nice 27-inch 1440p panel, that makes for a pretty sweet look in a wide variety of games. There's lots of visual detail thanks to the 1440p native res and gorgeous IPS colors.

The same applies to pixel response. Again, context matters. It's nowhere near as fast as a $1,000 OLED panel. But among IPS gaming monitors, this thing flies, we've never seen anything faster. Indeed, the fastest of the three user-configurable overdrive modes is actually usable, with little by way of overshoot or inverse ghosting.

That's actually pretty unusual. The most aggressive overdrive option in many monitor OSD menus is often a bit of a mess. Of course, to that zippy (for an IPS panel) response, you can also add nice low latency thanks to the 280Hz refresh.

Put all those pieces together, the high quality IPS image quality, the punchy backlight, the good response (again, qualified for the IPS context) and the buttery smooth 280Hz refresh and you have a pretty outstanding gaming panel that's also decent for general computing duties thanks to the 1440p resolution.

So, it all comes down to how much value you put on the increased refresh compared to a cheaper 144Hz 1440p option. You could save at least $200 settling for 144Hz. But what this monitor offers is the ability to both play CS:GO at 280Hz and also deliver decent 1440p eye candy in Cyberpunk 2077. That's a pretty compelling all-round gaming proposition, even if it does come at quite the price.

At some point, the returns on higher refresh rates must surely diminish. But not yet. Enter Alienware's 500Hz gaming monitor, yours for $829.

The Alienware AW2524H was originally announced back in January at CES.  But now it's actually available to buy on the Dell Alienware website. The 500Hz bit isn't totally novel—Asus has been promising a 500Hz screen since Computex—but this is the first time anyone has managed to hit that refresh rate with an IPS rather than TN panel.

It's a 25-inch model and, inevitably given the refresh rate, runs 1920 by 1080 pixels. So, it's an out-and-out esports panel built for speed rather than pretty graphics.

On that note, Alienware is claiming 0.5ms gray-to-gray response, which is exceptional. The catch is that it is also claiming 1ms for gray-to-gray response. Confused? Us too. 

More specifically, Alienware says the 1ms figure is for gray-to-gray "extreme" response, where the 0.5ms pertains to gray-to-gray "min" response. Whatever. No doubt this is a very quick panel by IPS standards. But it'll still be miles off the response of an OLED panel.

It's something of a niche tool, then, this new Alienware panel. It's 1080p on a 25-inch panel, so image clarity isn't a priority. And yet it bigs up the IPS thing, which implies image quality is important. 

Then it gives you 500Hz refresh, which is great for latency and beats out any OLED monitor by some distance. But it doesn't come close to an OLED for pixel response, however you want to measure it. 

And it's over $800. Ouch. 

Really, this new Alienware panel mostly serves to confirm how fragmented the monitor market is. When you consider factors like refresh rate, response, brightness, contrast, black levels, color accuracy, pixel density and so on, you have to accept that no one panel tech delivers it all.

Currently, LCD monitors offer the best refresh rates and latency, mini-LED models the best brightness, OLED the best lighting control and pixel speed. But if it's latency you prize above all else, and that $829 price tag isn't an issue, well, you know what to do.

Dell announced in a regulatory filing Monday that it is cutting the jobs of 6,650 employees. The news comes after PC sales for the Texas-based computer maker saw a massive drop at the end of 2022. 

In a memo viewed by Bloomberg, co-chief operating officer Jeff Clarke said that market conditions "continue to erode with an uncertain future." IDC, an industry analyst, told Bloomberg that Dell saw a 37% decline in PCs shipped from Q4 2021 to Q4 2022. Over half of the company's revenue comes from PC sales. 

According to Bloomberg, the 5% reduction in the workforce leaves the company with its lowest headcount in six years. Before the layoffs were announced, Dell had already introduced cost-cutting measures such as hiring freezes and reducing travel. Clarke says the layoffs were crucial for the "long-term health" of the company. 

Bloomberg analysts claim the layoffs could bring down Dell's annual expenses by $700 million to $1 billion and expect a "delayed PC rebound in 2023." A spokesperson said the job reductions are viewed as an "opportunity to drive efficiency."

Dell is one of many big companies in the tech sector to announce major layoffs recently. HP let go of nearly 6,000 workers back in November. Lenovo suffered an undisclosed amount of layoffs right before Christmas. 

In January, Microsoft, Meta, and Google each laid off over 10,000 employees within weeks of each other. Meta has even hinted that there may be more company-wide layoffs to come. Amazon let go of 18,000 employees, the largest mass layoff in the company's history. 

The reason for all the tech downsizing has been a combination of unpredictable economic conditions and pandemic-era overhiring. 

Clark ended the note by saying that Dell has "navigated economic downturns before and emerged stronger" and that they "will be ready when the market rebounds." 

At CES 2023, Acer showed off its newest duo of high refresh rate Predator OLED gaming monitors, the Predator X45 and Predator X27U.

As a 1440p advocate, it's always good to see more and more high refresh rate QHD gaming monitors getting announced. The Predator X45 is a massive 45-inch curved ultrawide UWQHD OLED, while the Predator X27U is a flat 27-inch QHD OLED. 

Both monitors have a refresh rate of 240Hz and a .01 response time. Perfect if you need a monitor for competitive gaming but want a higher resolution to go with the speed. 

Typically if you wanted higher refresh rates on a gaming monitor, you were stuck at 1080p. Not anymore. Acer and others are telling hardcore PC gamers they no longer have to make the compromise as long as they have the cash. 

The Predator X45's  OLED panel supports HDR10 and has a peak brightness of 1000 nits which should give you some good contrast. It even has a pair of HDMI 2.0 ports in addition to its DisplayPort 1.4 port so that you can also plug in your consoles. The X27U is a better choice if you need a little less of a bombastic monitor.

The FreeSync display has a USB hub with USB Type-C to charge your gadgets. I know it's small, but I won't stop shouting that more gaming monitors need this. So kudos, Acer. 

The Acer Predator X45 will be available in Q2 of this year for $1,699. If you feel like you're getting deja vu, it's because LG recently just announced its own 3440 x 1440p 45-inch curved OLED gaming monitor at 240Hz, shipping later this month for the same price. The Predator X27U is due out in the same release window for $1,099. 

Alienware and Dell announced that it is revamping their entire gaming laptop line this week at CES 2023. From super-thin to hulking workstations, Alienware and Dell are hoping their newly designed laptops will catch your eye, regardless of budget. 

The M series laptops are the Alienware flagship laptops that come in 16-inch and 18-inch models. That's right, a massive 18-inch QHD+ (2560 x 1600) panel is available in 165Hz or FHD+ (1920 x 1200) with 480Hz in a 16:10 aspect ratio giving you more on a screen than the typical 16:9.

The powerful m18 desktop replacement not only has a larger screen, but it's got plenty going on the hood. It'll be available with Intel's latest 13th Gen Core i9-13980HX processor and 'next-gen' Nvidia RTX Laptop GPUs, presumably something from the RTX 40-series family. 

AMD fans will be happy to know there will be specs of the m18 available for purchase with AMD's newest yet-announcedRyzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs. Alienware says its M series it's improved cooling will increase thermal capacity by 35% and increase airflow by 25%.

The high-end configurations of the Alienware m18 will launch "this winter," according to the press release, with prices starting at $2,899 in the US. Alienware will release entry-level models later this year at a more reasonable price of $2099.

The X series is Alienware's thin luxury gaming notebook that is significantly thinner than the M series, with the x14 being touted "as the world's thinnest 14-inch gaming laptop," according to the company, which measures .57 inches thick.

The x14 will ship with an RTX 3050, 4050, or 4060 GPU this winter, starting at $1,799. If that's a little too small for you, there's the x16, which is the 16-inch model starting at $3,099. There will also be entry-level specs starting at $2,149

On the budget side, Dell is releasing its G15 and G16 gaming laptops this Spring for $849 and $1,499, respectively, in some fun colors. 

At what point does the refresh rate on a monitor become too high? Can you even see the past difference 240Hz? Or 144Hz? Alienware thinks we could go higher and that 500Hz is "the new category of speed" for gaming monitors. Considering that other brands like Asus ROG are also launching their own 500Hz display, we expect to see this new 'category of speed' turn into quite the fight in 2023. 

At CES 2023, Alienware revealed its latest gaming monitor, the AW2524H, the company's first 500Hz gaming monitor. Technically, it's a native 480Hz gaming monitor that can hit 500Hz overclocked (via single DP). This 1080p 24.5-inch IPS gaming monitor also has got a speedy response time of 0.5ms GtG and 1ms in 'Extreme Mode.' The monitor also does 240Hz via pair of HDMI ports.

Design-wise, the AW2524H is going with a smaller hexagonal base, rather than the two jutting feet that it currently uses for its monitors, so it'll take up less space on your desk—a welcome design choice. Alienware is also ditching the RGB ring that's typically on the monitor's spine but adding a retractable headset hanger. Fair trade, if you ask me. 

Other features include G-Sync support, VESA Display HDR 400, and Nvidia Reflex Latency Analyzer. More importantly, it's got half a dozen USB ports which all gaming monitors should have. 

There's no getting around the fact that this thing is built for competitive gaming, where speed matters and nothing else. So unless you have a burning desire to play Valorant or CS : Go at the highest speed imaginable, 500Hz might be overkill for anyone else. If you want size, picture quality, and a fairly speedy display, check out the AW3423DW, Alienware's gorgeous curved QD-OLED display. 

The Alienware AW2524H is expected to land in North America on March 31, and in China on February 8. There's no pricing yet, but we assume this will fall under the 'not cheap' category. Between these and LG's new OLED 240Hz monitors, 2023 is looking like it will be an exciting year for gaming monitors that want to straddle the line between speed and picture quality. 

At CES 2022, Alienware unveiled Concept Nyx, a game streaming platform that lets a household of gamers stream games to multiple TVs simultaneously from a single, powerful gaming PC. At-home streaming from a PC isn't a new concept, though Alienware is looking to streamline the experience, starting with the controller. 

I actually got my hands on a Concept Nyx game controller at a recent Alienware event. While I didn't play any games, I did get to play with many of the controller's features. 

The first thing you notice about the Nyx controller is that instead of a proper d-pad, it's got a circular touchpad that acts as a mouse for navigating in-game menus for titles traditionally meant for a keyboard and mouse. In fact, one of the pre-recorded gameplay demos I was shown had the touchpad mapped to skills in Guild Wars 2. I would have loved to see this in action for myself since touchpads can be a bit finicky when they act as buttons and not for movement. I'm looking at you, Steam controller. 

Most of the demo was mainly spent tooling around with the controller's features and learning about its role in the game streaming ecosystem of Nyx. Think of the controller as your hall pass for accessing your games on any TV in the house. You could walk into any room with the Nyx app installed on the TV, which immediately pulls up your gaming profile. The Alienware logo on the center is a thumbprint reader that identifies you, loads up your game library, and even resumes your progress. The idea is that if you've been kicked off the TV for whatever reason, you can simply pick up where you left off in a different room. 

My favorite controller feature is the 'self-adjusting variable resistance thumb sticks.' This means you can adjust the thumbstick tension on the fly without opening the controller or using a tool. In addition to the thumbsticks setting, you can customize these controllers' haptics on a per-game basis. All this is controlled by two scroll wheels located at the bottom of the controller. No software is required. 

Multiple Nyx users can even share the screen to play two entirely different games simultaneously side-by-side as long as they have two Nyx controllers. It's something that sounds cool in theory but could be distracting unless you're sporting a massive TV in your living room. 

In a press release, Dell and Alienware hope in less than a decade to use the computing power of Concept Nyx outside of gaming for mixed reality experiences and "virtual collaborative spaces" that feature "displays and other tools that remove the need for a VR headset." 

Of course, the folks at Alienware reiterated that this is a concept, and there are no plans for Concept Nyx to hit the market anytime soon. The way it was explained, it pretty much wanted to see how many "dream features" could be squeezed into a prototype. However, I'd imagine if a controller like this were ever sold, it wouldn't be cheap.

The company is no stranger to showing off wild concepts to the public that seem like they would have commercial potential, only never to be heard from again, like its version of the Steam Deck, Concept UFO, a few years ago at CES. 

I can scarcely believe it, the annual smorgasbord of technology that is the Consumer Electronics Show, aka CES, is just around the corner. Where did this year go? So, what can you expect to emerge new-born and blinking under the Nevada sun in January, ready to revolutionise your gaming in 2023?

The big three will certainly have some new wares to show off. The show kicks off proper on January 5, but AMD's head honcho, Dr. Lisa Su will be doing her usual pre-show keynote sizzle shizzle on January 4.

AMD in action

It's not entirely certain exactly what Su will show off in terms of new hardware, but prime candidates include new laptop APUs based on a combination of Zen 4 CPU cores seen in the Ryzen 7000 series desktop chips and either RDNA 2 or RDNA 3 graphics.

In fact, AMD has already dished many of the key details. These laptop chips are codenamed Dragon Range and Phoenix. Aimed at big, high-performance desktop replacement rigs, the former is basically the desktop Ryzen 7000 with its 5nm CPU chiplets and 6nm IO and graphics die repackaged for mobile. We're expecting variants with up to 16 cores.

Arguably more interesting is Phoenix. Like Ryzen 7000 and Dragon Range, it's expected to be chiplet based and use those same 5nm Zen 4 cores, though this time with a maximum of eight rather than 16 of them. Of course, that's still a huge amount of processing power and Phoenix also gets much more powerful graphics in its IO chiplet.

Where Dragon Range has the same mini graphics core with just two RDNA 2-spec compute units, Phoenix is expected to rock 12 RDNA 3-spec compute units. It still won't be a real gaming powerhouse, but should be up to the job of light 1080p gaming.

Speaking of mobile, AMD could also announce some new RDNA 3 laptop GPUs based on the new Radeon RX 7000 series. Think RX 7900 and RX 7800 Mobility. Specs at this stage are speculative, but we'd expect any mobile chips to be based on the upcoming Navi 32 and Navi 33 GPUs, rather than the Navi 31 big boy from the desktop 7900 XT and 7900 XTX cards.

Currently, the best available info suggests Navi 32 will rock 60 compute units and 3,840 stream processors, while Navi 33 will run 32 compute units and 2,048 processors. For context, Navi 31 is 96 compute units and 6,144 processors.

Back on the desktop, we're not expecting AMD to announce new graphics cards given the recent launch of the 7900 XT and 7900 XTX. But we could see some new CPUs. A 3D V-cache version of new Zen 4 architecture, along the lines of the Zen 3-based Ryzen 7 5800X3D, is possible. We're also expecting more affordable and lower wattage non-X versions of the new Ryzen 7000 series.

Intel strikes back

As for arch rival Intel, it will also be going big on mobile with 13th Gen Raptor Lake laptop CPUs. The big news here is that Intel is expected to give laptops the full Raptor Lake experience. That means a Core i9 version with eight performance cores and all 16 efficiency cores. Yikes.

Lesser variants with lower core counts, including eight and eight, six and eight and six and four, all performance and efficiency respectively are also likely.

As for Raptor Lake on the desktop, Intel previewed a 6GHz version a little earlier this year and spoke of early 2023 availability. So, expect that chip to be launched at CES and likely branded Core i9 13900KS. As for Intel's Arc graphics, we don't think Intel will have any big announcements at CES.

Nvidia's plans

But what of the final member of the unholy trinity, Nvidia? Once again, mobile is expected to feature strongly, with RTX 40 series for laptops being up front and centre. As we discussed last month, we're expecting a full stack of RTX 40 series laptop chips for CES, including RTX 4090, 4080 and 4070.

As ever, those GPUs likely won't map directly to the desktop variants. So the RTX 4090 won't be based on the massive, power hungry AD102 chip in the desktop RTX 4090. Instead, it'll be the AD103 GPU as seen in the desktop RTX 4080 that qualifies for RTX 4090 branding in a laptop.

If you're keeping up with all that, it'll be AD104 for the RTX 4080 mobile and the even smaller AD106 chip for the RTX 4070 mobile, though of all these mobile GPUs, the RTX 4070 is the least certain for launch at CES. It may follow later in the year.

Anyway, the RTX 4090 mobile could be quite the beast. The AD103 GPU rocks 9,728 shades and 112 render outputs, both around 30 percent up on the meatiest chip from the outgoing RTX 30 series mobile line up. Factor in higher clocks, too, and laptop gaming performance will take a very nice step forward.

Back on the desktop, Nvidia's stillborn RTX 4080 12GB is widely tipped to make a re-appearance at CES, stickered up as the RTX 4070 Ti. Specs are likely to be exactly the same as the defunct 4080 12GB, but the big question is pricing. The 12GB was meant to go on sale at $899. Our guess is Nvidia will go for $799 for the 4070 Ti. Watch this space.

Laptops, laptops, laptops

While we're talking laptops, Alienware recently teased its upcoming 18-inch laptop, which we expect to debut at CES. Alienware is also rumoured to be working on an 18-inch model. So 18 inches could be a big theme at CES 2023.

Razer is also rumoured to have a new 16-inch model in the works. We're hoping that it gets a bit of a design overhaul. Razer's current laptops have pretty fat chins and it's arguably about time they got a slim-bezel refresh. Fingers crossed.

More laptops with high-refresh OLED panels are also likely. Asus in particular is going hard with OLED technology, so look out for some hot new laptops with super-fast, eye-popping OLED panels.

OLED Galore

It won't just be laptops with OLED goodness at CES. OLED PC monitors are a nailed-on certainty for CES. Asus recently launched a pair of large format OLED panels. But it's smaller, more, well, monitor-sized OLED monitors that interest us. 

High up on the list is Samsung's 34-inch ultrawide OLED monitor using the same 3,440 by 1,440 QD-OLED Samsung panel used by the Alienware 34 AW3423DW Samsung will likely launch a number of other OLED monitors at the show, too.

LG's new OLED gaming monitors should also be in attendance, ditto Asus's 27-inch OLED panel, which uses the same LG panel technology. All, told there will almost certainly be a whole slew of OLED monitor announcements at CES. What we're not expecting this year, sadly, is high pixel density OLED monitor tech. 32-inch 4K high-refresh OLED doesn't look likely this year.

8K if you really must, plus DisplayPort 2.1

We're not sure if it will be a major trend at CES, but there will be at least one 8K monitor at CES. Well, we say 8K. Samsung's updated "8K" Neo G9 was previewed by AMD at its RDNA 3 launch event. It's 8K in terms of horizontal pixel count, but with its 32:9 aspect, it's really two 4K pixel grids and half 8K resolution overall.

Very likely, this new half-8K panel will debut at CES. However, the problem with full 8K is twofold. Firstly, achieving decent frame rates at 8K is ridiculously hard. It's four times the GPU load of 4K. 

You also need monstrous display interface bandwidth to support high refresh 8K gaming. However, Nvidia's latest RTX 40 series do not support DisplayPort 2.1, which is ultimately a requirement for high refresh 8K gaming. AMD's new Radeon RX 7000 GPUs do support DisplayPort 2.1. But we're not convinced that 8K is anywhere being a thing for PC gaming.

That said, DisplayPort 2.1 will also enable even higher refreshes with existing resolutions. 4K at beyond 240Hz? If you really must, you'll need DisplayPort 2.1.

PCIe Gen 5 SSDs

Could CES be ground zero for those overdue PCI Express Gen 5 SSDs? Reportedly, the first Gen 5 drive using the Phison E26 controller chip went on sale recently in Japan. So, maybe, just maybe.

PCIe Gen 5 drives offer double the theoretical bandwidth of Gen 4 SSDs. So, peak throughout could hit as much as 15GB/s. Early Gen 5 drives probably won't be that quick. But something in the region of 12GB/s is realistic for first-gen drives.

That said, we're more interested in how much better these new SSD might be for IOPS and  random access performance. Arguably, that's the area of storage performance that really needs a boost. Not peak sequential transfer rates.

Ker-a-zeee concepts

It's CES so silly concept technology is pretty much a given. Last year, Razer gave us Project Sophia, a modular PC built into a desk with a huge OLED display edge-lit glass tabletop and THX sound system. Alienware, meanwhile, showed off a watercooled external GPU, Dell had its modular, upgradable Concept Luna laptops and TCL teased us with micro-LED AR glasses.

Most of this stuff remains in concept status, though Samsung's QD-OLED tech from CES 2022 is at least now available, included in the Alienware 34 monitor. As for what zany concepts you can expect from CES 2023, that's anyone's guess. 

But right out on the fringes of possibility, what about an affordable gaming graphics card? Now that would be an incredible technical innovation. Yeah, you're right. That's the stuff of science fiction. Oh well, it's nice to dream.

Something big is coming and it goes by the number 18. So says a new teaser video posted by Alienware on Twitter in reference, almost certainly, to a new 18-inch laptop. Meanwhile, Razer is also rumoured to be planning its own 18-inch beast. Could 18-inch could turn out to be the new 17-inch in 2023? It's certainly looking like that.

Alienware last sold an 18-inch model back in 2015, so this isn't an unprecedented form factor. But much has changed since then in terms of everything from screen tech to CPU and GPU performance.

The last 18-incher, the aptly named Alienware 18, was an absolute monster, complete with dual GPUs. But it also only ran at 1080p, had a DVD writer, weighed in at 5.5kg and sported screen bezels roughly the width of the Panama canal.

It was a machine from a very different era.

At this early stage, there are absolutely no indications regarding the specifications of the new Alienware 18. But with Nvidia to announce new GPUs at CES in less than a month, it's a safe bet that RTX 40-series graphics power will be under the hood.

Intel's upcoming 13th Gen mobile CPUs are also likely to appear. So, the main question is whether Alienware will stick with the uber chunky design ethic of the last 18-inch model, or go for something more sleek.

There's always a trade off when it comes to styling and performance in a gaming laptop, but we suspect Alienware will go for a skinnier design this time around. At the very least, we'd expect to see much slimmer bezels and likely at the option of a OLED and mini-LED displays, with both 1440p and 4K featuring. High refresh rates of at least 240Hz are pretty much a given.

Back in 2015, the Alienware 18 went for between $2,500 and $4,500 depending on specification. Add eight years and plenty of intervening inflation and it's slightly scary to think how high the new model might go. It's hard to imagine a starting price below three grand.

Razer is also rumoured to be working on an 18-inch laptop with 13th Gen Intel CPUs. There's a decent chance both will be unveiled at CES in January. Watch this space if uber-sized gaming portables are your thing. I think you'll be pleased.

Discord is getting in on the holiday deals season with a Cyber Monday offer on its premium subscription service, Discord Nitro, which offers expanded features to the chat app like custom emojis, better streaming quality, and in-app games called Activities.

Until November 28 (that's today), those who purchase a new Discord Nitro one-month ($9.99) or annual ($99.99) subscription will get a free month of Nitro added to their account—a pretty good deal if you've been meaning to try out Discord's premium features.

As a long-time Discord Nitro subscriber who mostly uses the service to stream games to friends at higher resolutions and framerates, I was delightfully surprised by a recent revamp of Nitro that added one of my new favorite Discord features: Activities. These "activities" are mostly in-house games made by Discord that run inside active voice channels, and they're pretty great.

The selection is basically pulled from the board game shelf of your average family game night: there's a version of Pictionary called SketchHeads, Scrabble, poker, checkers, and chess, plus a minigolf game called Putt Party and a Snake.io clone called Land-io. It's been really nice to fire up one of these games in the downtime between watching shows or playing games with friends, and I've definitely been caught playing hands of poker before the next round of Overwatch 2 starts.

• We're curating all the best Cyber Monday PC gaming deals right here.

You need at least one person with a Nitro subscription in the chat for Activities to work, but here's a nice plus: none of the games have any monetization whatsoever. That's so rare these days that I was a little confused that I was allowed to just give myself chips as the host in the Poker Night.

Even if the group gets bored after the third round of Putt Party, the BOGO deal is a better time than any to secure a few months of Nitro and see if it's worth keeping around.

Dell's Alienware line of gaming laptops has always been a divisive topic; it's difficult to dispute that they've got some powerful components under the hood, but the sci-fi aesthetic isn't to everyone's taste and you're certainly resigning yourself to paying a steep premium if you buy one. I like to call this the 'Alienware Tax'—and with Dell's new Alienware x14, that's actually a tax I'd be happy to pay. The larger, heavier 17-inch models are a bit harder to love, but this compact powerhouse immediately feels like a laptop for the discerning gamer.

Let's take a quick moment to look at what we're working with here. The Alienware x14 can be configured on Dell's websites with a few different specifications, with the cheapest model (which sports a 12th-gen Intel Core i5 processor and an RTX 3050) costing $1,499 (£1,549). The model I'm looking at for review has an Intel Core i7 12700H and an RTX 3060, joined by 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. This model costs $1,949 (£1,929).

You can pay extra to upgrade the memory and the drive (up to 32GB and 4TB respectively) but otherwise, this is the peak of the x14's configurations. That's totally fine, to be clear: squeezing an RTX 3070 or an i9 CPU into this little laptop would probably lead to significant compromises when it came to the chassis or thermal performance, and nobody wants that.

Attach those components to a bright and colourful 1080p display with a 144Hz refresh rate, and you've got a competent FHD gaming system. The Alienware x14 averaged over 60 fps in the majority of games, only dipping down into the 50-60 fps range in the more intensive game benchmarks like Metro: Exodus and Cyberpunk 2077. It won't be able to run Ultra settings cleanly in every single game, but it's the reliable 1080p performance that I've come to expect from the RTX 3060.

The laptop generally performs well across the board, with respectable scores in most synthetic benchmarks thanks to its Core i7 12700H processor and speedy DDR5 memory. It's undeniably a solid machine, but the price tag still doesn't quite add up—considering you can get an RTX 3060-equipped Asus TUF Dash F15 for $800 less, and even the RTX 3070-powered Dash we reviewed is cheaper than this. The Alienware x14 is sitting right at the premium end of FHD gaming laptops.

So, what is that hefty asking price getting you? Well, for starters this is an impressively compact gaming laptop, weighing in at just 4lbs (1.8kg) and just over half an inch thick with the lid closed. The inset hinge that has become synonymous with Alienware laptops is present, enlarging the overall footprint at the rear by about an inch. The chassis is mostly plastic, but it feels durable and doesn't pick up fingerprints easily.

The physical design is clean and effective; the interior is all-black, with a long perforated grille for the fans and speakers that extends down either side of the keyboard. The screen bezel is quite thin, with a bar across the top that contains the webcam, microphone array, and IR camera for facial recognition logins. Close the lid, and the exterior of the chassis is almost entirely white, printed faintly with a number 14 and adorned with Dell's little alien-face logo.

That logo lights up with RGB LEDs, but there's no sign of the chunky rear lightbar found on larger Alienware laptops here. The keyboard is also limited to single-zone solid-color RGB, so don't expect any flashy lighting effects. It's not a huge loss, but does feel a little harsh given the high price.

Fortunately, that keyboard is actually good to use. It's nothing mind-blowing—chiclet-style keys with butterfly switches beneath—but the individual key sizing is good, which makes it comfortable to use for both typing and gaming. Running down the right-hand side is a set of dedicated volume and mute keys, with their own lights to indicate whether your mic or speakers are muted.

The trackpad is less impressive. I don't say that because it's unpleasant to use; the click is satisfying, and there's none of the sponginess found in cheaper gaming laptops. It's simply a little on the small side, especially compared to the large trackpad of the Razer Blade 14—which is arguably the Alienware x14's immediate competitor in the premium compact gaming laptop space, and carries its own 'Razer Tax'.

The only significant frown I made when examining the x14's chassis came from finding that every single one of this laptop's ports are located on the rear edge. This is something that might not bother some users, but having to reach all the way around the back to plug in a thumb drive or the power cable swiftly became annoying. There is, at least, a good selection of physical ports: a conventional USB Type-A is joined by two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI 2.1, a headset jack, and a microSD card slot. The only thing missing is an Ethernet connection.

I wish I could say that the Alienware x14's digital side only gave me one concern, but naturally, this laptop came loaded with Dell's almost-bloatware Alienware software suite. Aside from not really doing much in this laptop—you can swap between performance profiles with a button press without needing to ever open the software—it's just not a particularly well-designed piece of software.

The Alienware x14 also uses Nvidia's mode-switching tech to conserve battery life, which in practice is more annoying than it is beneficial. It essentially swaps automatically between using the integrated CPU graphics and the dedicated GPU depending on the task at hand, which would be great if it didn't also freeze for several seconds every single time it did that. I ended up turning it off and sticking to the GPU graphics.

I found that the CPU ran quite hot too—maxing out at 100°C shortly into the benchmarking process, but that didn't appear to cause any noticeable amount of slowdown. The outer casing only felt mildly warm, which is a far cry from the thigh-roastings I've had from other laptops. The fans were a bit noisy while running intensive tasks, however.

Finally, there's the battery life. To put it short: it's not great. I've seen worse, but those were mostly bigger, more powerful machines. Sure, gaming laptops are somewhat universally poor in this area, mostly because running games is a power-intensive activity—anyone who has tried to play Genshin Impact on a phone will testify to this. But still, the Alienware x14's battery life fell just short of 'dismal' in our tests.

The simple truth of the Alienware x14's existence is that it isn't a gaming laptop for everyone. You could get similar performance from a much cheaper laptop, but the target audience here is people who don't want a budget device. The x14 looks and feels like a premium product, with performance that is good enough to justify buying it in the first place. 

Earlier this year we checked out the Alienware 34 QD-OLED AW3423DW curved gaming monitor and our reviewer was not disappointed. The wonderful contrast and colours combined with HDR made for a gorgeous lush screen while the 175Hz refresh rate and G-Sync Ultimate technology offered that smooth experience gamers expect. But that bit of Nvidia tech comes with a tax, and in this case it seems to be about $200 USD. 

Alienware's AW3423DW monitor released a few months back with a price tag it still holds of $1,299 USD. Alienware's new AW3423DWF monitor has just been announced (spotted by Tom's Hardware) and it's very similar to our favoured AW3423DW but with open standard technology, making for a $200 cheaper monitor. 

Avoiding the Nvidia licence and using AMD's FreeSync Premium Pro and VESA's Adaptive Sync means this new shiny OLED is now down to $1,100 USD. It also means the anti-screen tearing efforts and variable refresh rates are compatible with consoles like the Xbox Series X and PS5 for up to 120Hz.

For $200 less you're still getting a great 34-inch 3440 x 1440 QD OLED panel with quantum dot tech. It's a huge upgrade for gaming if you don't already have an ultrawide. The dark blacks and contrast is further enhanced by HDR and it really adds to immersion and image quality while gaming. But the refresh rate has been cut down ever so slightly from 175Hz to 165Hz.

There are a few other minor changes of note in this new model. The G-Sync variant sports a white backing design, while the AMD is a more toned down looking all black design with small LED highlights on the back with a smaller footprint. Dell has also swapped the port configuration offering up two DisplayPort ports but only one HDMI 2.0 one, which seems weird when they could just give us two of each. Regardless, it's still offering a 0.1ms response time while rocking the 1800R curve, though not a bendable one like that crazy Corsair screen.

It's pretty exciting to see a new variation of our top choice in gaming monitors release at a price drop, even if that is just made of Nvidia tax. This does bring the AW3423DWF down into what might be a more affordable price point for many, especially if they weren't going to benefit from the proprietary software in the first place. Finally, we might be seeing the best gaming monitor of the year for AMD builds when this one releases in the US and Canada on November 8.