The Alienware 16X Aurora is a gaming powerhouse — here’s my honest verdict after six months of testing

It’s no secret that Dell makes good laptops, and the storied brand has done it once again with the Alienware 16X Aurora. A powerful gaming laptop with bags of performance under the hood, the 16X Aurora is an excellent mid-range option. With its 240Hz refresh rate, bright screen, wide color coverage and accuracy, there’s a lot to love about it. Gaming performance is nothing short of exceptional, and it's perfect for everyday work too.

Graphics are beautiful thanks to NVIDIA’s RTX 50 series too. The 16X Aurora also sports a premium, good-looking design with plenty of ports for hooking up several peripherals. But it’s worth noting that its battery life can be described as mediocre at best, and the top level configuration will cost you an arm and a leg.

Is this the best gaming laptop for you? Read my full Dell Alienware 16X Aurora review to find out.

Dell Alienware 16X Aurora review: Specs

Dell Alienware 16X Aurora review: Cheat sheet

• What is it? A (slightly bulky) gaming laptop boasting outstanding performance in gaming and productivity
• Who is it for? Gamers who want a high-performing laptops
• How much does it cost? The Dell Alienware 16X Aurora starts at $2,499 / £2,199 and goes all the way up to $4,299 / £3,299
• What do we like? The premium design, excellent gaming and productivity performance, and great color coverage and accuracy
• What don’t we like? The mediocre battery life and premium price point

Dell Alienware 16X Aurora review: The ups

From its fantastic design and numerous ports, to its excellent gaming performance and wide color coverage, the Dell Alienware 16X Aurora is a superb machine.

Fantastic design and connectivity

Ever since I first heard about Alienware laptops back when I was 12, I’ve always loved the design — the alien logo is a treat. The Alienware 16X Aurora is, then, a rather good-looking laptop, wrapped in dark blue and purple-ish colors, officially called “Interstellar Indigo.” Its smooth aluminum chassis feels premium, and the matte finish lends the 16X Aurora a classy look.

The 16X Aurora packs a 16-inch (2560 x 1600) non-touch screen, so it measures 14.05 x 10.45 x 0.92 inches, making it a little bigger than the Dell XPS 16 ($1,749). While not exactly compact, it still fits into most regular-sized backpacks with ease — although its weight (5.66lbs) might put you off from traveling with it for long.

I’ve really enjoyed using the 16X Aurora’s keyboard and trackpad too. The keys on the keyboard have enough space between them that you don’t accidentally hit an unintended key, but they’re also close enough that you don’t have to spread your fingers too much to type. The keyboard features single-zone RGB lighting only, which I don’t personally mind — and you can change the colors and effects via Alienware’s Command Center software. The touchpad also feels highly responsive and pans smoothly. No complaints there.

Ports-wise, the 16X Aurora is packed, and features basically everything you’d need to hook up a plethora of peripherals to it. Alongside the laptop’s left edge, you’ll find a USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 port, an ethernet jack, as well as a 3.5mm jack for plugging in gaming headsets.

There are no ports on the right edge; instead, the others are located on the rear. There’s another of the same USB-A port, two USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports (one of which supports Thunderbolt 4), the port for the power adapter, and an HDMI port.

A vivid display

I’ve used the Dell Alienware 16X Aurora extensively and for a number of tasks: gaming, testing gaming keyboards and mice, conducting lab testing on the best monitors, and everyday work-centric tasks too. And there’s plenty of performance here to enjoy.

The 16-inch screen, first of all, has a refresh rate of 240Hz, which ensures silky smooth performance in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza Horizon 5. The 2.5K panel is plenty of resolution that makes games feel immersive, and there’s also an OLED configuration if that’s more your speed.

In addition to gaming, which I’ll get into in the next section, the 16X Aurora delivers bright, vivid colors across the board. I was stunned at how rich all the different shades and hues looked in the World Wildlife 4K YouTube video. Lush, green meadows appeared highly detailed, as did darker scenes filmed at night.

My lab testing confirmed what my eyes saw, as you can see in the table above. The 16X Aurora covers 98.3% of the sRGB spectrum and 99% of the wider DCI P3 color gamut. While both values are just a touch off 100%, the difference is barely noticeable, and you get an enjoyable viewing experience.

A Delta-E score of 0.6 is good too. It basically determines color accuracy, and the closer the score to zero, the better. 0.6, in this regard, is great, and I found the colors to be accurate in real-world use too.

The Razer Blade 16 ($2,999) and the Alienware x16 R2 ($2,099) boast better color accuracy making either a slightly better option than the 16X Aurora for those who do, say, color-intensive work, like photo and video editing. However, the 16X Aurora is much brighter than both with a measured brightness of 450.8 nits, so you shouldn’t have any issues seeing the screen in lit-up rooms. The MacBook Pro M5 ($1,599) upstages them all, though, with its 558 nits of brightness.

Performance aplenty

In addition to excellent color coverage and accuracy, the Dell Alienware 16X Aurora packs a powerful chip too. Depending on the configuration you go for, there are a few processing chips you can go for. My review unit came fitted with the Intel Core Ultra 7 255HX chip, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD.

Regardless of the task I did, the 16X Aurora performed admirably. Having multiple applications and browsers with 20 tabs open wasn’t an issue for the 16X Aurora. I didn’t experience any noticeable lag or unresponsiveness. Though there were a few instances where the laptop sounded like it was going to take off — particularly while playing the CPU-intensive Cyberpunk 2077 — I didn’t find it too jarring.

On Geekbench 6, which tests overall CPU performance, the 16X Aurora pulled in an excellent multi-core score of 18,697, outclassing both the Razer Blade 16 (2024) and the Alienware x16 R2. The MacBook Pro M5 performs slightly better than the 16X Aurora in our HandBrake video editing test (transcoding a 4K video to 1080p), but only by a very small margin.

On the BlackMagic Disk Speed test which measures the write and read speed in MBps, the 16X Aurora performed stupendously, with 4,233 write and 5,045 read speeds. The MacBook Pro M5 outperforms the 16X Aurora here with its fast 6,068 write and 6,323 read speeds, but in everyday use, Dell’s offering is more than enough.

Great for gaming

The Dell Alienware 16X Aurora is a beast for gaming. The model I tested packs an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card, with the top level configuration featuring an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti card.

At a native resolution of 2560 x 1600, this laptop can run the best Steam games without breaking a sweat. Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve used the 16X Aurora extensively to test the best gaming monitors, and the laptop has always performed admirably.

I played Cyberpunk 2077, Forza Horizon 5 and F1 25 with the highest graphics settings enabled. In Cyberpunk 2077 with features like Ray-Traced Lighting set to Ultra, the benchmark results showed an average of 63fps. Meanwhile, in Forza Horizon 5, I hit 150fps in Extreme mode, while F1 25 ran at a silky smooth 109fps in Ultra High graphics mode. Counter-Strike 2 achieved a maximum FPS of 235, so close to the screen’s 240Hz refresh rate, and it ensured ultra smooth performance.

Benchmark results are great on paper and can tell you a lot about the laptop’s performance, but how do the games really run? Well, really well. The user experience is sublime, with stunning visuals, vivid colors, and non-existent lag or ghosting. When the driver in front of me hit the brakes in F1 25, I could see the sparks flying from underneath the tyres in great detail — just like you would while watching a race on TV. In Cyberpunk 2077, the neon lights appeared saturated enough that they made me feel immersed in the streets of Night City.

Dell Alienware 16X Aurora review: The downs

The Dell Alienware 16X Aurora is a highly competent laptop, but there are a couple of flaws, namely its high price point and mediocre battery life.

Can get very expensive

The rule of thumb when buying a laptop is that the more things you add to its internal hardware, the more expensive it becomes — and the Dell Alienware 16X Aurora can get very pricey, especially when you deck it up with the best graphic card available and fit the biggest SSD possible.

The standard configuration I tested, at the time of writing, costs $2,499 / £2,199. If you go for the top level configuration with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 card, a 4TB SSD, and an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, you’re looking at an expenditure of $4,299 / £3,299. That’s a lot. I also say “at the time of writing” as prices may vary and fluctuate with the ongoing RAM crisis. It’s also worth noting that neither of these configurations feature an OLED panel.

For the OLED model, you’ll need to settle for 32GB RAM, 1TB storage and the Intel Core Ultra 9 290HZ process, and this model costs $2,919. It’s also not available in the U.K., at the time of writing.

Mediocre battery life

One of the first things I noticed during my early testing time with the Dell Alienware 16X Aurora was that its battery life seemed very short. I was having to constantly recharge the laptop while playing games. Having conducted a benchmark battery test, I can now confirm that the 16X Aurora’s battery life leaves a lot to be desired.

Due to lab testing limitations, I wasn’t able to conduct our specialized in-house battery testing, so I used UL Procyon’s battery benchmark test instead. I calibrated the 16X Aurora’s brightness to 150 nits and let the software play videos until the laptop ran out of charge, and that took three hours and one minute, which is awful.

This is poor but it isn’t exclusive to the 16X Aurora. As you can see in the table above, the Razer Blade 16 and the Alienware x16 R2 gaming laptops also have subpar battery lives, especially when compared to the behemoth MacBook Pro M5.

Chances are, your gaming laptop will be plugged in while you play anyway, and the 16X Aurora isn’t really a portable laptop either, so does the suboptimal battery matter that much? I don’t believe so.

Dell Alienware 16X Aurora review: Verdict

The Dell Alienware 16X Aurora is a very capable gaming laptop, and one of the best you can buy today. The laptop boasts a lovely, premium design, and it’s built well too. There are plenty of ports for connecting the laptop to a monitor or plugging your favorite peripherals into it.

Performance-wise, the 16X Aurora features a vivid display with great color coverage and accuracy, and its 240Hz refresh rate makes it ideal for gaming. It’s perfect for general productivity as well. While its battery life isn’t industry-leading, and the laptop can get very expensive depending on the configuration, neither drawback should stop you from picking up the 16X Aurora. It looks good and performs even better.