Alienware celebrates 25th anniversary with redesigned flagship Aurora desktop

Arif Bacchus

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Alienware is unveiling a new Alienware Aurora model that offers ultimate gaming power, and tool-less entry. Being called Alienware’s most accessible and upgradeable desktop to date, this model debuts a new curvaceous Legend 2.0 chassis and several significant design improvements.

Pricing has not yet been announced, but Alienware mentioned that this desktop has been “forged by the continuously passionate and compounding feedback of fans.” Sporting the Legend 2.0 industrial design famous from the Alienware laptop lineup, the new design choice benefits both performance, as well as cooling.

According to Alienware, an open layout chassis delivers 1.5x the internal volume compared to Aurora R12 or R10. That also means that compared to its predecessor, while running at idle, the Alienware Aurora ranges from 13% to 16% quieter depending on the configuration selected with available CPU liquid cooling. Other design changes can be seen below.

  • AlienFX customizable lighting capabilities have
    doubled. The next generation of Aurora will support
    up to 8 lighting zones including various internal
    ambient and traditional lighting capabilities
  • A custom motherboard that
    places power connections towards the edges to
    eliminate any chance of airflow obstruction and
    eliminates the need for a daughter board for front
    I/O to reduce internal wiring needs.
  • Motherboard power connectors have all been
    positioned towards the boundary of the
    motherboard to reduce cable clutter and promote
    airflow.

In addition to the cooling and design changes, graphics performance increased by 5% over the Aurora R12 when using the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card while running the 3DMark TimeSpy graphics score tests. Alienware even claims that thanks to these design changes, CPU temperatures have been recorded at up to 3% lower when both had CPU liquid cooling, and both were served the same 160W of power.