Review: Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop

Prebuilt gaming desktops have a market. After all, some people want a simpler entry into the world of PC gaming that doesn't involve tinkering. That's where a PC like the Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop comes into play—in theory.

While Alienware typically addresses the higher-end demographic with its gaming desktops and laptops, the Aurora Gaming Desktop is the company's most serious attempt yet to offer its gaming goods at a lower price. Overall, I've been happy with what you get with the Aurora, especially when I've seen sales that dip the price to $1,500.

Dressed to Game

Photograph: Luke Larsen

I recently reviewed the Dell Tower Plus, a prebuilt desktop I liked quite a lot. Turns out, the Aurora Gaming Desktop is almost identical to that PC, but with the Alienware branding (Dell owns Alienware). You get a ring of Tron-esque light around the intake fans at the front, as well as the smattering of honeycomb perforations along the glass window in the side panel. And the alien head itself is the power button.

It’s accurate to say that the Aurora feels like a gamer skin on the Dell Tower Plus, but that’s not a complaint. I found a lot to like about the way Dell balanced ease of use, upgradability, and price—and it translates well enough for gaming hardware. It’s not using fully off-the-shelf parts, but there’s enough here to make specific upgrades well into the future.

Like the Dell Tower Plus, the Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop comes in a custom case with an Intel Z890 Alienware motherboard, which has two DIMM slots of memory and two PCIe 5 M.2 slots for SSDs. Even though a standard ATX or Micro-ATX motherboard would fit, swapping in a new one would be difficult due to the use of proprietary connectors. An AMD CPU is a better option for prebuilt desktops like this, as you might be able to upgrade in future generations because AMD supports the same socket in a way that Intel does not. In other words, if you want a new CPU for the Aurora in a few years, you may be stuck.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

But don’t worry—there’s plenty of other things you can upgrade yourself. The graphics card, for example, is easily accessible. Once I removed the plastic brackets for shipping, it couldn't be easier to remove the graphics card. RAM, M.2 storage, and the Wi-Fi card are also easy to upgrade yourself, too. Meanwhile, there’s a single storage bay for a 3.5-inch SATA drive located in the bottom right corner with connectors already routed for slower and cheaper storage. There’s also one more open spot for a second intake fan that you can add yourself. In general, cable management is tidy.

Beyond the basics of what’s offered in the Dell Tower Plus, the Aurora adds things like the option for more powerful graphics and an all-in-one liquid cooler. My review unit came sporting the Nvidia RTX 5070, though the options include the RTX 5060 Ti, 5070 Ti, and 5080. The RTX 5090 is reserved for the company’s mega-tower behemoth, the Alienware Area-51. (There isn't enough room or power in this case to support that massive card.)

The 120-mm liquid cooling for the CPU only costs an extra $30 to upgrade, also providing two 120-mm fans installed at the top of the case to exhaust out through the top panel. There’s an RGB fan located in the rear for exhaust, and one up front for intake from the front panel. All that said, there’s a lot more potential for better airflow than in the Dell Tower Plus. In all my stress tests, the system maxed out at 82 degrees Celsius. That’s far from the coolest PC I’ve tested, but it’s within the range of acceptable temperatures.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

Up front, you get access to some handy ports: a headphone jack, three 5-Gbps USB-A ports, and a 10-Gbps USB-C port. These are the USB ports I often find myself using for convenience. The fastest USB you have is in the back, however. You get one 20-Gbps, USB4 port in the rear of the PC, alongside another 10-Gbps USB-C port, two more 5-Gbps USB-A ports, and two more 480-Mbps USB-A ports.

Don't ask me why there have to be so many different USB ports and speeds, but suffice to say, it's important to know which is which. Fortunately, each is labeled with the actual speeds. There's also an RJ-45 2.5-gigabit Ethernet jack and your typical line in/line out ports. You'll want to use the HDMI or DisplayPort in the graphics card for displays, especially since CPUs like the Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF don't come with integrated graphics, like mine.

A Decent Performer

Photograph: Luke Larsen

My unit came with an RTX 5070, and it costs an extra $250 to jump up to the RTX 5070 Ti, which gets you an extra 4 GB of VRAM. That's about on par with GPU prices available right now. At the time of writing, the starting $1,299 model comes with the RTX 5060 Ti, as well as 32 GB of RAM, a 1-terabyte M.2 SSD, and a 500-watt power supply. It's probably worth the $150 upgrade to get the 1,000-watt power supply, so you're clear to upgrade to a more powerful graphics card.

It also came with two sticks of Kingston Fury 16-GB RAM and a Wi-Fi 7 card. All that for $1,550 is a really solid deal. There are cheaper ways to get RTX 5070-level performance, such as this iBuyPower system, but the Alienware Aurora is also far from the most expensive either. The Asus ROG G700, for example, is hundreds of dollars more, even when similarly configured. I haven't tested these yet myself, so I don't know how equivalent the performance or fan noise is. But the Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop is a great deal, especially if you catch it on sale.

The Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop performs fine enough. It's about 5 percent behind the typical RTX 5070 scores in 3DMark Steel Nomad, a standard benchmark for measuring gaming PCs. The RTX 5070 is considered primarily a 1080p video card that can occasionally jump up to 1440p, depending on the game. You can see the frame rates in the chart below, all of which were tested at max settings without ray tracing, frame generation, or upscaling. Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong are both more GPU-intensive, while Marvel Rivals and Monster Hunter Wilds are more bottlenecked by the CPU.

The performance in Cyberpunk 2077, in particular, felt impressive. I was even able to average 71 fps (frames per second) in the Ray Tracing Ultra preset in 1080p without relying on DLSS. It's really too bad that it couldn't get Black Myth: Wukong over 60 fps at 1080p, though. It's a heavy game, but when you spend over $1,500, you hope that you can play modern games at 1080p at smooth frame rates. You can always drop the graphics preset in the game settings or sprinkle in some light DLSS upscaling for better performance. It was also around 5 percent behind our testing of the RTX 5070 Founders Edition on our test bench.

While performance didn't blow me away, I was overall impressed by what's on offer with the Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop. This isn't the PC to buy if you want ultimate control over upgrades in the future or even the most powerful gaming desktop. But if you want a pretty computer that you can upgrade the graphics for in the future, it does the job—just make sure to get it with the 1,000-watt power supply.