Gamers should go with the Alienware Aurora 16X model

Let's get this out of the way first. This Aurora 16X deal is the same price as the base Alienware Aurora 16 (non-X) laptop with worse specs. There's little argument here; just look at the list of upgrades below:

• Better display (2560x1600 240Hz G-Sync vs 2560x1600 120Hz)
• More powerful CPU (Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX vs Intel Core 9 270H)
• Higher RTX 5070 TGP rating and thus better performance (115W TGP vs 85W TGP)
• More premium materials (metal alloy lid and chassis vs lid only)
• RGB keyboard vs white-only backlighting
• Thunderbolt 4.0 port

Compared to other Alienware laptops, the Aurora 16X is designed to look less like a gamer's laptop. It boasts a sleek, understated design with the absence of extraneous visual-only embellishments or unnecessary RGB lighting outside of the keyboard illumination. Under the hood, however, the Aurora 16X still packs a punch with powerful gaming components and a robust Cryo Chamber cooling system. It's also priced much more affordably than an equivalent Alienware 16 Area-51 laptop, which costs at least $900 more. The Alienware Aurora 16X also weighs 1.6 pounds less and has a 30% thinner profile. For gamers that don't have a bottomless budget and value maximum performance for the price, this is definitely the gaming laptop to get.

The Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX is a top performing CPU

The Area-51 laptop is also equipped with a very powerful CPU as well. The Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX boasts a max turbo frequency of 5.4GHz with a whopping 24 cores and 40MB total L2 cache. According to Passmark, this is the second most powerful Intel mobile CPU available right now and goes head to head with AMD's Ryzen 9 7945HX3D.

The GeForce RTX 5070 is 5%-10% better than the RTX 4070

The mobile RTX 5070 GPU performs about 5%-10% better than the RTX 4070 that it replaces. That's not a very big generational improvement, but the RTX 5070 also supports multi-frame generation, which means the margin will widen in games that support DLSS 4.0. If you want a significantly better performing Nvidia GPU, you'll have to pick up an RTX 5070 Ti or RTX 5080 laptop. Currently the Alienware Aurora 16 doesn't have an option to equip these GPUs, so you would have to pony up $900 more for the Area-51.

Check out more of the best Alienware deals

Check out our Best Alienware Deals article with all of Dell's currently ongoing deals on gaming laptops and desktop PCs. Not everyone is the DIY type. If you're in the market for a prebuilt gaming PC, Dell is one of the best brands we'd recommend. Alienware desktops and laptops feature solid build quality, top-of-the-line gaming performance, excellent cooling (further improved on the newer models), aggressive styling, and pricing that is very competitive with other pre-built options. Best of all, there are plenty of sales that happen throughout the year, so it's not difficult to grab one of these computers at considerably less than their retail price.

Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.