Customer Ratings & Reviews

I purchased my Alienware 16X Aurora AC16251 after stopping into the Best Buy South Loop location in Chicago. I made about two trips of just browsing, and looking. I really took my time with my selection. After feeling every laptop that was on display, this one was the hottest of them all. At first, that turned me away but what became after that was choosing the one I slept on. I chose this model because of the RAM specifically. The screen isn’t my favorite after jumpshipping from a MacBook with Retina Display. But I cant complain about the refresh rate at a cool 240 Hz. The battery life, I only use this plugged in and I do complete shut downs after every use/play session. I do not intend to use this laptop for my personal use. It’s too big and clunky for that. I thought this would the kind of laptop to use while laying and lounging but I was wrong. Instead my set up is front of my lounge/recliner chair on a side table. I bought this laptop to play The Sims 3, which with all of the expansion packs, mods, and settings set to ultra, I finally healed my inner child. This laptop has great power settings, as it can automatically detect what you are doing. You have more battery profiles off of the charger but when you’re plugged in, you only have the options between balance or performance mode. Fans are loud. Like jet engine loud. But I don’t mind. This is a power house. This thing is a beast compared to the 1030 that was using before. And obviously in terms of software more than an Apple MacBook. This laptop also has gamepass included for a month (with credit card on file).

Performance on this laptop is excellent — fast, smooth, and handles games and programs with no issues. Battery life is decent for a gaming laptop but only lasts me about 2 hours off the charger. The biggest downside is the heat, it can get pretty hot during use. Keyboard feels a little cheap compared to the rest of the build. No fingerprint scanner, but it does have Windows Hello face unlock which works great. Overall, a powerful machine with a few small trade-offs.

I bought the Alienware 16X Aurora for both work and gaming and it has exceeded expectations. Performance is the headline here. Everything is fast. Apps open instantly, multitasking stays smooth, and it handles demanding creative workloads without feeling stressed. Editing timelines, exporting, and running heavier software feels effortless, and when it’s time to game the RTX 5060 delivers great frame rates with settings pushed up. The 16 inch 2.5K display is a standout. It’s sharp, bright, and makes both content work and gaming look excellent. Build quality also feels premium and sturdy, and the keyboard and trackpad are comfortable for long sessions. Thermals have been solid for a thin performance laptop and it stays stable under load. If you want a laptop that can handle real work and still be a serious gaming machine, this one is an easy recommendation.

Great PC for the great price. I mostly use it for running heavy GPu consuming tools like VMware, VIsual Studio, RAG frameworks, and a lot of IDEs and browsers. Also for the gaming, I have played FC25 & League of Legends and runs smooth like a butter. Fan noise and heat is somewhat noticeable but other than that great purchase for the great deal.

Very capable machine. I purchased it primarily for software development. My tooling uses a lot of Ram as well as demands a fair bit from the CPU, this computer was able handle all of that and much more. The RTX 5060 is also quite capable are running games on high at 2560x1600 , which for my gaming habits is more than enough. The build quality is also great.

The best birthday gift for my son and the best purchase in years. Its excellent Intel Core Ultra 9 processor, 32GB of RAM, and RTX 5060 deliver brutal performance for gaming and demanding tasks. The 240Hz display is super smooth, and the blue design gives it a unique touch. Everything loads super fast thanks to the 1TB SSD. 100% recommended! Thanks to Best Buy for always having the best technology available and making this premium experience possible.

It is good but i didn't like the charger is a huge and the laptop’s charging port is located in an impractical position at the back of the device under the screen, which makes using it while charging inconvenient. In addition, the laptop is very heavy.

Does everything you need, plays all the games I enjoy, Battery life is not the best and gets pretty hot when playing games otherwise good laptop.

Good laptop perfect for gaming and for video editing

amazing for gaming and trading great speed for both love it

The laptop is fantastic! Powerful, fast, efficient, and trustworthy. I can play games, edit videos, complete work tasks, and more at great quality. This is definitely a best buy!

The Alienware Aurora 16x is an incredible gaming PC. It delivers outstanding performance, runs smoothly even with demanding games.

My son absolutely loves his laptop. Does everything we need it to do. Not just games.

The product is great, and very beautiful. I recommend it to everyone.

everything at first glance looks extremely good, arrived earlier than estimated

Works great. This is my first gaming laptop I’ve had and it runs everything great so far.

When Dell purchased the high-end PC maker Alienware, it was in order to compete with emerging and existing power players. And what a great addition it was as Dell kept the brand's quality, design and power that users had come to expect from Alienware. It's 2025 and here is a brand-new line of Aurora 16 gaming laptops which are much more affordable than before. But did they cut corners? Is the quality on par with what you'd expect? Let's find out! The Aurora 16X is a beauty. I had the chance to snatch a blue version of it and it's gorgeous. The blue changes colors and alters between a black and dark blue depending on the light hitting it. It's relatively light compared to other gaming laptops, it's very well designed with plenty of air intake and release (note the little bulge on the bottom which helps boost the cooling). The connectors are spread out between the back and the left side of the laptop, which is almost a perfect layout, as you won't be fighting cables and USB dongles. The power brick is quite hefty, but fits neatly in a laptop bag or sleeve. The keyboard is comfortable to use and features back lighting for those long gaming sessions in the dark. In order to paint a quaint little picture of the Aurora 16X, I will break this down and go over the most important components, design and quality. CPU - This is perhaps one of the biggest highlight of this laptop. It sports a massive Intel Core 9 Ultra 275HX with 12 cores and 24 threads, which includes an internal iGPU as well. To be honest, this is almost overkill for gaming, but it does open opportunities to use it for content creation and more. It's blazing fast and powerful. GPU - You will be able to pick between the iGPU (integrated within the CPU) or a dedicated RTX 5060 laptop GPU. Focusing on the RTX as this is a gaming laptop, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it handled itself with all sorts of games. One big oddity is the choice of the 8 gigs of VRAM: it's genuine GDDR7 and not GDDR6. The reason this is odd is that the desktop versions of the 5060 do not run on GDDR7 but on the slower GDDR6. That being said, it's a boon for anyone who'll pick this laptop up. On the downside, the bus is limited to a meager 128bit. But I was able to leverage the RTX features such as multiple frame generation and other AI tools to speed up the rendering without sacrificing too much on the quality. You'll be able to run most games on medium or high settings depending on the game. Personally, I would have preferred a 5060Ti which would have probably enabled the Aurora to push a little more, but it would have raised the price quite a bit. RAM - That's another aspect of the Aurora 16X I liked a lot. It packs 32 gigs of memory, which is perfect for gaming. I believe we're now done with 16 gigs and don't get me started on gaming rigs flashing a pitiful 8 gigs of RAM. The memory is made by SK Hynix, which is amongst the best memory makers. This is more than enough for almost every task. SSD - This is where scratched my head a bit. The internal SSD/Nvme can only hold 1 TB. Why pack so much RAM into this beast and restrict it on the amount of software you can install without adding another storage device on? Games have become bigger and bigger and there are many that require 200+ gigs or more of storage *each*. You won't be able to store more than a handful of games on this SSD. I would recommend an upgrade down the road to 2 or even 4 TB. Screen - I won't beat around the bush on this one: It's great. With up to 240Hz refresh rate and a vivid 16" diagonal WQXGA, it's comfortable to use in any lighting condition. It's not an OLED screen by any means, but for this price, it's a great screen. Ports - There's plenty of ports, USB-A gen 3.x, Type C, HDMI, audio... you name it, it's there. And the layout is close to flawless. Everything else: The keyboard is great, the trackpad is very responsive and have a nice feel to it. The sound is surprisingly great as Alienware has lodged the speakers below the screen and above the keyboard. The battery life is solid as long as you switch between different power profiles. On battery, you won't be able to play for hours, but, it charges quite fast. The web-cam is nothing to write home about, it's there and functional, but nothing mind-blowing. So the question is: for this price, is it a sound purchase? I would argue that it is actually extremely affordable considering the quality and power. It's a premium gaming laptop at a mid-range price. What's not to love about that? Maybe the underwhelming RTX 5060 Laptop GPU which is not as powerful as it should be, especially looking at the remaining components. But at this price point, to get all this packed in a gorgeous package is a no-brainer. Buy it!

I loved the laptop and the price was perfect. I will buy again

The Alienware (by Dell) 16X Aurora 16” laptop is a powerful computer for gamers and those needing a lot of power for games as well as certain types of work, such as serious videography. So I’ll start out by saying that if you just need something for general school, office, or personal use, this machine will be overkill for basic needs. This is for people who need power that the average laptop doesn’t give you. That said, If you do need the power, the Alienware 16X Aurora dishes it out. First thing you’ll notice when unpacking it though is the weight. With power comes weight, and this machine is nearly 6 pounds, not including the very large (and also heavy) 180 watt charging brick and proprietary power plug. This is after all designed for gamers who most likely will keep it at home or not tote it around a lot, and while it can be put in a larger backpack, you won’t want to do it frequently. With the weight though, comes a really nice, bright and colorful, 240Hz, 16 inch screen with a sharp resolution of 2560 x 1600. You are combining this with an Intel Core i9 series 2 processor, 32 gigs of RAM, a dedicated NVIDIA RTX graphics card with 8 gigs of dedicated video RAM in itself, along with a 1 terabyte SSD drive for storage, So again, a very powerful system. Setup was a little frustrating. The initial setup takes a while as the Aurora needs to download updates, but make note – after all is said and done, if you manually go into the Updates area in settings, it will find a number of additional updates to install, including firmware which takes quite a while. So, expect full setup to take quite a bit of time. After the firmware update, it erased by initial face recognized login and PIN I had set up, and I had to redo both. So maybe expect a little frustration as well. You’ll get plenty of ports with the 16X Aurora. Many of them are on the back (my preference) so they’re out of the way. On the back you have your power port, a HDMI 2.1 port, Two USB-C ports (one being thunderbolt 4.0) and a USB-A port. The left side has your headset jack, another USB-A port, and an Ethernet port should you wish to hardwire instead of using Wi-Fi. A new what they call “Cryo-Chamber” cooling system exhausts hot hair from the back and sides, and does seem to work really well. I can feel very warm hair being pushed out during processor-heavy activities and it works well as the machine doesn’t feel hot to the touch. A stealth mode quiets things down a bit while bumping the power down a notch, but even when the fans are in use more, they just sound like air and to me, are not disturbing (no odd whines or noises). The keyboard feels good. Not quite the best I’ve used, but comfortable. You still get a dedicated numeric and F-set of keys. A nice blue-purple light under the keys has a couple of brightness settings. The trackpad has a good give to it and works as it should. A 1080p web cam is good in medium to good light and offers all normal settings including background blur now, although it does not have a physical privacy shutter, which would have been nice. The speakers are loud and clear and I’d say good overall, though a lot of people will most likely be using headsets when gaming, and the headset jack works great. Overall, the entire physical setup is very good with no serious complaints. As is now the norm for new PCs, you have a dedicated Microsoft Copilot key so you can interact with the Copilot AI for help with a variety of projects, pictures, and questions. Works as it should, though use it as a tool, and don’t let it do your work for you! The combination of the i9 processor, RAM, and NVIDIA card in the 16X Aurora lets you use the most common intensive software. I have had no issues at all with the Adobe suite, even with heavy layer photo projects or video editing. I have tested an older Microsoft video encoder that was notorious for eating processing power, and while it kicked the fans on full blast, it was still no problem for this machine, and within a minute the fans went back to normal. Good stuff! High demand games like Avowed, Creed, and Cyberpunk have worked fine. There have been only a couple of frame skips, but that is most likely due more to the speed fluxes of my internet connection and I don’t believe them to be any issue with the computer hardware. I’ve had no issues with the Wi-Fi 7 or Bluetooth connectivity. Battery life is typically never great on a gaming laptop due to the higher power needs they have. The 16X Aurora is pretty typical. If you are actually gaming or doing video editing, you definitely want to have your power brick handy, especially if you are taking the laptop out and about, and again, factor in the total weight of the laptop and the large brick when having to do so. If you are using it for simple day-to-day tasks, the battery life is actually pretty good and I haven’t had any issues getting through a day with some to spare. Aside from a couple of minor frustrations during the initial setup, I would still definitely recommend the Alienware 16X Aurora to people who need the hardware and features it offers for those specific uses. It has a great screen, lots of processing power, and it's not loud. It’s certainly not a light, portable, everyday-use computer, but is again for people who need the power those everyday laptops don’t offer. And for those who need it, is to me, well worth the asking price.

Alienware 16X Aurora Review I’ve become a more casual gamer over the years, but I still game quite a bit and am always looking for a great gaming experience and new ways to play my ever-growing collection of games. The Alienware 16X Aurora is a departure from Alienware’s older “shelf” cooling design, so I was really excited to give it a test drive. I’ll start with a TLDR version for those who don’t want to read the book I’m about to write. TLDR The Alienware 16X Aurora is an excellent substitute for a desktop gaming setup, capable of satisfying most gamers except the most demanding enthusiasts. It features a 16-inch 1440p G-Sync display, an 8GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060, and a 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, which together deliver strong performance for most games at medium to high settings. Despite its powerful components, the laptop maintains a surprisingly portable design, making it more suitable for home use rather than extensive travel. I don’t like the keyboard and the inclusion of a number pad on a gaming laptop, so I can’t give this laptop 5 stars. However, if you’re okay with the keyboard layout, then you may just fall in love with this mid-range gaming laptop that you could use for spreadsheets as well. Design/Build Quality The 16X Aurora is a hefty laptop, but this new design by Alienware makes it feel less bulky than older models. The laptop feels substantial and solid while staying reasonably lightweight for its size at about 6 lbs. I don’t really like the keyboard, as it has a numpad, which seems to crowd the keys you’ll actually use when gaming. I believe the keys could have been bigger if the numpad wasn’t included. Also, typing on the keys feels acceptable, but not great. Everything is shifted to the left, including the trackpad, which makes typing a little odd. The trackpad feels solid and is pleasant to use, and I like that Alienware removed the “shelf” that was on most of its gaming laptops underneath the unit. This makes for a more cohesive design in my opinion and lets the display hinge sit at the very back of the unit, which I find more visually pleasing. There isn’t a lot of RGB here, a departure from the usual AlienwareFX craziness, but it does include one zone for the keyboard that you can adjust with the Alienware Command Center. I feel like the lack of RGB and the more subtle design, along with the toned-down blue color, make for a more mature-looking laptop, which I like as an older gamer. Gaming Performance Let’s get to the gaming, shall we? The 16X Aurora is a powerful midrange gaming laptop that packs a lot of features for its price. Its 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060, 1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD, and 32GB DDR5 memory paired with a 2560x1600 16-inch 240Hz G-Sync screen chewed up just about everything I threw at it. The RTX 5060 NVIDIA card includes DLSS 4 and Frame Generation, which are game-changers for gaming at higher resolutions. I tested this laptop with a bunch of games and wasn’t disappointed in the results. I used DLSS 4 on all of these tests on its Quality preset and Frame Generation when available. I know some people have issues with these technologies, but I don’t notice any real visual degradation in most games when I turn them on, so I use them when I can. Here are just a few of the games and how they performed: Cyberpunk 2077: 70FPS+ with ray tracing and DLSS 4.0 Doom: The Dark Ages: 140FPS+ with DLSS and Frame Generation Borderlands 3: 110FPS+ Assassin’s Creed Shadows: 80FPS+ with DLSS 4.0 Baldur’s Gate 3: 95FPS+ Forza Horizon 5: 120FPS+ with DLSS You’ll have access to the Alienware Command Center, where you can change overclocking profiles, lighting preferences, and a few other laptop functions and features. I stress-tested the 16X for hours using 3DMark on the highest performance setting with no issues. That means that even overclocked, this laptop stays cool to the touch and stable, but it does get very loud. Stealth mode is a pretty cool feature that you can activate with a button press. It’ll turn off all the overclocking and silence the fans in case you’re in a quiet setting or want to get more battery life out of it. The 16-inch 240Hz screen is crisp and clear, although viewing angles tend to suffer at an angle since I believe the panel is based on IPS technology to achieve this high refresh rate. If you’re looking for OLED black levels with this unit, you’re going to be disappointed, but I believe most people will be happy with the display. Usability/Features/Battery Life The 16X Aurora comes with plenty of USB-C and USB-A ports (including 1 USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C and 1 Thunderbolt 4 port). It also packs an HDMI 2.1 port, which is nice, but you won’t find a DisplayPort here unless you connect through the Thunderbolt port with an adapter. You get WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3, and a 6-cell battery that yields enough battery life to maybe play a game for a bit, but honestly, you’re going to be plugging this in. Funny enough, it comes with an RJ-45 port for a hardwired Ethernet connection, which is awesome for gamers or even people who might use this for work. The cooling on the 16X Aurora is effective and keeps the top of the laptop just warm to the touch under heavy load. Sure, the fans can get loud when you switch to performance mode, but that’s to be expected. The Alienware Command Center is a step up from the past, and I didn’t mind using it to adjust the settings I needed.