Alienware is beefing up the gaming chops of its flagship prebuilt Area-51 gaming PCs with Ryzen 9000 X3D processors – the best gaming processors in the business. Alienware has announced that, starting today, North American gamers can choose an Area-51 desktop with either a Ryzen 7 9800X3D or a Ryzen 9 9950X3D. The Ryzen 7 9700X, a respectable CPU in its own right, will also be available.
When we reviewed it last year, we found that the 8-core 9800X3D outperformed non-X3D chips almost across the board, thanks to AMD's so-called 3D V-cache that puts its on-die memory just under the core chiplet die (CCD) to allow for more and lower-latency memory. Months later, IGN reviewed the even more powerful 16-core 9950X3D and found it impressive… and probably overkill for most people.
Both chips are power-hungry – the 9800X3D pulled up to 160.3W of power during testing, while 9950X3D peaked at 200W. That didn't stop them from getting the top two slots in IGN's list of best gaming CPUs; they're just that good, and will help Alienware's best gaming PC to compete with gaming prebuilts from the likes of MSI and Asus.
Beyond the new AMD chips, available configurations look to be the same as before. For instance, you can outfit the machine with Nvidia GPUs ranging from the GeForce RTX 5070 to the RTX 5090 – but you won't find the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT that's our current favorite graphics card. RAM, port count and type, and storage options all remain the same, as well. And of course, you'll have that front cooling vent that I assume every owner of one of these uses as a grab handle for when they need to pull the chassis out to get at its ports in the back.
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom's Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn't be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.
