Alienware Upgrades Its Best Gaming Laptop So It Looks as Good as It Feels

The Alienware Area-51 was the kind of laptop that gets you excited to game. It felt great on the fingertips thanks to its mechanical keyboard with Cherry Ultra switches. It looked the part—like it had fallen off a UFO fuselage and was glowing with vibrant otherworldly energy through its bottom panel glass window. Its extraterrestrial design was unfortunately hampered by a dull IPS LCD screen. Dell’s gaming brand may have come back to make amends. However, a revised screen—plus the skyrocketing cost of RAM—will likely demand a heftier price tag.

The new version of the Alienware 16 Area-51 for 2026 will sport an OLED panel at the same 2,560 x 1,600 resolution and 240Hz refresh rate as the previous model. This display will claim a 0.2ms response time and 120% DCI-P3 color gamut, typical of organic light-emitting diode screens. The new gaming laptop promises HDR True Black 500 certification as well as a peak of 620 nits of brightness in HDR. No, it’s not the brightest display available. If you’re not already aware, OLED displays offer far better contrast and black levels than other LCD-based screens. There are more modern, updated OLED screens coming to CES 2026, which promote better brightness overall.

Alienware promises the screen will have an anti-glare protector to keep the surface from reflecting too much light. Take the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i as an example of ultra-bright shiny displays that will reflect practically everything when not playing in a dim interior. The tradeoff with most anti-glare screens is a less vibrant picture. Indeed, every Alienware laptop is getting an OLED option. This includes the 16X Aurora, which will also pack a similar 240Hz panel.

There likely won’t be any 18-inch OLED version, unfortunately. Alienware told Gizmodo that there aren’t enough 18-inch OLED panels available to make the laptop cost-effective. Either way, the 16-inch will support the top-end Intel Core Ultra 200HX processors. The 2025 version of the 16-inch Area-51 topped out with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, one step short of the highest-end 285HX, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 laptop GPU. The system also carried 32GB of high-speed DDR5 RAM. That memory spec will likely become an issue for consumers in 2026, considering the spiking price of RAM across the board.

Dell has previously told Gizmodo that it will take “targeted pricing action when necessary†due to the spiking cost of memory. Already, the company has increased prices for corporate clients, according to a report from Business Insider. AI data centers are demanding so much high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that the semiconductor makers who are responsible for today’s consumer-level RAM are shifting their focus—causing a massive shortage in memory across RAM and storage options.

Which is why consumers may be more enticed by the cheaper options. Dell’s gaming brand may also have an “entry level†as well as an “ultra-slim gaming laptop†that’s only around 17mm thick. I saw it in person, though Alienware was adamant I didn’t take any photos of the laptop in its pre-production, relatively simplistic body. That new form factor will come in 14- and 16-inch sizes and will still support an Nvidia GPU as well as “next-gen†Intel CPUs, which could be one of the new Panther Lake variations. We can expect these laptops are meant to compete against today’s 14- and 16-inch Razer Blade laptops.

No matter what, expect that laptops will cost more, but for now we can think about what may come in the future.

Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.