Alienware has built some of the easiest-to-open toolless gaming PCs around — but for years, the Dell-owned brand has stifled their upgrade potential by limiting them to Dell’s own proprietary power supplies and motherboards.
But the 2025 Alienware Area-51, an 80-liter tower just introduced at CES in Las Vegas, finally ditches the proprietary parts in favor of standard ATX components.
Even though the tempered glass sided chassis features fancy compartments for liquid cooling and power supplies, it’s no longer a hexagonal monster or even a proprietary tower: it’ll come with a standard power supply, standard based motherboard, and even feature standard fan mounting locations. And even though there’s a dedicated daughterboard to easily control and cable manage its lighting, fans, I/O, and power switch, Dell will offer a conversion kit to make it work with third-party motherboards.
“With this edition, we are returning to our roots with a machine that caters to the desires of PC gaming enthusiasts and longtime Alienware fans who have a deep appreciation for technology and a can-do attitude for manually customizing their build to their needs,” writes brand manager Matt McGowan, promising “the ability to make serious upgrades for years to come.”
Why now? I asked McGowan, and his primary answer is that he’s listening to his customers. “I’m talking with customers, reading reviews, understanding what the sentiment is in the market and where things are going,” he tells The Verge, and what he’s hearing is demand for “standard mounting locations” — a demand so “loud” that Alienware decided to make a “wholesale shift” toward a fully upgradable computer.
That’s not to say there weren’t reasons to go proprietary, or that Alienware is promising to do this on every PC. In fact, Alienware built its own nonproprietary ATX motherboard for this Alienware Area-51, and the new 2025 version of its smaller Aurora (a spec bump with new Nvidia and Intel chips) will still feature proprietary motherboards and power supplies, at least for now.
McGowan says that’s because of the “leverage” Dell gets with proprietary parts.
“If you go back years and years, there was a decision to take the power supply unit and go and drive commonality between our Dell Precision products and Alienware products,” he explains. Dell got better prices that way — and, he argues, more efficient, higher-quality power supplies, too, by unifying its supply chain and taking advantage of those economies of scale.
And, he says, it allowed Dell to shrink the size of its PC cases at a time its commercial customers, in particular, valued a “form factor aggressive” chassis.
So, does that mean the Alienware Aurora, the smaller and less expensive desktop that Dell is more likely to sell in volume, will get the ATX treatment, too? “We’re evaluating that for Aurora as well,” McGowan tells me, but he isn’t promising anything today. “We have to hit an inflection point ... where we apply resources to go and redesign the internals of that chassis,” he says.
But Dell would need to see the numbers add up — not just in terms of price, but the ratios of price, performance, size, and quality that would allow a new Aurora to compete.
“There’s a clear customer advantage around how much power we can put into a compact mini tower. The other [consideration] is cost related; when we get economies of scale across other Dell product and it’s something we can adopt with little impact on the gaming side, we’re going to take that and pass that savings on to the user,” he says.
This is far from Dell’s only shift in strategy this year in an attempt to become more consumer-friendly: it’s also killing off the XPS brand for Apple-like “Pro” and “Pro Max” product lines instead, and those Pro laptops will now all feature consumer-replaceable USB-C ports in addition to user-replaceable batteries.
Alienware hasn’t shared the entry price or configuration of the Area-51 quite yet but says it’ll ship later in Q1 starting at $4,499 with a “high-end, next-gen Nvidia GPU.” The company is also announcing a pair of new Area-51 laptops.
