Famous for its otherworldly designs, Dell's Alienware brand has changed gears and taken a minimalist approach with its new Aurora R16 gaming desktop (starts at $1,299.99; $1,949.99 as tested). Though this mid-tower doesn’t yet come in budget configurations like the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 and the NZXT Player: One, it’s still an admirable value in its initial configurations, with the pep for 1440p or light 4K play as we’ve tested it. Simple serviceability, multi-zone RGB lighting, and silent operation top off the Aurora’s appeal. For all that, we give the Alienware Aurora R16 our Editors' Choice award for mainstream midrange gaming desktops.

The Design: Did Alienware Go Mainstream?

The Aurora R16 represents a new direction for Alienware's gaming desktops, moving away from the spaceship looks of the Alienware Aurora R15 and those before it for the broader appeal of traditional boutique-built gaming rigs. Dell says the Aurora R16 is quieter and has better airflow than its predecessor despite being 40% smaller, at 16.5 by 7.8 by 18.1 inches (HWD).

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Three AlienFX RGB lighting zones inside the system retain Alienware’s affection for science fiction. The stadium ring flanking the front panel, the alien head power button, and the 120mm exhaust fan are configurable for different effects in the Alienware Command Center app, including wave and rainbow effects. The app also allows for speed and brightness control, and the zones can be turned off entirely. The Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 has more lighting, but the Alienware's lighting selection has a more distinct vibe.

(Credit: Alienware)

Port selection recessed into the front panel includes an audio combo jack, three 5Gbps USB Type-A ports, and one 10Gbps USB Type-C connection. The bottom USB-A and the USB-C ports can charge your devices when the tower is switched off.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Rear connections abound with eight more USB ports (two 5Gbps USB-A, one 10Gbps USB-C, one 20Gbps USB-C, and four USB 2.0, two of latter supporting smart power on), numerous audio connections (two digital SPDIF outputs with coaxial, surround, and the usual microphone, line-in, and line-out), and a 2.5Gbps Killer E3100 Ethernet jack. For video output, our unit’s Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card has one HDMI and three DisplayPort connections.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The Aurora R16 supports Killer DoubleShot Pro when equipped with the Killer AX1675 Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 wireless card like our review unit, which sends game traffic exclusively over Ethernet to minimize latency and other traffic over Wi-Fi. The included Killer Intelligence Center app lets you further tweak network settings. The wireless card has an external antenna that must be connected to the gold jacks below the rear exhaust fan.

Going Inside: Simple Serviceability

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The Aurora R16’s side door is secured by a sliding latch, itself fastened by a Philips-head screw. The side door then tilts out and lifts away. The see-through panel is plastic, not tempered glass, but it still looks quite clear.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Alienware’s interior is logically laid out and minimizes cabling. Our liquid-cooled model has a top-mounted 240mm radiator. You'll find just one 120mm intake fan, but the three 120mm exhaust fans (two on the radiator and one at the back) and the fan in the power supply ensure ample passive intake through the perforated front and side panels. I noticed negligible fan noise even while gaming, directly addressing a complaint I had with the previous generation.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The proprietary Intel Z690-based motherboard has MicroATX-like (9.6 by 9.6 inches) dimensions except for a top right protrusion that extends forward to feed the chassis' front ports directly from the board, rather than through typical case-header cables. Both its M.2 2280 SSD slots are populated in our review unit, though the included drives lack heatsinks. You'll also find a 3.5-inch bay next to the 500-watt (W) power supply. Alienware includes a 1,000W model in its Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti configurations. (Note: The Aurora still uses a Dell-specific power supply design, which, like the motherboard, may be a concern for future upgraders.)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Instead of the usual four, the board has two DDR5-5600 DIMM slots, capping this Alienware’s memory ceiling at 64GB (two 32GB modules), which is still plenty. Expansion slots include one PCI Express 5.0 x16 and two PCI Express 3.0 x4, but the latter two are inaccessible because the heatsink on the graphics card covers them.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

In addition to the Alienware Command Center and Killer Intelligence Center apps, Dell also preinstalls an Alienware Upgrade app for system updates. This tower has no built-in CPU overclocking, but the Alienware Command Center app has a Performance thermal profile that supposedly increases the power limit of the graphics card. I didn’t see any difference in benchmarks after I enabled it, though. No trial software is installed.

As for included peripherals, Dell includes a basic USB keyboard and mouse. A standard one-year warranty rounds out the package.

Testing the Alienware Aurora R16: Toned-Down Design, Blow-Out Performance

The Aurora R16 we’ve tested has a liquid-cooled Intel Core i7-13700F CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card, 32GB of RAM, two 1TB SSDs (configured as separate drives, not RAID), and Windows 11 Home. Dell’s $1,949.99 pricing seems competitive; I saw the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 for $1,569.99, though it had air cooling, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. Top component choices for this Alienware are the Core i9-13900F and the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti; the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 isn't yet an option at the time of writing.

Dell’s $1,299.99 starting price includes an air-cooled Core i7-13700F, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, which should make it an effective 1080p gaming rig. It’s still outside budget territory, however, which seems like a missed opportunity; Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 configurations are available closer to $1,000, and the AMD-based Legion Tower 5 Gen 8 usually goes for even less. NZXT’s Player: One also comes in under $1,000.

A word on the Aurora R16’s Intel processors: These chips have a 65W base power rating, not 125W like the Core K-class chips often seen in larger towers, so they run at a lower base clock speed; our unit’s Core i7-13700F runs at 2.1GHz versus the 3.4GHz of the Intel Core i7-13700KF. However, those two chips have the same configuration of eight Performance and eight Efficient cores and a similar boost clock (5.2GHz versus 5.4GHz in the 125W version). Games tend to use the boost clock, so the 65W chip shouldn’t hold this desktop back.

The Aurora R16 will face mainly higher-end towers for our performance comparisons. The company's own Dell XPS Desktop (8960) has a GeForce RTX 4080, while the iBuyPower Gaming RDY Y40BG202 and the NZXT Player: Three use the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. All three of these leverage the Core i7-13700K CPU. We also included the entry-level Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060. Expect the Aurora R16 to slot in the middle.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.

Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Aurora R16 predictably finished ahead of the Lenovo but behind the others in PCMark’s main tests. These machines are far overqualified for the office productivity apps that test simulates.

However, the CPU-specific tests show that the Aurora’s 65W Core i7 isn’t as adept as the K-series Intel chips in the Dell XPS, iBuyPower, and NZXT systems. To its credit, the Alienware didn’t trail by much in key tests like Geekbench (within 100 points of the Dell XPS) and Photoshop (within 50 points of the Dell XPS, the fastest in the group).

While it's far from the fastest desktop you can find for processor-heavy tasks, the Aurora R16 should see you through many demanding applications such as media rendering.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

For gaming desktops, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, the more modest Night Raid (suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and more demanding Time Spy (suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We then run two OpenGL exercises, rendered offscreen by the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which allows for different native display resolutions; more frames per second (fps) means higher performance.

Our real gaming benchmarks are those built into F1 2021, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, however tested at higher resolutions and quality settings. These three represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games, respectively. We run Valhalla and Siege twice each at Ultra quality (at both 1080p and 4K), while F1 2021 is run at 4K only, with and without AMD and Nvidia's performance-boosting FSR and DLSS features turned on.

The Aurora’s triple-digit frame rates in the 1440p gaming benchmarks suggest the GeForce RTX 4070 is ideal for gaming at that resolution. The RTX 4070 Ti in the iBuyPower and NZXT was noticeably faster, but that was known going in, and that GPU is available in the Aurora if 4K gaming is your goal. If 1080p is your aim, though, the base-level Aurora’s GeForce RTX 4060 is plenty, with performance that will be noticeably better than that of the Lenovo’s GeForce RTX 3060 seen here.

All told, you get quite a bit of power here from the Alienware for a lot less cash in taking just a half-step down in GPU class from our next-best-tested midrange gaming system, the iBuyPower rig.

Verdict: A Sensible Gaming PC from an Out-There Brand

The Aurora R16’s industrial look isn't so much an about-face from Alienware's sci-fi aesthetic as it is a step toward wider appeal that retains plenty of that space-age identity. This more mainstream design likely helped with the Aurora’s quieter operation, addressing an issue we took with the previous generation. Our main complaint is that Dell doesn't sell a truly budget model yet. Despite that, the Core i7 and RTX 4060 base model is well priced, and our liquid-cooled review unit put up admirable numbers in our gaming benchmarks. Overall, the Alienware Aurora R16 does nearly everything well for a decent price, earning our Editors' Choice award for mainstream midrange gaming desktops.