Alienware’s Flagship Desktop Finally Ditches Proprietary Parts

Alienware has built immoderate of nan easiest-to-open toolless gaming PCs astir — but for years, nan Dell-owned marque has stifled their upgrade imaginable by limiting them to Dell’s ain proprietary powerfulness supplies and motherboards.

But nan 2025 Alienware Area-51, an 80-liter building conscionable introduced astatine CES successful Las Vegas, yet ditches nan proprietary parts successful favour of modular ATX components.

Even though nan tempered coagulated sided chassis features fancy compartments for liquid cooling and powerfulness supplies, it’s nary longer a hexagonal monster aliases moreover a proprietary tower: it’ll recreation pinch a modular powerfulness supply, modular based motherboard, and moreover characteristic modular instrumentality mounting locations. And moreover though there’s a dedicated daughterboard to easy powerfulness and cablegram negociate its lighting, fans, I/O, and powerfulness switch, Dell will relationship a conversion kit to make it activity pinch third-party motherboards.

“With this edition, we are returning to our roots pinch a instrumentality that caters to nan desires of PC gaming enthusiasts and longtime Alienware fans who personification a dense appreciation for exertion and a can-do cognition for manually customizing their build to their needs,” writes marque caput Matt McGowan, promising “the expertise to make superior upgrades for years to come.”

Why now? I asked McGowan, and his superior reply is that he’s listening to his customers. “I’m talking pinch customers, reference reviews, knowing what nan sentiment is successful nan marketplace and wherever things are going,” he tells The Verge, and what he’s proceeding is petition for “standard mounting locations” — a petition truthful “loud” that Alienware decided to make a “wholesale shift” toward a afloat upgradable computer.

That’s not to opportunity location weren’t reasons to spell proprietary, aliases that Alienware is promising to do this connected each PC. In fact, Alienware built its ain nonproprietary ATX motherboard for this Alienware Area-51, and nan caller 2025 type of its smaller Aurora (a spec bump pinch caller Nvidia and Intel chips) will still characteristic proprietary motherboards and powerfulness supplies, astatine slightest for now.

McGowan says that’s because of nan “leverage” Dell gets pinch proprietary parts.

“If you spell backmost years and years, location was a determination to return nan powerfulness proviso information and spell and thrust commonality betwixt our Dell Precision products and Alienware products,” he explains. Dell sewage amended prices that measurement — and, he argues, overmuch efficient, higher-quality powerfulness supplies, too, by unifying its proviso concatenation and taking advantage of those economies of scale.

And, he says, it allowed Dell to shrink nan size of its PC cases astatine a clip its commercialized customers, successful particular, weighted a “form facet aggressive” chassis.

So, does that mean nan Alienware Aurora, nan smaller and small costly desktop that Dell is overmuch apt to discarded successful volume, will get nan ATX treatment, too? “We’re evaluating that for Aurora arsenic well,” McGowan tells me, but he isn’t promising point today. “We personification to deed an inflection constituent ... wherever we usage resources to spell and redesign nan internals of that chassis,” he says.

But Dell would petition to spot nan numbers adhd up — not conscionable successful position of price, but nan ratios of price, performance, size, and worth that would fto a caller Aurora to compete.

“There’s a clear customer advantage astir really overmuch powerfulness we tin put into a compact mini tower. The different [consideration] is costs related; erstwhile we get economies of modular crossed different Dell merchandise and it’s point we tin adopt pinch mini effect connected nan gaming side, we’re going to return that and locomotion that savings connected to nan user,” he says.

This is acold from Dell’s only displacement successful strategy this twelvemonth successful an effort to spell overmuch consumer-friendly: it’s too sidesplitting disconnected nan XPS marque for Apple-like “Pro” and “Pro Max” merchandise lines instead, and those Pro laptops will now each characteristic consumer-replaceable USB-C ports successful summation to user-replaceable batteries.

Alienware hasn’t shared nan preamble worth aliases configuration of nan Area-51 alternatively yet but says it’ll alloy later successful Q1 starting astatine $4,499 pinch a “high-end, next-gen Nvidia GPU.” The institution is too announcing a brace of caller Area-51 laptops.