Alienware Brings AMD X3D Chips to its Flagship Area-51 Gaming PCs

Alienware is beefing up the gaming chops of its flagship prebuilt Area-51 gaming PCs with Ryzen 9000 X3D processors – the champion gaming processors successful the business. Alienware has announced that, starting today, North American gamers tin take an Area-51 desktop with either a Ryzen 7 9800X3D oregon a Ryzen 9 9950X3D. The Ryzen 7 9700X, a respectable CPU successful its ain right, volition besides beryllium available.

When we reviewed it past year, we recovered that the 8-core 9800X3D outperformed non-X3D chips astir crossed the board, acknowledgment to AMD's alleged 3D V-cache that puts its on-die representation conscionable nether the halfway chiplet dice (CCD) to let for much and lower-latency memory. Months later, IGN reviewed the adjacent much almighty 16-core 9950X3D and recovered it impressive... and astir apt overkill for astir people.

Both chips are power-hungry – the 9800X3D pulled up to 160.3W of powerfulness during testing, portion 9950X3D peaked astatine 200W. That didn't halt them from getting the apical 2 slots successful IGN's database of champion gaming CPUs; they're conscionable that good, and volition assistance Alienware's champion gaming PC to vie with gaming prebuilts from the likes of MSI and Asus.

Beyond the caller AMD chips, disposable configurations look to beryllium the aforesaid arsenic before. For instance, you tin outfit the instrumentality 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 existent favourite graphics card. RAM, larboard number and type, and retention options each stay the same, arsenic well. And of course, you'll person that beforehand cooling vent that I presume each proprietor of 1 of these uses arsenic a drawback grip for erstwhile they request to propulsion the chassis retired to get astatine its ports successful the back.

Wes is simply a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they telephone him) who has covered technology, gaming, and amusement steadily since 2020 astatine Gizmodo, Tom's Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and astir recently, The Verge. Inside of him determination are 2 wolves: 1 that thinks it wouldn't beryllium truthful atrocious to commencement collecting crippled consoles again, and the different who besides thinks this, but much strongly.