Alienware Aurora R9

DELL’S ALIENWARE BRAND has improved incrementally from its early days as super-expensive gaming hardware bedecked with RGB lighting. The Alienware Aurora desktops have been successful for Dell, and the newest— the R9, with a ninth-gen Intel CPU—is the greatest yet.

The R9 was designed with esports in mind, utilizing a smart design for maximum cooling. Air is drawn in at the front and ejected from the rear, side, and top, with a PSU swing-arm mount that allows for both a relatively compact chassis and improved airflow for the GPU (or GPUs, as the R9 supports the installation of a second card).

The Aurora is prepped for maximum connectivity, with three USB 3.1 ports, a USB Type-C port, plus audio input and output all on the front I/O. Most models of the R9 come VR-ready, and all are equipped with Killer E2500 LAN for high-speed connectivity when gaming. In fact, the Aurora R9 is the rig of choice for esports maestros Team Liquid.

The internal design is impressively compact, fitting in a full AIO cooler with radiator, keeping the CPU (up to an Intel Core i9-9900K, depending on the configuration) perfectly cooled. There’s up to 4TB of storage, combining 7,200 rpm hard drives and high-speed NVMe M.2 SSDs. The Z390 motherboard has space for upgrades, whether it’s raising your memory capacity or installing a new GPU. Memory speed likely won’t need a boost, though, as the R9 comes with 2,933Hz RAM as standard.

LIGHT IT UP 1 The front features rounded lighting zones that use Dell’s AlienFX RGB lighting, with up to 16.8 million colors accessible via the Alienware Command Center software. The app also allows for component thermal monitoring, audio control, and in-OS hardware overclocking—a powerful piece of gaming-oriented software. DOUBLE DOWN 2 There are five different configurations of the Aurora R9 available, ranging from an $800 model, equipped with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650, all the way up to a $4,500 powerhouse, packing 64GB of RAM, along with twin RTX 2080 Super GPUs, with NVLink SLI enabled for maximum graphical power. LUNAR LANDER 3 The new Aurora is available in two colors, and naturally both of them are space-themed: Lunar Light, the model pictured here, and Dark Side of the Moon, also known to laymen as “black.” For no discernible reason, the latter version has one fewer AlienFX lighting zones to customize.