The last time we looked at Alienware's midrange gaming desktop was the year we had a Royal Wedding and lost Steve Jobs. Since then, Alienware has concentrated on the high-end Area-51, and the console-shaped Alpha. Now, at this week's E3, it brings back a blast from the past, the Alienware Aurora.

Like its predecessor, the 2016 Aurora is a mid-tower system. It takes some visual cues from the Area-51, including multiple AlienFX lighting zones and three triangular LED lighting strips on the sides. But it's physically much less imposing than the Area-51, and should fit in a cubicle or home office easier than that behemoth.

Alienware claims that its system is almost completely tool-less, and can be serviced and upgraded without using a screwdriver. Once open, you can swing the mid-mounted power supply out of the way to get to the graphics cards and memory slots. Up to five storage devices can be installed, including spinning hard drives, SATA solid state drives (SSDs), and M.2 SSDs. The microATX motherboard supports up to Core i7-6700K (4 core), 16GB of DDR4 memory, and up to two Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards. If you need more power (10-core i7 procesor, three GTX graphics cards), then you'll want to trade up to the Area-51.

The system has aggressive airflow through the PC case to cool the internal components, and during our short time with the desktop we didn't hear too much fan noise. It was a lot quieter than our memories of the 2011 version of the Aurora, which had vertical fins that opened up for better air circulation.

A lot of other new tech is present, including USB-C, USB 3.1 (Type-A), along with promised 4K and VR gaming support. Order the Aurora starting June 14 on Alienware's website, and check back with PCMag.com for a full review.

Further Reading

Desktop PC Reviews