Alienware Aurora R15 Gaming PC Review: Re-Designed For Peak Performance

We initially began testing the Alienware Aurora with our full system test suite at 4K resolution, just as we did in our recent testing of Maingear's MG-1, as that machine's Intel Core i9-13900K and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 made for the fastest pre-built gaming PC we'd tested up to that point. However, as you'll see below, the Alienware Aurora R15 obviously vanquished that competitor with its stronger GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, which of course the MG-1 could support as well.

In order to better determine where newer PCs stand compared to similar-caliber hardware, we’ve put together an updated system test suite, pulling results from our recent CPU and GPU reviews. Thus, some benchmark results below are labeled “HH Test Bench.” Big thanks to Marco Chiappetta for capturing and documenting all of these numbers.

We'll also remind you here that we tested the Alienware Aurora at its factory "Overclock 2" settings, which only gooses the CPU speed a power a touch and was fully stable even in extended stress testing.

The ATTO disk benchmark is a fairly quick and simple test which measures read/write bandwidth and IOPS across a range of different data sizes. While we don't typically compare these results across multiple machines, it's useful to gauge whether a particular system’s storage subsystem is up to snuff.

Alienware's 2TB Kioxia PCIe Gen 4 SSD puts up excellent numbers at around 6.25GB/sec for reads and around 5GB/sec for writes. This will be more than enough bandwidth to power any storage workload from gaming to content creation like video production and of course productivity tasks.

Here we have numbers from the Speedometer 2.0 tests available at browserbench.org. The Speedometer Benchmark Suite uses a wide array of latency and throughput benchmarks to evaluate web application performance, then tabulates all the individual results into a final score. This benchmarks measures performance of an array of browser-based technologies used on modern, rich web applications. Scores in this benchmark are an indicator of the performance users would see when browsing the web and running advanced web apps. All of the systems were tested using the latest version of Microsoft's Edge browser, with default browser settings, on a clean, fully-updated install of Windows 11.

Browser benchmark tests can be somewhat finicky, but are generally aligned with CPU responsiveness in light duty web rendering tasks. Here we see the Alienware Aurora R15's Intel Core i9-13900KF processor drop in right where it should, at the top of this benchmark test group.

Cinebench is a rendering performance test based on Maxon's Cinema 4D, which is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding on system processor resources, and it can utilize any number of threads, which make it an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

Here the Alienware Aurora R15 comes up slightly softer versus its top tier competition, but well within striking distance of some of our best Cinebench scores we've ever recorded. Also note its single thread performance is very robust and nearly the top score.

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, and animation to simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking. It has a purpose-built benchmarking tool that includes three pre-built scenes to render out while tracking the time it takes to completely render each scene.

Blender rendering workloads showed similar results to Cinebench, with the Aurora R15 sliding in just beneath our top scores for Intel's Core i9-13900K series CPUs. Both the Maingear MG-1 and our 13900K test bed had slightly more robust CPU cooling over Alienware' s 240mm radiator, but the difference would likely not be user-perceptible.

In the GeekBench tests, we're stressing only the CPU cores in a system (not the graphics card/GPU), with both single and multi-threaded workloads. The tests are comprised of encryption processing, image compression, HTML5 parsing, physics calculations and other general purpose compute processing workloads.

Geekbench places lighter, more bursty workloads on the processor, and here the Alienware Aurora R15 lands right where it should in the pack of our top scores.

PCMark 10 uses a mix of real-world applications and simulated workloads to establish how well a given system performs productivity tasks, including image and video editing, web browsing, and OpenOffice document editing. These scores appear to be more neatly clustered than some comparison sets, but we should still note that the systems are sorted by their overall PCMark score, which is the fourth (gray) bar in each cluster.

With PCMark 10, the Alienware Aurora R15 fairs really well again, with a top Digital Content Creation score, likely due to its strong RTX 4090 GPU, and a second place finish overall for the PCMark 10 score.

As usual, we'll start off our 3D benchmarking with 3DMark. If you're somehow unfamiliar, 3DMark is a synthetic game-like benchmark for assessing gaming graphics (GPU) and physics (CPU) performance. This tool has a wide variety of tests and demos that target various types of graphics workloads, to give a better picture of how a system will handle real games. We used the Time Spy benchmark, 3DMark's DirectX 12 test. This test has multiple presets, but the standard Time Spy test is plenty taxing.

3DMark Time Spy gives us our first glimpse of the Aurora R15's gaming chops with its GeForce RTX 4090 pushing the pixels. The Dell gaming rig chalks up the top overall score in this benchmark, but trails slightly versus our test bench RTX 4090 GPU Graphics Score.

Port Royal was released as an update to UL’s popular 3DMark suite. It is designed to test real-time ray tracing performance of graphics cards that support Microsoft DirectX Raytracing, or DXR. Although DXR is technically compatible with all DX12-class GPUs, the graphics card must have drivers that enable support for the feature.

In the Port Royal ray tracing benchmark, the Alienware Aurora R15 vaults back to the top in a photo finish with our RTX 4090 test bed score, and right where it should be versus the other GPUs and test systems we have in our database. 

Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker launched at the end of 2021, and as usual, Square-Enix updated its free character creator and benchmark tool. The free utility checks in at approximately a 2.21GB download. It will test your PC's ability to run the game at various settings, and presents a final result with an overall rating upon its conclusion. We tested Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker in 4K UHD, with maximum image quality settings.

In our first, in-game benchmark, the Alienware Aurora R15 drops in another second place finish. Regardless, we're treated to great gaming performance here.

Forza Horizon 5 is currently the latest edition of Microsoft and Playground Games' popular open-world racing franchise. This title leverages the proprietary ForzaTech engine and DirectX 12 Ultimate to deliver much larger maps than its predecessors, with more detailed models and higher graphics fidelity in general including some ray-traced reflection effects. We tested the game in 4K with the "Extreme" graphics preset.

Here the Core i9-13900KF and GeForce RTX 4090 combo of the Alienware Aurora R15, slots in back at the top of the pack, with much stronger scores versus even our RTX 4090 test bed. This is likely due to driver optimization over time resulting in better flagship graphics performance from our stable of NVIDIA GPUs.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is an action-adventure game where you play as Star-Lord and lead the rest of the Guardians from mission to mission. The game’s minimum requirements call for a Radeon RX 570 or GeForce GTX 1060-class GPU, but it also supports some of the latest graphics technologies, including DXR and DLSS.

Once again, the Alienware Aurora R15 puts up a great score in Marvel's Guardians of The Galaxy. The resulting scores here are essentially a tie between the Dell pre-built gaming rig and our top GeForce RTX 4090 test bench score.

F1 2022 is Codemasters' latest Formula One racing simulation, and like previous version of the game, it sports impressive visuals. This latest addition to the franchise supports DirectX 12 with ray tracing, and it incorporates support for a number of AMD and NVIDIA technologies (like FSR 2.2 and DLSS Frame Generation). We tested the game with its Ultra High graphics preset, with ray-tracing and TAA enabled.

In F1 22, the Alienware Aurora R15 apparently likes stretching its legs in racing sims again, where the Dell gaming desktop puts up another top score with an identical min frame rate, way up in the high 80 FPS range. Remember, this is all 4K gaming here, and when we look at these top tier triple-A game titles, with ray tracing and ultra image quality settings turned on to the max, it's an impressive feat to put up these kind of numbers to be sure.

Let's wrap things up with more system vitals and stress testing before we conclude this interesting and fun gaming desktop review...