Alienware Aurora R16 Gaming Desktop Review: A Civil Redesign

We initially began testing the Alienware Aurora R16 with our full system test suite at 4K resolution, just as we did in our recent testing of Alienware's Aurora R15, as that machine's Intel Core i9-13900KF and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 made for the fastest pre-built gaming PC we'd tested up to that point. However, as you'll see below, the Alienware Aurora R16 doesn't quite have the same firepower, but it competes really well at a lower price point.

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 “Test Bench.”

We'll also remind you here that we tested the Alienware Aurora at its factory settings, as there is no overclocking the Core i7-13700F. This system has a Z690 motherboard, which supports overclocking on 12th and 13th generation Intel K-series CPUs, but no such luck here. On the other hand, we think it becomes very apparent below that it's not necessary to do that to get good performance.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

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.




As we mentioned earlier, the Aurora R16 uses a pair of 1 TB SSDs from SK Hynix, but not in any sort of RAID capacity. As a result, we're seeing single drive performance here and it's extremely solid. Sequential reads up over 6 GB per second is what we wanted to see, and IOPS show that it's responsive as well. 

Speedometer 2.0 Benchmark

Here we have numbers from the Speedometer 2.0 tests available at browserbench.org. Scores in this benchmark are an indicator of the performance users would see when browsing the web and running advanced web apps using a large array of JavaScript frameworks. 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.


Because this test is so lightly threaded, the 65 Watt TDP doesn't affect the Aurora R16 at all. In fact, it eclipses the previous-generation Aurora R15 and Core i9-13900KS test bed, likely due to upgrades on the browser side. Edge is based on Chromium, so JavaScript performance is going to be good. 

Cinebench R23 Rendering Benchmark

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.


The Aurora R16 falls behind a lot of other CPUs, but beats out the Maingear Vybe and its Ryzen 7 5800X3D pretty handily. The performance is on par with our Core i5-13600K testbed, but that's due again to the 65 Watt CPU in the Aurora. Honestly, this is fine; every other CPU on this chart has a much higher power requirement, and the pre-built systems here are all much more expensive than the Aurora. Single-threaded performance is much closer to the systems with better MT scores. 

Blender 3D Rendering Benchmark

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.


The Maingear MG-1 leads the way here, but the Aurora R16 is on par with higher-power test beds while most likely drawing less power. It also beats out the Ryzen 7 7700X test bed and makes the last-gen Ryzen 7 5800X3D look positively ancient. 

Geekbench v5.4.1 System Benchmark

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.


This is more of the same. Single-threaded performance is within 10% of the highest-powered CPUs on the list, while multi-threaded performance trails a bit. It's again on par with the 125 Watt Core i5-13600K and thumps gaming champion Ryzen 7 7800X3D. 

PCMark 10 System Productivity And Content Creation Benchmark

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.


PCMark is the first test where our Aurora R16 falters. While it's right on the heels of our Ryzen 9 5900X test platform, it's a far cry even from the 11th-generation Core i9 in the Falcon Northwest Talon. It's not like this is a bad score, it's just that the Aurora R16 wasn't obviously faster than any of our other systems. Time to move on to 3D performance. 

3DMark Time Spy DirectX 12 Benchmark

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.

Time Spy shakes out about how we'd expect. All of the testbed systems above have a Ryzen 7 5800X3D except for the Radeon RX 7700 XT, which has a Ryzen 7 7800X3D. The Aurora R16 slips between the 7700 XT and 7800 XT, which is what we found to be the case in our review of those graphics cards. 

3DMark Port Royal DirectX Raytracing Benchmark

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.


The Aurora R16's GeForce RTX 4070 has very good ray tracing performance, especially compared to AMD graphics cards, so the Aurora R16 beats out even the Radeon RX 7900 XTX in this test. Of course, the GeForce RTX 4080 and 4090 in our desktops from Alienware and Maingear thump all comers, but those systems are far more expensive. 

Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Benchmark

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.

Yes, the Aurora R16 comes in last place here, but we're comparing it to really high end graphics cards. The lows are better than the last-gen RTX 3080, and it's essentially tied with the 3080 Ti and Radeon RX 6900 XT while playing at 4K UHD. We don't really see a reason to play this game at a lower resolution if the display supports 4K, even on this system. 

Forza Horizon 5 Benchmark

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.


This is another case where, yes, the Aurora R16 doesn't finish in the top half, but the cards and systems above it are all far more expensive. And again, it handles Ultra HD with maximum settings and FPS lows above 60. It's just a great, smooth experience, and unless you're popping for a 4K monitor with a 144 Hz display, we don't think anybody could tell the difference. 

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Benchmark

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.


With DXR cranked to the max, the GeForce RTX 4070 can't quiet provide the smoothest experience at UHD. The game supports DLSS 2, of course, so that can always be enabled, and if you watched our video you already know that this game runs at 70+ frames per second with DLSS Quality. At this point, you've got to spend a whole lot more to get the smoothest experience in this game without the aid of upscaling, as even the Maingear MG-1 can't quite maintain 60 fps on the low end. 

F1 22 Formula 1 Racing Benchmark

F1 2022 is Codemasters' recent 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.


The Aurora R16 again trails at 4K, and it can't quite get 60 fps at UHD with all the ray tracing features cranked up to the max. However, again, DLSS comes to the rescue as we demonstrated in the video. And again, ray tracing is a performance drain where playing without would afford a lot of extra performance if you don't want to use NVIDIA's machine learning upscaler. 

Let's wrap things up with power, thermal, and acoustic stress testing before we render our final verdict...