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Dell refreshes its Alienware and XPS desktops with 11th-gen Intel CPUs

You can order them on March 18th.

Alienware Aurora R12 (Dell/Alienware)

Dell isn't wasting any time before upgrading its flagship desktops with Intel's latest hardware. Both the Alienware Aurora R12 and the XPS desktop will be getting the company's 11th-gen CPUs. You'll be able to order both systems on the company's website on March 18th. As we've covered the new Intel chips, codenamed "Rocket Lake S," will deliver up to a 19 percent performance bump from the last generation CPUs. The only downside is that the Core i9-11900K, the highest-end model, offers eight CPU cores instead of the 10900K's ten.

Since single-core performance and high clock speeds matter more for gamers, instead of multi-core performance, most consumers likely won't miss the extra two cores. Intel claims the 11900K is around 14 percent faster in Microsoft Flight Simulator than its predecessor while playing in 1080p with high settings. Design-wise, nothing is changing with the XPS desktop and Aurora R12. The former still looks sleek and boxy, with plenty of design notes from the the latest XPS laptops, while the latter keeps the near-future styling of a sci-fi film.

Strangely, Dell isn't offering NVIDIA's RTX 3080 or 3090 with the XPS Desktop, though you'll be able to snag them with the Aurora machines. It'd also be nice to see a Ryzen option with the XPS Desktop, though it'll probably be a while before we see that.