Alienware M15
Dell’s well-established 15-inch gaming rig gets Intel’s 10th Gen. CPUs, but does the added performance make sense considering what you’ll pay?
PRICE $6,399 ONLINE dell.com/en-au/
The Alienware m15 laptops have been a staple of Dell’s gaming laptop range for years now and as per the company’s business model you can get this new 15-inch rig with just about every CPU and GPU combo you could want.
At the lower-end this includes a new 10th Generation Intel Core i7-10750H CPU, an Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti GPU, 16GB of RAM and a tiny 256GB PCIe SSD for $3,199. If however, you’re after a top-tier pro setup then you can drop $6,399 on a unit with a Core i9-10980HK CPU, a Nvidia RTX 2080 Super GPU, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB PCIe SSD. The entire range come with a base FullHD 144Hz (7ms response time) IPS panel with G-Sync that can be swapped out at no cost for a crazy-fast 300Hz (3ms) 1080p display without G-Sync; or upgraded to a 60Hz OLED 4K screen with 400nit brightness and a HDR DCI-P3 colour gamut for an extra $500.
The unit that Dell sent us had all the top specs, which is pretty steep at $6,399, even in the premium laptop space. You can’t get anything with this CPU/GPU combo for under $5K, but there’s actually a number of comparable offerings for under six grand, so the m15 R3 is a little overpriced, on the whole.
Alienware’s 2020 m15 R3 has reintroduced the T-shaped base design after a brief hiatus on its last model — so the bottom half of the unit once again protrudes out behind the screen hinge for heat vents that don’t have to fire directly onto the display. This design is complimented by a powdery matte white or soft grey top that’s subtly embossed with the number ‘15’ in a sleek sci-fi font. This elegant design is matched with a nicely weighted keyboard with deep travel and a silky smooth trackpad.
You need some serious thermal management to keep an overclockable 8-core CPU in check, but Alienware has been running Core i9 CPUs in laptops for a few iterations now and seems to have a cooling system up to the task. We generally saw about a 10% bump in CPU performance in multi-threaded CPU benchmarks over the Intel Core i9-9980HK CPU, but the single-core performance fluctuated too much to offer any obvious improvement. In comparison to last year’s Alienware m15 running a Core i7-8750H CPU and 16GB of RAM you’ll see between 20% and 35% overall computing performance.
Unsurprisingly the Nvidia RTX 2080 Super with Max-Q ploughed through games, getting over 60fps averages on all benchmarks on ‘1080p ultra’ settings. You’ll still have to optimise the graphics on the latest high-res games to make the most of the new 300Hz monitor, but it’s not like there’s a more powerful GPU you could upgrade to yet.
Battery life was pretty woeful at just 1 hour and 37 minutes in PCMark 8 Home, and this didn’t improve much in 1080p movie playback, lasting just 2 hours and 3 minutes, but this is all you can really hope for from an 86Wh battery running such powerful components. JOEL BURGESS