Alienware M15 R3 (2020)
Alienware’s brilliant 15-inch gaming beast just got a little bit better.
Have to ask how much? You probably can’t afford it. So it goes with the latest revision of the fabulous Alienware M15 gaming laptop for 2020.
At least it does for this absolutely loaded review configuration. This 15-inch beast is crammed with pretty much the finest components known to science, humanity, Christendom, you name it. First up, given this is a gaming laptop, is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics card.
It’s Nvidia’s top mobile graphics chip, and thus ultimately the best currently available. However, for the relatively slim M15 chassis
Alienware has opted for the low-clocked Max-Q version of the 2080 Super, which limits performance somewhat. Nvidia does have some new 3000-series graphics chips, like the RTX 3080, but mobile versions are some way off. So, the 2080 Super is as good as it gets for some time.
Next, the screen. It’s a 15-inch 4K OLED panel rated at 400 nits and it’s utterly glorious, although also problematic in this context, more of which momentarily. Then there’s the 10th-gen Intel Core i9-10980HK CPU, no less than Intel’s finest eight-core mobile processor. Rounding things out in the key specs department are 32GB of RAM and a 512GB M.2 SSD. All told you’re looking at a meaty price tag starting with a ‘5’, for this configuration, though you can downgrade and save a considerable amount.
Design
This is comfortably Alienware’s best 15-inch design yet. It’s not super slim. Nor is it a member of the fashionable zero-bezel brigade; lower bezel and hinge in particular are pretty beefy. But at well under an inch thick and tipping the scales at 2.5kg, it’s not a monster either.
The 240W power supply,
meanwhile, has been designed to be relatively flat and wide and reasonably thin. That helps with portability compared to a narrower but thicker brick. However, the absence of straps to help keep the cables tidy in transit is a pity, to be sure.
It’s also simply far slicker and sexier than previous generations of Alienware laptops. And if the actual design is a subjective call, the quality is undeniable. That’s particularly notable in the rock solid keyboard bed that suffers from virtually no flex or bounce. The keys themselves offer a pretty generous 1.7mm of travel. The action is quite soft, the upside of which is low noise. But gamers who favour a more crisp and mechanical feel may require a little adjustment time. As for the glass-topped trackpad, it’s a nice touch, literally, even if it will likely see little if any gaming action.
Elsewhere, the evidence of proper engineering is legion. Alienware has built in 12-phase graphics voltage regulation, with six phases for the CPU. The cooling is handled by an advanced solution involving copper heat pipes, vapour chambers and larger fans than before. And Alienware has updated the chassis coating to reduce smearing and staining.
Alienware also says the four-way (woofer/tweeter) stereo speaker design packs 2.5x more bass and 2x more treble than before and 30 per cent more volume overall. Really, those are just some of the highlights. The list of features and revisions is huge.
Performance
At 1080p and with all the settings set to ‘ultra’, the Alienware M15 for 2020 has the measure of pretty much any game you throw at it. That’s largely down to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super mobile graphics chip. It is as good as mobile GPUs currently get.
At least, it nearly is. This is the ‘Max-Q’ version of the 2080 Super and it’s clocked significantly lower than the standard version. Low enough, in fact, that gaming performance is about the same as a 2070 Super non-Max-Q fitted to Alienware’s large M17 chassis.
With this particular configuration, the slight problem is that the glorious 15-inch OLED display is fully 4K. That has two immediate consequences. First, for the best image quality, you need to run at native resolution, and that crushes frame rates down to the high 20s or low 30s, again assuming ultra settings.
The visual quality at 4K really is something special. Partly that’s thanks to the qualities of OLED - the incredibly rich colours, near infinite contrast, super fast response. But it’s also the crazy pixel density and detail. Don’t let anyone tell you 4K is overkill on a 15-inch panel in that regard. You can see the difference compared to 1080p, it’s incredible.
But paying this much for a laptop and having to switch off or at least knock some of the in-game eye candy isn’t ideal. The harsh reality is that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super in Max-Q format doesn’t have the graphics chops for totally smooth gameplay at 4K in the most demanding titles, not in mobile form it doesn’t. Perhaps Nvidia’s incoming RTX 30-series will leap that hurdle. But the mobile variants of that new Ampere family of GPUs are probably six months away, at least.
You can, of course, opt to run the M15’s 4K OLED panel at 1080p. The result, however, is soft non-native image quality and refresh rate limited to 60Hz. For many gamers, one of Alienware’s high-refresh 1080p screen options will likely be a better all round choice. If online shooters are your thing, the 300Hz panel sounds pretty sweet. Alienware’s brilliant 15-inch gaming beast, the M15, just got a little bit better thanks to design tweaks and new components. But, it’s still painfully pricey.