TEST: The best Looking Alienware laptop yet
Alienware m15 R2
There’s just something about the Alienware m15 R2 that pulls you in. It’s probably the expert manner in which it walks the line between gaudy and tasteful, artfully finding a middle ground that is all the more attractive. The m15 exudes a cool and contemporary vibe, but it also contains hints of the future as well, smartly filling the gap between a minimalist laptop like the Razer Blade 15 and more ostentatious designs from Acer or ASUS.
I particularly like how the sharp, angular lines on the old m15 have been dropped in favour of softer and more modern curves. The lid is also a nearly uninterrupted slab, which is particularly stunning on the white Lunar Light model. The previous m15 resembled the outer hull of some sort of spaceship, and while that was kind of cool, I much prefer the cleaner look of the m15 R2. An illuminated alien head sits near the top, and a futuristic number 15 is etched in the bottom right corner.
One distinctive design element of the Legend aesthetic is the rounded, elongated bar. This bar runs down the front of Alienware’s Aurora gaming desktop, and it’s found along the back of the m15. It actually houses the hexagonal mesh vent through which hot air leaves the laptop, and it’s a key part of the laptop’s look.
The m15 R2 isn’t that much thinner than its predecessor though, measuring 20.5mm at its thickest point. It also features a magnesium alloy chassis this time around to slightly reduce its weight, but it still comes in at 2.16kg. That said, it’s still a massive upgrade from where Alienware was just a few years ago. Build quality is also really solid, and there’s no obvious flexing when typing or pushing down
on anywhere, even the intake grilles above the keyboard.
My one gripe would be the hinge, which doesn’t open with quite as fluid a motion as I’d like. You can’t really open it with just one hand either, so it seems like Alienware could have done more work on adjusting the resistance of the hinge.
My review unit came with a 1,920 x 1,080-pixel 144Hz display with a peak brightness of 300 nits. It’s brighter than the screen on most other gaming laptops, and colours appear vivid and punchy without any obvious skew toward either the warmer or cooler end of the spectrum. It’s a good display, one that’s framed with thankfully slim bezels. This still isn’t quite the edgeto-edge display you see on laptops like the Gigabyte Aero 15, but they’re slim enough that you won’t find them much of an eyesore.
The cooling system has been upgraded too to Alienware’s Cryo-Tech v3.0. It comprises two fans, each with 106 fireresistant, liquid crystal polymer fan blades, and dense copper heatsink fins and composite heat pipes. The fan diameter has also been increased slightly, which means they can push more air as well.
Once you’ve got Tobii set up, you can do nifty things with it like turn the screen on simply by looking at it. Your computer will also notice when you’re not around and automatically dim the screen to save battery. You can even use it to switch applications when you hold down Alt + Tab, and the system will switch to whichever application you’re looking at in the grid.
Elsewhere, Alienware has upgraded the keyboard on the m15
R2. The keys now sport a slight concave design, which make them that bit more comfortable to use. In addition, key travel distance is now further at 1.7mm, compared to 1.4mm from before. I can’t really say that the extra 0.3mm makes a huge difference, but I found the keyboard overall rather pleasant to type on.
Of course, there’s perkey RGB customisations available as well, so you can go to town tweaking the lighting effects to suit you.
The precision glass trackpad is excellent too. It isn’t quite as large as I’d like it to be, but it’s really more than sufficient, complete with integrated buttons that click satisfyingly.
Gaming performance is what you’d expect from a GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q, and the laptop will run just about any game at 1080p with good frame rates. However, it’s also rather expensive for what it offers and is somewhat bogged down by mediocre battery life and thermal performance.
The Tempest Kirin enters the mechanical keyboard market at a time when there’s probably more choice than ever. Founded by three local keyboard enthusiasts, the company’s goal is to offer an affordable keyboard with features usually reserved for higher-end boards. One of the first things you’ll notice about it is its brightly coloured keycaps, which stand out from the sea of stock black caps found on most off-the-shelf keyboards today.
The Kirin is available in two different colours – the black Kirin Monarch and white Crayon. If you follow the custom keyboard community, you’ll probably notice that they’re unabashedly modelled after T0mb3ry’s Carbon set and WinMix’s SA Chalk respectively. You can get SA Chalk off KBDfans right now, but Carbon is considerably harder to find and is only available secondhand through online marketplaces like the r/mechmarket subreddit.
I’d have loved to see Tempest come up with their own keycap designs and colour schemes, but I think mainstream consumers will nevertheless appreciate the extra pop of colour. It’s not hard to see what Tempest is trying to do here. By offering stock keycaps that closely resemble expensive custom sets, it’s arguably helping you save money.
The keycaps are constructed of PBT plastic instead of ABS, which means they offer a rougher texture and lower-pitched sound that I personally prefer. PBT is also more resistant to shine than ABS, so you shouldn’t see them take on that unsightly gloss that many ABS keycaps inevitably suffer from. However, the PBT caps used on the Kirin seem rather thin, and there’s a massive amount of backlight bleeding that’s especially obvious on the Crayon model.
The keyboard offers only white backlighting though, but you can pick from up to seven different presets bound to the number row. This includes animations like Respiration, Ripple, and Sonar, all of which are really smooth and responsive. They look alright in white, but I have no doubt they’d look even better if there was RGB support.
The legends have been printed using a process of dye sublimation. Heat has
been used to sink the dye into the plastic, so there’s no surface layer that can wear off over time. That’s great, but some of the legends are also slightly inconsistent, and you’ll notice differences in alignment or legends that are simply not printed straight. I’m nitpicking here though, and these issues probably won’t bug you unless you look really closely.
The Kirin’s other main selling point is its support for wireless operation. It connects to your PC (or iOS or Android phone) over Bluetooth 3.0, which makes it more portable and versatile than your average tenkeyless keyboard. While there are many mechanical keyboards available today, there are considerably fewer options that can work wirelessly. You mostly hear the same few names being thrown around, like the Anne Pro 2, Filco Majestouch Convertible 2 and iKBC CD87 BT.
The Kirin hopes to plug this gap, and it can remember up to three different devices in its onboard memory.
That’s pretty useful if you move around a lot and need a keyboard that will work with different systems.
Tempest says the 1,850mAh battery is good for up to 60 hours of use, but the keyboard is sorely lacking any battery indicator either in the form of hardware or software to let you know when you should think about plugging it back in. Nevertheless, it still seems to be chugging on after a few days of use, but I probably have to charge it soon.
The plastic chassis and steel mounting plate come together to make a reasonably solid board. There’s no creaking or flexing when exerting pressure on the case, which is good enough for me at this price.
The switches on the Kirin are the ubiquitous Cherry MX models, and you get to pick between Blue, Red, and Brown switches. I’d suggest going for either the Reds or Browns, since the clicky feedback of Blues is sure to earn you dirty looks from coworkers. Furthermore, Blue switches are less-than ideal for gaming because they have their reset point located above their actuation point, so you can’t trigger multiple key presses as quickly.
Unfortunately, Tempest hasn’t added a hot-swappable PCB here, which means you’re stuck with whatever Cherry MX switch you pick.
The Kirin doesn’t ship with any software that lets you reprogram the keys, but there are a bunch of hardware shortcuts to tweak the layout of the keyboard. For example, Fn+Left Ctrl swaps the left Ctrl and Caps Lock for a HHKB-style layout, while Fn+Left Alt swaps the left Alt and Windows key. Finally, Fn+Win triggers a gaming mode of sorts by disabling the Windows key.
CONCLU S I O N A decent entry-level wireless mechanical keyboard with a fun pop of colour.