Alienware M15 R3
A powerhouse laptop forf games and creative work,wo with a stunning screen and a strong set of speakers
SCORE
PRICE £2,533 (£3,064 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk
Alienware was one of the first f companies to push high high-end designer gaming laptop laptops, but b Dell (which bought the brand way back in 2006) believes these models m could also double for creative duties. d Looking at the Alienware it’s n not hard h d to see why. While there are signs sig of f its gaming heritage in the angula angular design and honeycomb grille above the keyboard, these are relatively restrained. What’s more, there’s no arguing with the spec. With a tenth-generation tenth-genera Core i9-10980HK CPU, 32GB of 3,200MHz DDR4 RAM and a mobile RTX 2080 Max-Q, our review sample easily out-specs most workstations you could buy for the same money.
The design is nothing if not practical, bringing the hinge forwards of the rear edge of the h laptop, l which hh shuffles the screen itself closer and leaves room for a good selection of ports and two massive vents at the back. While you’ll find Ethernet, audio an and USB ports on the side, along with a microSD card slot, slot there’s plenty of room at the rear for fo HDMI and Display DisplayPort outputs, a USB-C/ USB-C/Thunderbolt d bl 3 port and one of D Dell’s proprietary graphics amplifier ports: this lets you hook up a desktop graphics card in an amplifier module and upgrade the laptop’s onboard graphics later.
The position of the hinge means there’s less space on the interior surface of the laptop, but while there’s a little less wristrest – and touchpad area – than on some other machines, it doesn’t really impact usability. In fact, the well-spaced keys, intelligent layout and easy-going feel make this a straightforward laptop to work with, and the touchpad makes up for its small size with flawless accuracy.
Our review sample shipped with a 4K OLED, and it’s a beauty. It covers 100% of the sRGB and DCI-P3 colour gamuts, and 97.5% of Adobe RGB. With a brightness level of 428cd/m 428cd/m2, 2, it’s bright enough to showcase HDR video content, and our only grumble would be the less-than-perfect colour accuracy. An average Delta E of 3.55 isn’t bad, but other laptops on test do better. Still, this is only a blocker if you are doing colour-accurate ccurate work ( see Jon Honeyball’s thoughts oughts on this subject from p110 0) .
Models with ith this screen also o feature eature Tobii eye-tracking y king – a technology logy that tracks the user’s gaze to alter r the view in supporting rting 3D applications. The vast majority of these applications pplications are games, where re it takes some getting used to, and outside it’s mostly used as a power-saving wer-saving feature, dimming the screen creen while you’re you re not looking at it. It also dims and locks the laptop if it senses you’re away, and then wakes up when it spots you returning.
One advantage we often find with gaming laptops is that audio is better than normal, and that’s certainly the case here. Not only is there mo more volume than you’d normally norma expect from laptop speake speakers but more bass, more energ energy and a significantly wider stereo spread. You’ll want headphones or monitors for f anything critical, but it’s g great for streaming video, games or background music.
In short, this is a fantastic laptop for almost any use, but what really makes it shine is its performance. For one thing, that eight-core, 16-thread Core i9 processor outperforms almost everything else out there, even if the Chillblast’s aggressive cooling of its Core i7-10875H ( see opposite) gives it the edge in some of our benchmarks. The Alienware stormed through CPU-intensive rendering and video-processing tests, but also had the GPU horsepower to outperform the competition in GPU-based rendering and compute-heavy tasks.
What’s more, it can deliver this performance without making an earsplitting racket. You can make it noisier by going to the Alienware Control Center and switching thermal performance profiles, but we found that the effect on performance was negligible. At default values, the machine kept mostly to a gentle hum, only occasionally reaching higher levels of fan noise in GPU-enhanced rendering tests ts and demanding games. All the same, me, the high-end screen and high-end spec have one inevitable downside: battery life. Even ven just running HD video eo we saw the Alienware M15 R3 giving up the ghost in 4hrs 20mins – which is only slightly tly better than we saw from the Chillblast. However, that’s s the price you have to pay for or such performance, and we think it’s a worthwhile hwhile compromise.