Yesterday I was invited down to a boxing gym in central London to see a new laptop from Alienware that is punching well above its featherweight level. The Alienware M15 Laptop is a brand new thin and light gaming laptop that will serve well as both a powerful gaming rig but also as a machine for those who actually need to get real work done when they are not gaming.
I have been fortunate enough to use the Dell XPS 13 2in 1 and the XPS 15 2 in 1 which are both fantastic machines from Dell which are aimed more at the Prosumer market from those who want a thin and light machine with stellar battery life but do not want too have to sacrifice too much on power. The Alienware brand is an off shoot from Dell that has always perused gaming machines at their core. They have been making gaming laptops for as long as I can remember and I have always aspired to own even though I am not the biggest gamer in the world. There is just something about having the knowledge that under the hood I have that raw horsepower if I need it.
With the new Alienware M15 I no longer have to be concerned with the fact that traditionally gaming machines have been bulky and heavy systems as this new 15.6″ is light enough to be my daily carry (at least it seems like it might). I also don’t need to worry that the battery will not give up on me when I am writing up that all important article. I can’t promise to be the best article rewriter so battery life is critical. We have not been given actual figures for the estimated battery runtime, this will need to be something tat is discovered during some real world testing. I was howerve given an idle time of 14hrs which is pretty reasonable.
The typing experience felt positive with a good amount of travel and the keys were nucely dampened with a good throw. This being a gaming targeted device i was expecting the keyboard to be a bit more heavy duty, I have to say that I am glad that it is not as for me that may prove to be prohibitive for getting work done.
As this was a pre-production device the guys showing the device did not have any games running on the system. They did however have a benchmark running and to my untrained eyes it seemed to be smooth and the frame rates were higher than I have seen on most laptops, Again though this will need to be tested more thoroughly in a real review.
Connectivity wise the system is well equipped with multiple USB Type 3 ports on the sides and around the rear. USB Type C with Thunderbolt support was also to be found on the rear nestling beside an HDMI out and Display port, this will give you plenty of options for connecting up monitors and the like. Alongside this, we also find a proprietary port from Dell that will allow you add on an External graphics card if you wish to really ramp up your GPU power over the Nvidia Gsync 1060/1070 series that is to be found on board.
The system will come in a variety of flavours starting with a version with 1080p screen, Intel 8th Gen i7-8300H and 6GB of DDR4 2666mhz RAM as for the Hard drive there are an abundance of options to go for and I would advise skipping the 1TB Hybrid drive and going for the 256 SATA M.2 SSD as a minimum.
If money is no object and you want to fully trick out the system then you go for up to 512 + 256 Dual PCIe M.2 SSD’ 32 GB of DD$ 2666MHz RAM, Intel 8th Gen I7-8750, 15.6″ UHD Display with a 90Wh battery pack. This system should be around £2499.
The former build will set you back around £1599 and you can buy it now from Alienware
I was very impressed with the Alienware M15 andIi hope that I will be able to bring you a review of the device in the very near future as soon as they can be brought into the country.