Well designed Beautiful laptop. Does well with heavy work load. This laptop i use for working from home and with the wifi 6 does a great job with little to no lag. If your looking for a stylish laptop with plenty of power then it’s a must buy.

PROS + Fantastic gaming performance which, when plugged into power, nearly matches my desktop RTX 2080 Intel i9-9900K system in most games + 360hz full-HD display is buttery smooth & provides great framerate headroom for competitive gaming + Display gets plenty bright, with good color and contrast + Great aesthetics, especially for such a powerful gaming-centric machine + RGB is well-used without being gaudy, and is fully customizable + Impressively thin for how fast it runs + Lots of cooling for venting heat + Comfortable keyboard with good tactile feedback + Solid build quality & premium feeling design + Modern port selection, with HDMI 2.1, Thunderbolt 4, USB-C, & USB-A 3.2 ports CONS - Touchpad is on the small side for comfortable gaming - When gaming, fans can get quite audible - Secondary key functions don’t light up with the keyboard backlight - Poor battery life that only lasts a couple of hours when gaming, and not too much more for normal everyday multitasking SO-SO * Ports being on the back of the laptop are great for docked gaming, but less convenient when on the go * Desktop rivaling gaming performance when plugged in, but performance is noticeably paired back when playing off of battery * When gaming, laptop heats up very quickly, with top & back of laptop in particular getting noticeably hot. However, areas where your hands are like wrist rests and keyboard, stay cool * Very thin, but still pretty heavy at just over 5 lbs THE LONG & SHORT OF IT I have been using gaming-focused laptops for over a decade now and the Alienware x15 R2 has definitely had the strongest first impression of any gaming laptop I have used yet by quite a wide margin. Not only that, but with each day of use, I find myself finding more and more to like in this machine. With a very thin design, premium feeling build, and performance that can rival a current-gen console, this laptop is not one to overlook. While it may not provide the best dollar to performance ratio from a pure PC gaming performance perspective, and it certainly puts out the sound & heat to match its speed, as an all-in-one machine that can tear through most games without batting an eye and still serve as a highly functional laptop behind it all, this is the machine to beat. I highly recommend it. BUILD QUALITY & AESTHETICS Right from unboxing the laptop, I knew it was meant to be a premium product. The laptop certainly isn’t on the smaller end for a thin 15.6” machine, with the screen itself having fairly thick bezels in the age of modern ultrabooks, but that doesn’t mean the laptop is big. The best way to describe it is as thin & dense, with a very thin 0.63” profile but a not insignificant 5.2 lb weight. With that weight though comes build quality, and the Alienware has it in spades, with matte white finish on the outside and matte black interior that I personally think looks as great as it feels. There is no flex in the keyboard, bend in the screen, or creaking plastic, all of which I have found in previous gaming laptops I have owned. There is an angular design to the machine, which helps with the thinness appeal. If RGB is your thing, you do have a good set of options available here, with the keyboard, alien power button, alienware logo on the lid, and lightstrip running the whole back of the laptop all being fully RGB. I am personally a fan of subtle RGB, with accents that compliment the machine without being gaudy, and I think this laptop strikes the perfect balance. That being said, if RGB is not your thing, it is fully addressable, so you can turn off or change the color of the RGB to something more subtle if that is your preference. All-in-all, while aesthetics are always subjective, I personally can’t see many people taking issue with the build or look of this laptop. It feels like a quality machine, not just for a gaming laptop, but for any laptop. SCREEN & SPEAKERS With a 15.6” 1080p screen, you aren’t getting the highest pixels per inch or ultra fine detail of a QHD or UHD screen, but at this screen size, they aren’t really missed all that much. You still get plenty of contrast, brightness, and at 360hz, A LOT of smoothness. Even when scrolling the internet the high refresh rate display is noticeable, with a level of clarity in motion that just looks and feels great during everyday use, let alone when gaming (more on that below). I don’t have equipment to measure things like color accuracy, but having used several professional grade monitors & high-end TVs, I can’t say that nothing colorwise stands out to me as overly inaccurate or off-base. There is no vignetting or noticeable uniformity issues, and by and large the panel is quite good looking. As for the speakers, they are Dolby Atmos capable, and sound pretty good for laptop speakers, with plenty of volume headroom to pull from. This being said, they are still laptop speakers which are inherently limited by needing to fit in a thin design, and will quickly be outclassed by decent bookshelf speakers or a nice pair of headphones. I/O, KEYBOARD, TRACKPAD, & BATTERY LIFE When it comes to function, this laptop has everything necessary for an everyday work machine. The I/O port selection provides more than most modern thin laptops, with an HDMI 2.1, Thunderbolt 4, USB-C, & USB-A 3.2 port. Additionally, you also get 1 microSD-card slot and a headphone jack. Like most laptops these days, if you want additional ports (like ethernet, for which an included usb-c to ethernet adapter is included in the box), you can buy an external dock to connect to the machine. All of the I/O (except power & headphone jack) is placed on the back of the machine, rather than the sides, which means that when you have the laptop docked, cable management is great, with all cords behind the machine, leaving a very clean look. The downside to this of course is that when you need to access the ports regularly (say to swap SD cards or USBs), you will need to put the screen down or rotate the machine, which can certainly be less convenient (but by no means a deal breaker) than side-focused ports. When it comes to the keyboard, you get tactile keys which have good travel and don’t bottom out too early. The keyboard layout is well constructed, with full-size arrow keys, media keys on the right side, and a dedicated function row. The palm rest is comfortable with a soft material and an accurate trackpad. My only complaint with the trackpad comes down to the size, which feels a bit small, especially for gaming. Finally, if battery life is very important to you, you will likely be disappointed here. This is a powerful machine that is meant to fit into a thin form factor, and you are losing a lot of battery life with that. When gaming, I am getting barely 2 hours, and when browsing everyday, not too much more than that. This is really a machine that is meant to be used plugged in more often than not, with only small spurts of time away from power. GAMING PERFORMANCE & COOLING Finally, for the main reason you would want to buy this machine, gaming. Honestly, in many ways this is a bit boring to write because this thing is very fast, and if you are looking to run games on the laptop display at a minimum of 60fps, you will have very little issues. When on battery power, due to the adaptive power draw of the GPU, you will get around half the performance of when it is plugged in, but when plugged in, this thing can soar. I benchmarked several games, including Cyberpunk 2077 with ray-tracing, and this machine matched almost exactly performance-wise against my main gaming desktop with an RTX 2080 & intel i9-9900K, which is a bit mind-blowing to see given just how thin this laptop is. With some settings tuning, you can certainly push fps higher, and with a 360hz display, you may not regularly hit 360 fps in games, but with G-Sync you can get very high frame rates and low latency without issue. I connected the laptop to my main 32” 4K monitor, and had no trouble playing games like Hitman 3 & Modern Warfare at 4K with acceptable frame rates, especially when combined with the amazing DLSS. With classic games, like Bioshock or Assassin's Creed 2, I could max settings at 1080p and easily get FPS well into the hundreds. All of this performance comes with a lot of heat, and in a thin machine, heat can often be the killer. In this case, Alienware has done a good job of providing a lot of ventilation for the laptop, with outputs on the sides, back, and top front of the laptop. Combined with Alienware’s Quad-Cooling design, you get a lot of cooling performance. What this amounts to is a lot of fan noise and some hot spots on the laptop, but components which don’t throttle in the middle of gaming. Using MSI Afterburner, I could see that the CPU cores were hitting up to 100ºC when gaming, which is a lot, but for a gaming laptop is not unheard of. The GPU would stay a bit cooler at 70-80ºC, which while better is still quite warm. This is most noticeable on the top front and back of the laptop, where it can get very hot if you place your hand directly on it. This being said, the areas where your hands should be, like the keyboard and palm rest, stay very cool, even during long sessions. Honestly, it is the fan noise which will probably be more noticeable than the heat, which while not as loud as a console or desktop at full bore, is still quite noticeable during gaming, and may be irritating if you use speakers or open-back headphones for gaming. With closed-back headphones, or at louder volumes on speakers, you will be able to drown out the fan noise without much issue. All-in-all this machine has the gaming chops where it counts, and can easily throw down with some full-size desktops without breaking a sweat. This laptop is a beast for a mobile machine, and when taking the size and build quality into account, you are left with a killer all-in-one.

Alienware has taken their innovative “x” series design and stuffed the latest CPU and GPU’s from Intel and Nvidia respectively into a slim chassis. Using a i7-12700H and a Nvidia 3070ti, they’ve paired it with 16gb of 5200mhz DDR5, this laptop slays anything you throw at it. Using 4 cooling fans and their proprietary cooling thermal interface Element 31, you get to run the toasty 12700H at turbo speeds just a bit longer than the rest. Performance – Intel did good with their P and E core architecture CPUs. The highest multi core score I was able to land in Cinebench was 18,180 pts. Single core clocked in at 1,794. As for perceived performance, everything seems to just work fast. Programs loading, game load times, boot times, all just seem snappy. The only thing to watch for is the voltage lock on this CPU. If you like to undervolt to help with temperatures, you’ll be unpleased to find voltage and cores are locked on this one. This wasn’t the case for the 11700H which did not have the “K” moniker but was still adjustable. Not Alienware’s fault, but just a watch out. Gaming – Not going to run into any issues here. Almost every game runs easily at 60fps on max settings. Time spy gave me a total score of 11,289 with a GPU score of 10,977. For thin and light laptops, I think the 3070ti is probably where you start getting diminishing returns on heat vs performance output. When holding the laptop in your lap while gaming, you’ll notice it starts to get a bit uncomfortable with the amount of heat output. If I do game with it in my lap, I use a laptop cooling pad to help with this. All games played without activating turbo mode. Destiny 2: 1080p – Max settings – 180FPS cap. FPS average 120-135. Temperature Average 85, 100 peak. Halo Infinite: High Settings (Ultra exceeded recommended available VRAM). FPS average 100-110. Temperature Average 86. CoD Warzone: 60 FPS Average on max settings. Temperature Average 91. Keyboard and Trackpad – Alienware has one of the best keyboards on a laptop that I’ve typed on. I’ve used a dell XPS laptop before and this is reminiscent of their keyboard which I liked very much. I’m not a keyboard aficionado or anything but I can appreciate a decent keyboard. Trackpad isn’t too bad either. It is a bit of a fingerprint magnet though. I/O – The port selection on this could be a bit better but I’ve adapted. Two USB-C, one of which is thunderbolt 4. Thunderbolt 4 does afford you several options as far as external monitors, docks, and dongles. Super happy that they do include a 2.5ghz Ethernet USB C adapter. Looping WiFi into this category, you’re also given the lates wireless 6e standard which gives us the 6ghz band for higher bandwidths. Unfortunately, I don’t have a router capable of testing these speeds. There’s also a micro SD slot, HDMI, and a USB-A to round it out on the back. There’s an audio jack on the right and the power connector on the left. Internal I/O is where I’m a bit disappointed to find the RAM soldered on. You do get dual M.2 slots for NVMe storage but being able to increase the RAM down the road would have been nice too since only a 16gb model is offered in the 15” at the time of writing this review. Audio – The x15 comes with Dolby Atmos support. The sound is a bit better than most other laptops I’ve heard but it’s only a bit better than typical laptop audio. I can appreciate Alienware is trying here and I hope they continue to improve here. Build Quality and Design – Alienware has always been a bit different than the competition in regards to design. They have a sturdy chassis with little to no flex in the lid or body. The keyboard is solid and there isn’t any flexing when typing or applying light pressure. Also, the way the laptop dissipates heat, the keyboard doesn’t get hot when playing games. Each key and the alien head power button are all RGB capable as well as the alien head logo on the lid and the “Tron” ring around the rear I/O and exhaust vents. You can use the Alienware Command Center to set up default profiles, game profiles, as well as fan curve and a slight GPU overclock. Battery Life – I tested this by starting my stopwatch on my phone as I unplugged the PC and just used it like I normally would but avoided playing any games. I left the Alienware Control Center fan profile to “performance” and the power setting to “balanced”. I watched YouTube videos, browsed the internet using Firefox. Screen Brightness was at 75%. 2hr and 33m it was running on battery saver at 15% Battery. @ 2hr and 50m I was down to 6% and decided to plug it in. Your mileage may vary, but I’d assume 3 hours is all you get. Even though you can’t adjust voltage, I did use Throttlestop to set a low power profile that turns off turbo boost. I imagine this will help me squeeze some more battery life out of it. Final Thoughts – I’ve always been a fan of Alienware’s bold design choices and lack of fear on pushing the envelope on innovation. I’m a gamer and I feel like a gamer when I use this PC and, more importantly, game on it. From the design to the performance, Alienware is selling a top notch laptop that is worthy of competing against the best of the best. I do feel like future models would benefit from maybe one more USB type A port but more importantly for me, upgradable RAM slots. All in all, a fantastic gaming device.

Incredible laptop, runs every game flawlessly, amazing screen display and refresh rate.

Plays any game perfectly no issues at all highly Fran’s at maxed settings