Alienware - m15 R5 15.6" FHD 360Hz Gaming Laptop - AMD Ryzen R9 - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 - 1TB Solid State Drive - Dark Side of the Moon

So far, I really like it. It does glitch sometimes but so far its good. I use a VMware on it and works smoothly with no interruptions. I also play COD on it, and sometimes glitches or the boot is a tad slow. But overall good laptop for your buck.

This laptop performs very well if you are capable of performing minor tweaks and want to replace the stock RAM. I got it while it was on sale for $1699 and it is well worth it. First and foremost, Dell addressed the GPU missing CUDA cores issue awhile ago, it isn't an issue anymore. My unit has no build quality issues or creaking lid. Minimal flex on the palm rest / keyboard area. Overall it feels very solidly built. All Ryzen laptops run hot, it is just how it is and not exclusive to this laptop. You can set a temp offset in the system bios to cap CPU temp. I have mine set to TCC 5 which results in a max temp of 95 C. This is completely fine when under load / gaming. Results in almost no performance hit. Alienware Control Center isn't the most useful app out there, that's putting it mildly. But you can adjust CPU and GPU fan curves to your liking which also helps with noise and temps. When running in balanced mode the fans are completely off and silent while doing office and internet work. I don't like RGB and have it all turned off except for the keyboard backlighting. Further, you can use 3rd party utilities to adjust short and long boost TDP which further helps CPU temp. My system came with slower DDR4 3200 single rank 1Rx16 RAM. Quality RAM can give a nice CPU boost on mobile Ryzen laptops. I swapped in some lower density 32gb 3200 CL20 dual rank 2Rx8 RAM. The keyboard is surprisingly excellent. Keys have nice travel and feedback while not been very clackity or noisy. The touchpad is small but very nice to use. I've had no issues with the FHD 360hz screen, very crisp and no issues with response time and the like. The RTX 3070 is the 130w variant. I've flashed the 140w 3070 vbios from the M15 R4 and it works perfectly. Performance is absolutely stellar and gives many 3080 laptops a run for their money and bests them as well. While gaming GPU temps rarely exceed 80 C. The 3070 is the perfect GPU for 1080p and should be more than capable for quite some time. The laptop has a MUX and you can run in dGPU only mode with G-sync. Also there is Advanced Optimus. Killer feature that many laptops don't have. To get the most out of the battery you can set refresh rate to 60hz when unplugged. Battery life when doing office and internet / daily work exceeds 7 hours for me which is insane for a gaming laptop like this. Nice perk to have the IR camera and Windows Hello facial recognition, works perfectly and is very convenient. The only negative about this laptop is that buying an extended onsite warranty from Dell is obscenely overpriced and highway robbery. But this is not Best Buy's fault so can't knock them. Ignore all the negative "reviews" out there. When tweaked this laptop performs admirably well and beats out almost all other 3070 laptops out there. It has Advanced Optimus, G-sync, can be adjusted to run a true 140w max-p 3070, and has 7+ hour battery life when performing regular office and internet / video consumption / 2D tasks. Can't ask for much more in this form factor. Highly recommend!

Awesome laptop extremely fast. I'm so glad I bought. Plays all my games.

Third time is a charm. I bought my first and second one from my local Best Buy and both had a dead pixel. The second one also had a strange feel in the screen hinge. I decided to drive an hour and a half away (literally to the only store that had them left in stock in my state) and yes, it was worth it. I finally got one that’s perfect. Hardware aside, you’ll probably have to update the integrated graphics manually from Dell’s support page- I had to on all 3 of these laptops because there’s definitely a problem. Running Halo Infinite I knew right away- performance was crap. Like 12fps on high settings. I updated everything possible, even in the Alienware update app but apparently the app isn’t the most reliable. I downloaded the IG Radeon driver and software package and repaired the install, checking to box to do a clean install so it would remove all the old settings and drivers. After that, I was getting around 80-90fps on high settings for Halo Infinite. To finish the setup, I turned off the IG using the Advanced Optimus set to disabled and the CPU TCC offset set to 15. *See attached photo. That allows the 3070 to bypass the IG and connect directly to the display, increasing performance. The CPU TCC offset can be given a value between 0-15. It will put a cap on the CPU temp to 100°c - (set value). I’ve set mine to 15 so mine is capped now at 85°c. When I had it set to 10, I was consistently getting 90-100fps on Ultra settings on Halo Infinite. Since I want my computer to last as long as possible, I’ve now capped it at 85° in hopes to maximize its life span. Apparently these Ryzen chips can handle the higher temps but personally, I’d rather not risk it. Go into Alienware Command Center and adjust your speakers, I like the “Music” profile as it has a richer, fuller sound. Out of the box the bass is very weak. After all that and a few other tweaks, I’m very happy with it. Considering I did get it for $1,699- I’m happy with it. I wouldn’t pay anything more for it as there are so many other options in this $2k+ space. But yeah, hope this helps anyone looking to get this awesome machine.

-READ ME FOR HELP- This is a powerful laptop, I can play Modern Warfare at max settings, VTube, AND play music at the same time with no interruptions! I’m a content creator and student, it works awesome. However, Windows 11 is finicky. It even deletes the AMD Radeon software, so you will need help and patience to set it up: Step 1: Update Windows Software Step 2: Log into Dell and update drivers through Support Assist Step 3: Check Windows update again & restart Step 4: Update Alienware Command Center Step 5: Download Nivida GeForce Experience and update GPU Step 6: Re-Download AMD Radeon software (see picture for specifics) to update CPU Step 7: Finally, Update Windows & Restart Step 8: Enjoy your rig! These steps are a necessity. Windows 11 isn’t current the most easy to work with the AMD CPU and Nivida GPU so you need to do some manual work. There’s a lot going on internally so you’ll spend about a day simply updating. I spent almost a week going back and forth with Geek Squad and I finally learned how maximize this Alienware. It is well worth it and I think fairly priced, even at $2100 maximum. Buy the Total Tech membership. I hope I saved someone a headache!

Very great laptop 10/10 would recommend. .

So I wasn't too sure about getting Alienware cuz I'm not a fan of Dell. But I did have a MSI laptop before I purchases and at the price point getting the alienware M15 R5 for $1,700 I can't complain. A lot of people are being negative saying this computer gets hot. Well all ryzen's get hot. You need to go in your bias and change that to 10 or 15 to keep the degrees at 85 to 90° and you won't have any problem. My MSI one had a better battery life but that was about it. This battery runs well gaming at full 360 Hertz about between 5 to 6 hours and if you leave it at 60 Hz I would say between 6 to 7 hours. The chassis on this is well built and the computer is heavier than other ones due to the cooling system that is copper and the great ventilation on this. The travel on the keyboard is amazingly smooth and it feels outstanding. I do use a targus cooling pad underneath it still and I never had an issue with it getting too hot. The computer also does run very well with Windows 11 as it was sending in the past that it might not work very well with AMD but I haven't witnessed any issues with it yet. The RAM is not the best ram for it and I would recommend changing it but that's only if you can find something on sale. Otherwise it still does a job. Well. The graphics card is better than most, especially running it with the Ryzen 9. You are getting 115 w graphics card with the 10 w boost. Most of the other ones I believe are around 65 and 80 watts. You can add another SSD drive from what I am reading, but you might need to buy the heat sink for it or look it up on Dell for the adapter. It can be expanded up to four terabytes, two on each side. And everything that I read, you can put this up to 64 gigs of RAM but I would confirm that with any sources to make sure. All in all, it's a very underrated computer that runs and outperforms better than most computers out there with the same parts that are over $1,000 more.

I bought this laptop for my grandson and when he opened it he was so surprised that he started hugging it and I knew he liked it!! Because if anyone knows about a 15yr old boy you get nothing out of them lol but other then that’s fire lol but knew I did good and when I text him he’s always on it !! Which tells me I did good!! Not including I got him a wireless Alienware mouse and headphone set and a 8 seagate something lol this is a picture with him at a friends house trying to get on his laptop without waiting to get home!!!!