Customer Ratings & Reviews

Most gaming laptops are on the clunky side. You might as well call it a desktop that you can pack up but never want to. Not so with the M15 as its slim form factor and weight make it very portable and slim. While size is a big factor for many it is the performance that most care more about when it comes to gaming laptops. This is where the M15 truly shines. This particular model being in the mid-grade of the lineup had no problems running all the AAA games I threw at it. While you aren't likely to be driving the including 300Hz monitor to its max you are certainly going to get outstanding performance for a laptop. If you are a gamer and or looking for high end device to do video editing this should be on your radar. It works and it works much much better than I ever expected. Now let's address the question most previous and new owners of Alienware products always seem to ask. Does this laptop have good thermals? Yes the previous models were known for running very very hot. In my 3dMark testing along with real world gaming and video processing I found it does run a bit hot but not much more than I would expect at this performance level packed into this slim case. In my testing the thermals on par with what you would expect from Alienware. If you plan on putting this in your lap you will be sadly disappointed and likely in pain however kept on a table or a lapdesk you will be just fine and enjoy that performance you are looking for. Lastly for productivity I can't say enough about how wonderful this keyboard is for a laptop. It has almost the perfect amount of travel and feels wonderful to type on for extended periods of time. I've had many many laptops and this is my favorite keyboard to date. If you are looking for a uniquely designed laptop that performs at the top of the heap and don't mind the sacrifices you need to make to get there (heat, battery life) this is the one for you.

I purchased this a couple of days ago. This is my 3rd Alienware. This one is fast and has an extra m2 slot so you can put a 2nd hard drive in or run it in a raid. Plays games incredibly smooth. The wifi card is fast start up is quick. It had a problem with the command center but going through Dell support it was a quick fix. The screen looks good, it feels well built and it has nice rgb lighting. It's a small and light powerhouse. You can hear the fans kick on but it's not too loud compared to others I've heard, the speakers can easily drown out the fan noise. I would say speaker quality is good but my previous Alienware 17 has better sound. But I ordered the matching headset.

I only used this laptop a short amount of time before I realized it's shortcomings - heat, noise, battery life. Performance was amazing on this laptop, pretty much all the games I played on it ran at max settings, and on the 300hz screen they looked absolutely amazing. Build quality was top-notch. Speakers were great, lighting was super cool, keyboard was a joy to type on. But then I tried to use it as a laptop. The battery life is really bad - I only got about 1.5 hours on a full charge - this is because of the 300hz screen; since it's such a high refresh rate, the computer has to use the Nvidia GPU all the time - thus leading to a higher power consumption and much more heat generated. And boy does this laptop get hot. Even doing normal tasks - web browsing, youtube, online classes, calls with friends - the fans would ramp up to audible levels constantly, and the battery would quickly run it's course. Is this going to mostly stay at your desk? If yes, excellent, this is the laptop for you. But at that point, why have a laptop? There are other (read: AMD-based) options available that generate less heat, noise, and have better battery life. I get this is a gaming laptop, but there are better options to be had.

Alienware laptop tends to have back light bleed issues. I have owned 4 alienware laptops in the past and except this one, all of them including the latest m17 r4 had backlight issues and hence i returned the laptops. Now coming to this laptop, lucky for me there is no bleed. i love it when black appear as black especially since most of the modern games such as tomb raider, control, farcry etc has really dark environments. The screen could have been brighter but never the less, without any light bleed the screen is beautiful. Now coming to performance, its really good. If you compare it with m17 r4 with 3070, the new m17r4 has a max performance gain of 10-15%. But 1 thing which is bad in this laptop is over heating. Without tweaking the cpu clock, the cpu temperature during gaming frequently hits 100 C. But with undervolting and lowering the turbo clock speeds, i was able to reduce 20 C on CPU and 5 C on GPU without impacting performance much ( still faced 3-4 % drop in average fps) The audio from this laptop is not great. Its not that loud and not very crisp. The legion 7i has far better audio and screen brightness compared to this one. I got this open box for 1300 and for the price its an awesome buy. So if you can get this laptop for 1400 or less, go for it. Else spend 400 more and get the m15 or m17 r4 with 3070

Great product overall and good quality, but has some annoyances. It runs well, usually. The Alienware command center controls all the fans and overclocks, and always seems to crash. It also doesn’t play nice with windows 11. The intel cpu runs at 100C constantly. It’s designed to do that, but it makes using the keyboard while gaming impossible. The laptop is essentially an oven after gaming. I haven’t had any serious issues even with the crazy heat, but it’s very loud and makes my room hot. But; all those things aside: The display looks great, but wish I payed more for the 17”. It has desktop level performance, as the 2000 nvidia GPU’s where on par with desktops. Even though it’s almost 3 years old, it can still handle todays games with good settings and performance. If the laptop didn’t have weird dell software bugs; be so loud and so hot, it would be perfect.

The keyboard light doesn’t work. I’ve update everything and nothing helps.

Screen error, I returned immediately and hopefully my replacement doesn't have that.

I bought this laptop for video games and Adobe apps. The performance is excellent, however temperatures run high and the fans get extremely loud. (So far I have not experienced thermal throttling despite the temperatures.) Battery life is short; I’ve been getting somewhere in between 30 minutes and 1 hour, but as long as your mostly plugged in, you’ll be fine. I have exchanged this model before as it had a trackpad defect. The current model I’m using right now has some problems, and is getting decent service from Dell’s technical support. I recommend you consider buying an ASUS ROG laptop as I’ve used it prior and temperatures are better; you could also go for an MSI, but don’t expect good customer support from either of them. Overall, The Alienware is a good laptop; just don’t expect it to be great.

I don't buy prebuilt desktops, but I can't build a laptop, so I have to choose the least worst of what is being sold. I last bought an old Toshiba and HP, but since they use older processors which won't allow Windows 11 installations, I needed something newer to last well into 11's lifespan. However, as new laptops began to phase out OEM Windows 10 installs when new, I decided to buy this one as I don't want to shift to Windows 11 until I'm forced to. Not being able to upgrade the RAM isn't too bothersome as 16GB is sufficient, and there are two M.2 slots for storage expansion, albeit one is not full length. I don't use it much for gaming yet, as my main complaint is the temperature and fan noise. I'd rather not push it too hard. The 2070 super in mobile format is still a good performer, and comes close to my desktop 2080 card. Battery life isn't the best, but it's decent. I got about 2-3 hours on average with my workload. Keyboard and trackpad are good, and the design aesthetic is okay to look at. I doubt this is being sold new anymore, but if you find an open box one, it is decent if gotten at a sale price.

My Model: Intel Core i7, RTX 2070 SUPER. This is an amazing machine. I am new to gaming laptops/computers and have learned a lot through trial and error. Before settling with this computer I tried out the ROG Zephyrus G14 (RTX 2060 Max-Q) and M15 (RTX 2070 Max-Q). Performance-wise, this computer blows them both out of the water. For moderate gaming, school/work use, the ROG models are better due to smaller profiles & better battery life. If you want to primarily game, Alienware is the way to go. This laptop runs AAA titles at 70+ FPS at Ultra settings, incredible if you're coming from console. At $1,599 on sale this is an insane value, but still a premium price to pay if you're coming from console gaming. I needed a new PC, so I was more than worth it for me. My observed performance: Destiny 2: Ultra 1080p--100+ FPS Assassin's Creed Odyssey: Ultra 1080p--75+ FPS Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Higher 1080p--80+ FPS Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War: Highest 1080p--100+ FPS A couple of notes if you're new to gaming laptops no matter what you go with: 1) They are best used plugged into the wall. The wall power is needed for your machine to run at a high level. You will experience poor battery life and performance unplugged while gaming. 2) They get hot and run loud-ish. This is some powerful equipment in a small package, it gets hot and has a powerful/loud fan. I play with a controller with it sitting on my desk with headphones so I don't notice. 3) If you want a discreet, convenient, portable, high end gaming setup, this is the best option out there. This laptop and a controller is all you need to enjoy a next gen gaming experience. This is the finest piece of gaming equipment I have ever owned.

Absolute beast of a machine, great processor, awesome graphic card with plenty of ram and storage! Only thing is that it runs hot, but problem solved with a fan deck

I want to start this by saying that I did return this laptop because I felt I could get better for the price, now for the actual review. So the first thing I noticed when booting up the laptop for the first time was 1. it turned on as soon as I opened the lid and 2. the boot time was much faster than any other computers I've had. Pretty rainbow keyboard, nice screen, looking good so far. I set it up with my info, did some updates, downloaded some programs, the usual stuff. Opened up the Alienware Command Center (I think that's the actual name) and started going through some different color schemes for the keyboard. Changed what I wanted and closed the program, went on to play some games and found OH this is getting really hot. Elder Scrolls Online, a fairly easy game for this type of machine, got over 90c. Okayyyyy then Fortnite, CoD, Minecraft, etc started hitting triple digits and I started looking around for an undervolting tutorial online, found one that worked surprisingly well and had my temps under control, never going over 80c in any games. Cool, I fixed this issue for a while as long as I remember to turn on the program before getting into a game. To be fair, heating issues are to be expected with these components and Alienware/Dell are known for running hot as they are more focused on performance than temps. Though it really would have been nice if the actual chassis stayed decently cool, instead the WASD keys would get unreasonably hot as well as uh everywhere else..? Sure I managed to get the CPU/GPU under control but using this as a laptop and having that hot plastic directly on my skin, no thank you. I stuck to my actual desk, which is pretty annoying seeing as this is a LAP top, ordered a lap desk for it but returned the computer before it even arrived so now I have one for a rainy day I guess. For frames in games- In ESO at all ultra, my fps was capped at 90 but I never had any drops. In Fortnite in all Epic, had some hiccups but I turned down shadows and tweaked a few other settings and had a steady 200+fps. CoD Warzone, almost all ultra, kept over 90fps, maybe more but it's not my go to game so I didn't stick around too long on that one. RL Craft with shaders, kept 40-60fps, still a very enjoyable experience. The screen, oh the screen, I heard so many people say "going from a 60hz screen to 144hz is a gamechanger" and I gotta say, going from 60hz to 300hz, mind blowing. I thought it would be a minimal change but it was so clean and crisp, could get pretty bright or pretty dim, not really any bleeding from what I could see, great color accuracy, I really enjoyed it. Now for a few issues I had other than the temps. The glorious Alienware Command Center (ACC), an atrocious program that I had constant issues with. Starting with it freezing in the "loading program updates" screen, couldn't change my keyboard lighting, couldn't change the fan speeds, nothing when that screen would pop up, WHICH BTW would be every single time I opened the program after the initial startup. I finally fixed it by FULLY uninstalling the program and getting it completely reinstalled from scratch through a link on the Dell website. It actually worked after that, shocker! Issue 2- It had some weird power issue, not too sure if that was a defect or what but it was enough to make me start thinking about the return policy. So I was using it as a laptop.. On my lap.. And of course, gaming laptops tend to have poor battery life, so I noticed it hit roughly 15% battery so I grabbed my power cord and plugged it in... The laptop was NOT having any of it, it instantly black screened and launched itself into Safe Mode. This had never happened to me before so I was a little taken back. It said there was a power issue of some sort and gave me an option to test everything, so I did and it made this ear ringing DING every few seconds just to tell me "Oh there's nothing wrong here" and then set me back into the game I had been playing like nothing had happened. Very odd, very unsettling. Issue 3 is more of a cosmetic thing but I noticed the lighting on the keyboard and on the back of the laptop had this thing where they would flicker every now and then, and no it was not a setting I had enabled, the flickering was random. Sometimes it would happen 3 times in a minute, other times it would go hours without a problem. Really not my biggest concern but it was there and for my first OFFICIAL gaming laptop of this caliber and price point, I was bound to be nitpicky. After weighing the Pros and Cons Pros being, really nice screen, pretty great performance, cool lights whenever they worked. The Cons being, getting unbearably hot in long sessions, weird power issues that had genuinely startled me, really poor quality software, probably the worst battery life of all the gaming laptops I had been looking at (I got MAYBE 2 hours just watching Youtube at below mid brightness), etc,. I decided, maybe I'll just get my money back and look around for something else, maybe wait for the 2021 Legion 5 lineup from Lenovo if they ever release in the U.S, wouldn't mind a 30 series gpu for roughly the same price or cheaper than this laptop. Maybe my laptop was just defective, maybe this model just has frequent issues like the ones I experienced, I don't really know and I'm not planning to test my luck and try another one of these. I've had Alienware computers (desktops and this laptop) in the past and have had issues with all of them, definitely going to look at every brand but this one from now on.

Purchased this about a year ago now and it’s still going strong. It’ll run most major titles with settings maxed and 100+ FPS with few exceptions. You can’t upgrade the RAM, so definitely keep that in mind. 16 GB is more then enough for gaming/general use and I’ve never had issues with running low. But if you’re looking for a machine to edit videos on make sure you get the 32 or 64 GB version. You don’t want this laptop if you expect to use it un-plugged. I like to think of these as the first generation of fully portable, and truly capable, Desktop Replacements. Unplugged, sitting idle with just the screen on and brightness turned up all the way, that battery won’t even last 2 hours at this point. That and the experience you get gaming unplugged is so much worse, it wouldn’t even be worth the half hour of play time you’d be lucky to get. Keep it plugged in, and I couldn’t ask for a better experience on the go, Alienware truly went beyond my expectations of what I thought this thing was gonna be. The model that comes with a AMD chip is almost certainly better, at least in terms of QoL features, if not performance too but I’ve never seen them compared. All I know for sure is, that Intel chip needs to be reined in voltage wise to keep the temperature reasonable. It’s easily done with ‘Throttle Stop’ but would probably be seen as an inconvenience for anyone who doesn’t like to tinker with software and settings.

First and foremost, I rarely ever do reviews on products I buy. but hopefully this review will help others, when choosing a laptop for your needs. I have gone through so many laptops, before I came across this laptop. I was stuck in the whole console era and finally decided to join the PC world, and see if it was worth the extra money, compared to gaming consoles. WOW... I was truly missing out on a whole new experience, and i was not disappointed. But i wanted something worth my money, and I ended up buying the HP Pavilion with GTX 1660 TI graphics card. Which I will say it was fantastic laptop, but I wanted something better. Then i ended up exchanging it for ASUS Zephryus, which was also a great laptop and had great specs, but overall I did end up exchanging the ASUS for the Alienware M15 R3. I saw Best Buy had this on sale, Excellent condition for 1,252.00. I got very lucky to even get my hands on this gaming beast . Cause all I can say is that it's absolutely worth every single penny!!! one thing I would highly recommend is, Throttle Stop. there are plenty of Youtube videos to guide you to this process, which is fairly easy to understand. the only negative I can really say about this laptop is the Battery life. Which i averaged out about 2 hours with some minor tweaking. And this laptop does also get very loud when fans kick In and CPU temps do seem to get high when loading very demanding games. But once you set Throttle stop, the laptop will maintain better CPU temps when gaming and just doing general tasks. This is the key to keeping the temps at balanced rate

Good laptop if you ca get passed a couple issues, laptop is fast, will handle anything you throw at it and at a good frame rate, with the sales the run its often a really good deal. Build quality is great, the screen is great, the keyboard is good, plays new AAA tittles at high frames, but the fans. If you game with headphones on and in a room by yourself this might be your laptop, but even when not gaming the spin up and are loud, even with the jet engine sounding fans this thing got hot too, if you can deal with loud fans and possible undervolting ( please do your research before you mess with this, its not that hard but you can break things if you do it wrong) this is a good laptop, working in a room with someone else my fans were driving them crazy even I had to return it.

The computer overall is good, but the cooldown fans is an issue. It overheats fast even with cleaning the dust and taking the dust out from the fans still make the computer overheat fast, but graphics a master piece

This is a superb laptop and made stellar depending on the price. I picked this up open box for $1,300 which is absolutely a steal for an Rtx 2070 super (I believe it’s the full mobile version). I couldn’t even justify waiting for the new laptops with a 3060 to come up as they are not going to offer any significant gains in the laptop department. Heat dissipation and power delivery are the main limiting factors here (and laptop size/weight) so you’re going to inevitably reach a point of diminishing returns until the actual die of the processors get smaller. There are trade offs with this laptop, I don’t think I would pay anywhere close to MSRP, it is just too expensive. You will need more storage (picked up a $100 1TB ssd). If you are inclined to tinker with the laptop I would absolutely get throttlestop to get the temps down. I disabled Turbo all together and still occasionally hit 80c in Cod Cold War (mostly runs at 70c). Frame rates with some tweaks easily sit near the 100fps mark or better. The Intel chips just run so incredibly hot when they ramp up in frequency. I’d rather spare frames for the life of the laptop especially when it’s more than enough at standard frequency. No ram upgrade, understandably (I guess), it’s not like ram is that thick but, it seems like you do get faster ram embedded than the cheap stuff they typically stick in. Other than that, the laptop is an excellent size to performance. I can’t comment on the battery because it’s typically terrible for extremely high performance laptops. This isn’t an i5 with a GTX 1660 Ti, this is a significant upgrade above that so keep that in mind. The conclusion is if you can catch this in the $1,300 range I wouldn’t hesitate. At MSRP you are better off waiting for the new Rtx 3000 series. I’m sure a 3060 will start around $1500 so let that be the deciding factor.

This machine is a beast. Can run heavy games with ease. The 300 hz screen is smooth as butter. Only thing that some people might not like is that it can get pretty loud, also the battery life is pretty bad. You have to use it plugged in, other than that, it's the best laptop I've ever had.

Good laptop great performance but terrible battery life at the expense of performance worse than any other laptop I’ve tested

I managed to snag this when it was on sale and it has been a great purchase so far. I’ve really enjoyed everything about this laptop minus the fact it can get very hot very quickly. This is pretty common for most laptops, but this one seems to get hot very quickly. Also, the battery life could be better. I normally keep mine plugged in at all times so that’s no worry. If you’re looking for a well priced, all around good gaming laptop you’re in the right place. Almost every game I’ve played I’ve been able to have at high - max settings with no problem.