Customer Ratings & Reviews

Nice laptop but when playing aaa games gpu shuts off

This is a solid gaming laptop. I bought this to replace my previous 17-inch Alienware laptop that was starting to show its age. The old laptop still works perfectly well, but demands are greater now and it isn't keeping up. The laptop came pretty well equipped, but I added some upgrades right away. It's usually more cost effective to buy with lower specs and upgrade what you can, and that was definitely the case here. In the AMD model, there are two additional SSD slots that you can use. I swapped out the original SSD with a 2 TB Samsung 990 Pro, added a second 2 TB Samsung 990 Pro, and installed a Dogfish 1 TB SSD in the open 2230 slot. This increased my storage to 5 TB, and the Samsung SSDs benchmarked much faster than the OEM drive. I also increased the RAM to 64GB. I do things other than gaming on this, so having the extra RAM helps. Did I need 64GB? Probably not, but it wasn't that expensive and the computer could take it, so why not? I usually have this hooked up to a 49" OLED monitor running at 5,120 x 1,440 resolution with 240Hz, and this laptop can drive those pixels without any problem at all. The battery life on this isn't great, but it is still a lot better than my old Alienware laptop ever got. I don't usually play games on battery power, and this laptop will usually run for 2-3 hours on battery if you're not gaming. Not great, but my old laptop would only last around an hour even when the battery was brand new. The charging brick is huge and heavy. You can carry this thing around in a bag, but I wouldn't want to have to lug it around vey much. One of the reasons why the battery lasts longer in this is because of the Optimus feature which lets you switch between integrated graphics and the Nvidia graphics. For desktop use, it will try to use the AMD graphics and only use the Nvidea when it needs to. Currently, this seems to be a bit buggy when using an external monitor. Sometimes when it switches from one mode to the other, the external monitor will blank for a second or it might show a jumbled pixelated screen. It's not as visible on the laptop screen, but sometimes you will see a flash when it switches from one mode to the other. You can prevent this from happening by locking the video to either the integrated graphics or the dedicated one. I usually keep it on integrated graphics on battery power, auto mode if I'm using the laptop by itself while plugged into power, and lock it to dedicated graphics mode when using an external monitor. It would be nice if there was a way to set this to happen automatically, but it's only a couple of mouse clicks to set the mode you want. The laptop feels solid, the keypad feels nice, and it does a great job driving the latest games. It really is a powerhouse. There are still some bugs, like the graphics switching thing that I mentioned and some issues with the Alienware software, but these things should be able to be addressed with updates. Alienware products might be a bit more expensive than their competitors, but I like the way that they look, and I couldn't be happier with their customer service. My old laptop had a problem with the Ethernet port, and in the middle of the Covid pandemic, they sent someone to my rural home to repair it. That's exactly the type of customer service that I want when I spend this much money on a computer.

I have to keep the screen on (can't use power saving features so that the screen turns off), otherwise I cannot get the screen to turn back on randomly and have to do a force restart. I've had issue with sleep mode or turning sleep mode off but still have the screen go off since day one. Had this computer now for almost a year and have tried so many things to resolve, I'm thinking this is some sort of hardware issue. It makes using the computer risky considering I could be working on an important project and lose all of my progress if I go AFK and get my screen to go back on (which will require a forced restart to get the computer to work again).

The system was purchased in Sept-2023, since then it has a multiple problems (battery drainage, random rebooting, freezing screen, flickering screen). The motherboard was replaced, system board was replaced, windows was reinstalled couple of times. And.....surprisingly it still randomly reboots, and when you close the lid after long work hours, in the morning you will find out that the battery drained to 0 or the blue screen.

Got this computer less than a week ago to play some diablo 4 on while away from home. It was able to run everything with 200+ fps even on quiet mode. The 4th time I turned it on to use it I noticed that the RGB rainbow wave backlighting was very choppy and the alienware command center wouldn't open. Turned on the game and was running at about 10 fps and not showing anything out of normal as far as GPU or CPU usage. Then the laptop just black screened. Turned it back on and while tryin to look at the command center it black screened again.

The computer is Great! Shipping time was Great! The computer arrived and was not reset. Could not setup or login. I ended up resetting myself. I setup an appointment with the closest Best Buy to make sure everything was good. They told me I did what they would have done. All good, but never verified. Someone else’s information could have been on this computer. The computer was never cleaned up. I can’t believe it was shipped out this way. I spent quite a bit of time going through and cleaning. I bought this computer in like new condition but was far from it. Cosmetically it is good but a lot to be desired when it comes to the process. I considered returning and buying elsewhere. I have bought quite a few computers with Best Buy and this really let me down. I am chalking it up to oversight at this time.