Customer Ratings & Reviews

This is a very good 4000 series gaming laptop! The screen (at least on my unit) has zero backlight bleed and is sufficiently bright with great color gamut! The RTX 4080 GPU is extraordinary and a significant step up even from a 3000 series GPU. The keyboard is excellent to type on and Alienware/Dell have finally illuminated the secondary functions which is something they have neglected to do for the last couple of years in their Alienware lines. It's nice to be able to see which function key does what in a dim or dark environment. The cooling is very good and while the machine likes to go crazy on the CPU by ramping it up to well over 100 watts when you first launch a game it usually calms down after a couple of minutes. The GPU always stays cool, but the CPU fluctuates a lot in power and temperature depending on what's going on in the game. I know there's reviews out there about the 55 watt power limit that was put in the BIOS, but an update this past week seems to have reset that. You can of course go back in and set whatever limits you want as this M16 comes with a very customizable BIOS! On the negative side of things, I personally don't love the sound of the fans as they tend to be a little high pitched with a bit of a whistle at times. The other criticisms I have are that the trackpad is a little small by today's standards and not the smoothest. One more issue is that the laptop doesn't support USB-C charging for those times when you don't want to carry the literal brick-sized power adapter. The M16 is highly upgradable with space for three more SSDs (two are the shorty size) and the ability to swap out the RAM as well. Overall, this is a very good gaming and generally purpose machine. Windows Hello face login works super well, the keyboard is a joy to type on, the battery life is mediocre (but that comes with this class of laptop) and the build quality is excellent! If you want high performance for a reasonable price from a usually highly expensive brand this is it!

First things first, the performance of this laptop is exceptional. If maximum performance is what you are after, stop hesitating and just buy this laptop, if it's available still. Chasis: The shell of the laptop is of high quality metal with a semi-gloss coating and the interior features a soft touch material. Both materials resist finger prints, which is great. Keyboard and Touchpad: These both are great albeit the touch pad is on the smaller side. The keyboard has ample travel and I appreciate the touch of RGB. The track pad is not glass I believe but it feels high quality nonetheless. Display: Not much to say here: 1600p at 240hz with G-SYNC and ~100% P3 color coverage. My only complaint here is the display is about 300 nits, and brighter is always better. The matte coating does a good job with reflections though. (Fan) Noise: The fan Noise of this laptop is pretty reasonable, especially in the balanced mode which is my profile of choice as I don't need maximum performance all of the time. With that said, my unit has pretty audible coil whine (high pitched electric noise that sounds like buzzing at varying frequencies) and I'm not too happy about that. It's a minor inconvenience though as it does not impact the functionality of the device whatsoever. Battery Life: I was able to get about 4-5 hours by enabling power saver, throttling the CPU to 15W in Intel XTU, and setting the preferred graphics to integrated. All of these steps are a bit tedious though and I would rather just plug it in to be honest. The laptop weighs ~7lbs anyway, so not terribly portable. Performance: I mentioned it earlier, but holy smokes is this thing fast. I compared it to another laptop with an i7 11800H and 3050 mobile, and it is a bloodbath. It's multi core speeds in Cinebench R23 are some of the fastest I've seen and the single core at over 2100 points is insane. Time spy shows a similar trend, with the 4080 mobile at over 19k points in the graphics score, which is nipping at the heels of a 3090 desktop and I believe surpasses a desktop 4070. The CPU does not lag too far behind and I'm surprised how similarly it performs to the desktop 13900K since this draws considerably less power. All in all, performance is where this laptop shines, which makes since giving it's 4 fan cooling system and significant bulk. Conclusion: Buy this if the pros outweigh the cons I mentioned and especially if you plan to use it as a desktop replacement. It can serve as a day to day laptop; however, I would recommend something at least a little lighter and with better battery life for that purpose.

Alienware has a great reputation for making really solid gaming desktops and laptops. I would like to address my main concern with this laptop and that was the brightness of the screen. I also have another laptop with 500 nits brightness that I used to compare this to. It is 300+ nits and is plenty bright. I was surprised how I needed to turn it down a few notches when gaming due to it being too bright so no worries about the screen brightness. The picture was very crisp and clear, so watching movies and gaming was a treat. l also ran a backlight bleed test and almost 0 backlight bleed. I would also like to give kudos to Alienware on the RGB and keyboard as they are very good. Typing on this laptop is really good and feels nice to the touch with good travel. The secondary functions are also lit up nice and bright. This laptop has great build quality (solid and heavy) and I think the color is awesome! No need to worry about the power when gaming on this laptop. Yes, the fans can get loud under load when gaming but that is to be expected. Yes, the battery life is not the best either under load. The 4080 with 12GB of VRAM is great. I did run a benchmark test on MW2 and the AVG was 204 FPS (please see picture). All I needed to do was run the normal updates and the laptop did the rest. After a few weeks of non-stop gaming etc. I can say I do recommend this laptop as I have had 0 issues with it. I hope this is helpful for anyone looking at this laptop.

The specs are awesome. High-end machine with really good performance. The price is good for the overall package. Pros: very good performance (keeps up with a high productivity and gaming demand), reasonable price, the design is something special (take it or leave it). The QHD 240 hz screen is excelent. Cons: the overall design is kind of bulky (again take it or leave it), not a laptop designed for extreme portability. The power adapter is a brick, heavy and unconfortable. It gets warm pretty fast, but if you know how to tweak the fans config the temperature will run in the reasonable theshold. The screen brightness is high but default but it can be configured to your demand. Overall is a really solid option with a relative good price. Totally recommended

Great laptop. Has some flaws in terms of Alienware command center not being updated yet and low wattage to the cpu out of the box, but these are things that can be fixed manually or will be fixed with software updates. Out of the box, no one will notice any limitations playing games. I benched m16 4080 at 106 fps in Cyberpunk with ultra settings, DLSS on quality, with DLSS frame generation on, and ray tracing on ultra. I am replacing my desktop with this laptop and I am perfectly content doing that with this machine. The screen is also bright, clear and colorful despite the only 300+ nits.

I wish I could reply to the people that give 1 start review but here a few things. If you wanna play video games and not have the laptop plugged in it will run very slow in needs to be plugged at all times and you can’t expect a laptop with a high end GPU to last a couple of hours without it plugged in, if long battery time is what you want maybe you should go with apple and forget about playing with a big leagues. Hands on the best laptop ever, worth every cent. Also for people out there if you want to upgrade your ram get 2 32gb at 5200mhz because thats the only one compatible with 64 gbs of ram. One last thing to whom ever that want to buy this laptop think of it as a desktop that you can move it around with ease. Take my advice and buy the ALIENWARE HORIZON TRAVEL BACKPACK 18, Alienware mouse and head set,youll thank me later. I believe they all available here at best buy

The performance I needed went portable. Before I gloss over the nice qualities I must hit you with it's problems I am facing. It's susceptibility to screen chips has slightly changed my fondness for the quality of tech. that the company boast , but its crispness in detail forgives it. Nonetheless its human error for closing up to fast near usb-c cables left over from an external hard-drive and mouse. The issue with storage 929GB worth of it allows for all of my hobbies to be downloaded but creatively it's better to get an external harddrive for content creation and music data storage. I was able to successfully download FL studio 21 Producer Edition all plugins, Serato and Recordbox DJ, Games: Call of duty MW3, CYBERPUNK, Starfield, callisto, and a couple small games of 20-50gb worth. I may be redlining with 81Gb left but I can make it work. Being able to play a cpu/gpu heavy game while music producing without closing applications Is the bread and butter for this laptops efficiency. With no bugs or latency issues im able to effortlessly switch without harming hardware. Now can you do that with it's battery alone? Not for long, but you can enjoy gaming for 2 hours without the charger but youll have to watch the latency issues with it being unplugged and the battery draining fast. Other than A durable screen, Draining battery, and low storage (2tb should be the standard in this upcoming age of technology and not 1)

[Employee of bestbuy] for my first alienware product i am super impressed and happy with what M16 R1 brings! the i9 paird up with the 4080 runs flawlessly:) very powerful gaming laptop if you’re into hardcore gaming. upgradibility for the ram and SSD is very easy, side note, the ram can take up to 5600 Mtz but only with 32GB, and 64GB will only take up to 5200 Mtz. there is 4 upgradble SSD slots in the R1 making it enough room to fit up to 8-10TBs possibly even more! there’s 2 m.2 2280 slots and 2 m.2 2230 slots. i currently fully decked out this m16 r1 with some fury 64 GB 5600 MTz ram (5200 mtz), and 2 4TB m.2 990 pro SSDs. With these upgrades, you can run anything and everything.

Overall excellent laptop! Handles all of the AAA titles like a champ. Fans are a bit loud under load but totally understandable. Gotta cool the 13900hx and the 4080 somehow. Everythung looks amaziing on this screen as well! Also, super easy to upgrade memory and storage!

The performance is great over all and the screen is so smooth that you'll love it. I used it majorly for COD gaming, NFS, CS GO, Fortnite, Apex Legends. Apart from gaming i used it for couple of softwares, graphic designing, video editing and also coding. I've never had seen such a powerful and smooth laptop ever. Alienware at its best.

I like the laptop it’s really good for gaming and it’s enough for daily use my only suggestion would be upgrade the ram to 32gb. Cooling is good

The Alienware M16 is probably one of the king of High-end gaming laptop now. I'll explain it in several aspects. 1.Beastly performance: The Alienware m16 has a 13 generation intel i9 13900HX with 24 core 32 threads. Can easily get nearly 28000pts in Cinebench R23 (I saw some people can get 32000-36000, probably setting problem) which is 1.6 to 2 times R9 7940hs! Also it has a Nvidia 4080 laptop GPU, can get about 18622 pts in 3dmark. Better than desktop 4070! With these two beast in the laptop, the aw m16 can easily run any 3a game with high graphic setting and also can do PR,PS,AE..... lightning fast!! (Intel is better for Adobe) 2.Powerful heat release system which can tame the beast. Dell put 4 fans in their laptop!! (Many others use 3 fans like ROG scar 18, MSI GE78 only use 2) which can help to cool down the maximum 300watt beast! (the fan will get to 56-60db in performance mode) in 3dmark even you turn on the performance mode, it still pass the stress test with 98.7% 3.Super large, fast and beautiful display: The AW M16 has a 16 inches 2.5k 240hz display, which is so comfortable to play games and watch videos (Compare to ROG G14(also got in bestbuy wwwww) in image 4) with superfast respond time, the CS experience is nice, you can't see any delay. And they put the screen higher so you don't need to look down at the screen anymore. 4. (last but not the least) The supercool industrial design. Which is a symbol of Alienware laptops. Alienware always looks like a future product or a hypercar since they release the first product. RGBs around the body and keyboard looks pretty and honeycomb air inlet makes a feeling of cyberpunk. Also there is a skin-friendly coating , makes the laptop touch like baby skin. The keyboard is nice but I more recommend you to try it by yourself. For the speakers, well I can't say it's well cuz there are only 2 speakers on the laptop. But the sound is large enough. At the end, I want to say the shopping experience in BestBuy is excellent!!! They can help you really quick! And also they often have bigggg discount!! Something you need to pay attention: 1. Both the adapter and laptop are super heavy 2. Just like many people said, I recommend delete awcc after set up your computer. 3. The power release tactics is crazy, the fan noise and temperature sometime may go crazy. 5. There are 2 ram slots (already 2 8g ddr5 4800mhz memory) and 2 2280( 1 already have a ssd) 2 2230 ssd slots can do expansion. 6. The condition or result might be different caused by lot of elements, so the review is just for reference.

It’s an amazing computer and works well, but easily overheats and has a short battery life. Works amazingly as a desk computer.

I purchased the G18 strix with a 4080 , that labtop thermal performance was horrible ended up returning it . This M16 Alienware is just outstanding Alienware nailed it with their cooling system this year , yes temps get high but the system never throttles , I can tell you the 4080 in this machine exceeds my 3080ti strix desktop . Some benchmarks ( Overwatch 2 epic on 2540 resolution get max 240FPS , COD 2 warzone on 2540 by 1600 max settings I get 143 to 187FPS . God of war ultra quality 2540 by 1600 I get 130 in open areas and indoor about 170 this machine is a beast !! The screen yes it’s only 300 nits but it’s accuracy is amazing colorful and super fast !! Buy this machine you will not regret it !!

My brother told me to pick a laptop for my birthday. I could have gone higher, could have gone lower, but I'm glad I picked this one because it is just right. Graphics are beautiful. It runs beautifully. So far so good. It's sturdy but not bulky. It does get super hot, even raised. So I had to buy a fan base and it works just fine.

Great looking laptop , good quality , great screen and vivid . Unfortunately its not user friend uponed setup . Driver need to be updated 1 by 1 from dells website . The command center is very basic with little few options and No true fan control . The cpu out the box is set at 55watts . You have to install XTU ti mess with the wattage . XTU and command center dont get along so the wattage will keep on randomly reseting on setups . Overclocking is locked in the BIOS . Undervolting is also locked . Onces changing your wattage through XTU , the cpu will run extremely hot 95-100°c on high fans . The machine has potential but unfortunately ill be returing it . A performance computer should be close to ready and perform properly.

A 16" Alienware in a 15" package with the 4080 is hard to beat. It runs smooth and is not too loud. Mostly played MW3 multiplayer and get 180+ fps max settings with GSync matches most desktop gaming PCs. It is designed well and the screen looks fantastic with 240 Hz it looks sharp and no screen tearing. I have had no issues and the Alienware design is a nice touch. Highly recommend a good case or backpack to keep it from any damage or scratching when transporting. Don't use it on battery, so can't say much about that. I did upgrade RAM to 64 GB and that did increase smoothness and improved loading times in gaming. There were some minor stutters during loading levels before installing GSkill 2x32 GB DDR5 5600 sticks.

On Jan 3rd, purchased this device online for about $1,700 (Open Box - Excellent condition), received a different Dell laptop with an i5 on Jan 5th (maybe $500 value). Was not allowed any option but that was promised a price match if reordered and refund in 3-5 days. Within a couple hours, was forced to buy the same (Open Box - Excellent condition) for $200 more, about $1,900 even though was promised this price match. Shipped device back with their provided return UPS label (which proves they received on Jan 16th, screenshot attached). HQ deny it was received over email, refuse to provide my refund, will not respond to my calls or messages, and though I replied to their email 2-3 times, we get nothing back. I have not sworn or acted out in any correspondence. Worst statement was “This is unfair and unprofessional”. Unfortunately, we decided to use a credit card for the points, but now that it’s Jan 27th, this purchase is the gift that keeps on taking. I know this is a product review, but no matter what, cannot obtain resolve any other way including a formal complaint with the BBB. (The latest laptop does perform extremely well).

Excellent laptop, I think it's great and beautiful design

An amazing laptop from the specs and honestly, I love Alienware laptop, so keeping this short