Alienware M15 R3 Review

Most good things happen in groups of three. It is the case with the Alienware m15 R3, which starts at $1,449 (recommended price: $2,379) and comes with a powerful 10th Gen chip and Nvidia RTX GPU. It also has Alienware’s trademark adjustable lighting and a beautiful 4K monitor. Also, remember that the keyboard is easy to use and the speakers are very loud. But the battery life could be better, and you’ll have to spend a lot of money to get all those cool features. But the Alienware m15 R3 is an excellent choice for gamers who want a system that works as well as it looks. It’s one of the best computers for games, video editing, and virtual reality (VR).

Alienware M15 R3 Specs

PROS:

• Elegant structure
• Beautiful 4K OLED screen
• Overall and gameplay performance are both good.
• Powerful orators
• A keyboard that fits your hand perfectly

CONS:

• Battery life is not good.
• Expensive

Price

I’ve always liked that Alienware is committed to giving customers various options that don’t give up too much. For example, the $1,449 base model of the m15 has a 2.6-GHz Intel Core i7-10750H processor, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB PCIe M.2 SSD, an AMD Radeon RX 5500M with 4GB of VRAM, and a 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080-pixel display with a 144Hz frame rate and 7-millisecond reaction time.

The $2,379 version of the laptop I reviewed adds a pair of 512GB PCIe M.2 SSDs in RAID 0 setup, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 GPU with 8GB of VRAM, and a 15.6-inch, 3840 x 2160-pixel (4K) 60Hz, 1ms screen. But if you want even more power, the $3,709 model has an Intel Core i9-10980HK CPU, 32GB of RAM, two 2TB PCIe M.2 SSDs in RAID 0 configuration, and an extra 512GB PCIe M.2 SSD drive, an Nvidia RTX 2080 Super Max-Q GPU with 8GB of VRAM, and a 3840 x 2160-pixel, 60Hz, 1ms panel.

Design

The M15 still looks like a piece of celestial heaven from the future. With its Lunar Light paint job and bright, alien head in the middle of the lid, I’m always ready for that figurative lift-off. The big “15” in the bottom left corner makes the laptop look sporty but not in a violent way. If you don’t like the almost-pearly white color, you can also get the system in a color that Alienware calls “Dark Side of the Moon.”

Black shiny plastic is used for the front lid and keyboard deck, while black matte plastic is used for the hinge and back vent housing. When you turn the laptop over, you’ll see a beautiful honeycomb design where the fans are. When I opened the case, I saw more of that ethereal white, which was made more noticeable by the blue backlighting from the full-size chiclet-style keyboard.

Above the keyboard are more honeycombed vents, and a small alien head is pretending to be the power button in the top right corner. The white glass touchscreen is in the middle of a large handrest below the keyboard. Shiny black bezels ring the 15.6-inch screen. The sides are thin, but the top and bottom are so thick that “Alienware” is written along the bottom chin. Below that is the built-in Tobii eye tracker, which we’ll discuss later.

Ports

This thing has ports everywhere. Do you want to connect a mouse, an external SSD, or one or two monitors? The m15 has a lot of ports and slots, so go for it. On the right side are two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports and a place for a microSD card. On the left side is another USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A port, a Gigabit Ethernet port that can be expanded, a speaker jack, and a Noble lock slot. There is a Thunderbolt 3 port, a mini DisplayPort 1.4 port, an HDMI 2.0b port, and a power jack on the back. The Alienware Graphics Amplifier port is also the company’s external GPU.

Performance

The Alienware m15 R3 has a 2.6-GHz Intel Core i7-10750H processor, 16GB of RAM, and two 512GB PCIe m.2 SSDs in RAID 0 mode. I opened 30 tabs in Google Chrome, some of which ran Twitch, YouTube, and huge files, and nothing terrible happened. The laptop held its own during our mock tests, but in a few scores, it was beat. When we used Geekbench 5.0 to measure full speed, the m15 got a score of 6,314, which was higher than the Helios 300’s score of 5,137, even though both have a Core i7-10750H CPU.

The Zephyrus (AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS CPU) and Scar G15 (Intel Core i9-10980HK) got 7,895 and 8,263, respectively. During the Handbrake test, the m15 encoded a 4K video to 1080p quality in 8 minutes and 38 seconds. It is faster than the Helios 300, which took 10 minutes and 26 seconds, but slower than the category average of 8 minutes and 26 seconds. The fastest times were 7:26 for the Scar G15 and 6:59 for the Zephyrus.

Battery Life

On the Laptop Mag Battery Test (continuous web browsing over Wi-Fi), the Alienware m15 R3 lasted 4 hours and 38 minutes, less than the 5:17 average for expensive laptops but still pretty good for a game laptop. The computer did better than the Helios 300 and Scar G15, which took 3:12 and 3:48, respectively. But none of them could beat the 11:32 runtime of the Zephyrus, which is the longest we’ve seen on a game laptop.