Alienware m18 Review 2023

One of the first of the new breed of 18-inch computers, the m18 can get expensive if you set it up in a high-end way. An RTX 4090 and Core i9-13900HX will cost $3,300 without much memory or storage. But if you care most about the big screen, it starts at $2,000 and has a good i7-13650HX and RTX 4050. Don’t expect a long battery life; remember that the fans can get loud when you’re using it a lot.

Alienware m18  Specs

Pros:

• Huge screen for playing games
• The Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU is very fast. The CherryMX keyboard is very smooth. There are a lot of ports and plugs.
• This 18-inch game laptop is cheaper than the other one we’ve looked at.

Cons:

• Less interesting colour choices than in the last generation
• The price goes up because of better parts.
• Fans can be loud when playing games.

Price

The Alienware m18 can now be purchased from Dell’s online store and a select group of authorized resellers for a starting price of $2,099. An m18 with a 13th-generation Intel Core i7-13650HX central processing unit, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics processing unit, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD is available for that price. Furthermore, it has a regular 18-inch QHD+ (2560 x 1600) 165Hz display. If you want to go all out, you can spend a ton of money making adjustments. The best Alienware m18 can be had for around $4,949 (before taxes) at the time of this writing. In addition, you’ll have access to a faster frame rate but a lower-resolution 18-inch FHD+ (1920 x 1200) 480Hz display.

Design

The Alienware m18 is an extremely large desktop PC. The design has a lot of interesting touches, but the one I keep focusing on is how awkward it is to use with one hand. Depending on the setup, this technological marvel weighs between 8.5 and 8.9 pounds and has dimensions of 16.1 by 12.6 by 1.05 inches. It’s also larger and heavier than rival 18-inch gaming laptops like the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 and the Razer Blade 18. When you lift the lid, you’ll be able to appreciate the benefits of that size: A huge, plush keyboard deck with an interesting pattern of triangular holes along its upper border.

This laptop has an enormous 18-inch display. The borders are noticeably thicker than the rest of the screen at the top and bottom, where the webcam and Alienware logo are located. You won’t be able to disguise the fact that this is an Alienware gaming laptop thanks to its dark grey (sorry, Dark Side of the Moon) metal frame with hexagonal cuts and huge logos.

Display

Our Alienware m18 has a large 18-inch QHD+ (2,560 x 1,600 pixels), 16:10, 165Hz display, which is great for playing games and watching videos simultaneously. The first few times you use an 18-inch laptop, the screen size may take you by surprise. It’s not that the screen size is the only reason I wouldn’t recommend this laptop, but it’s getting difficult to enjoy working on increasingly compact devices. I evaluated the smaller and lighter Razer Blade 18 and LG Gram 17 Pro. A 13- or 14-inch ultraportable screen now feels puny. Although 300 nits are adequate, today’s top computers typically have 400 or 500 nits.

Performance

In terms of gaming performance, our review unit of the Alienware m18 is second to none. Playing my favorite games at maximum settings and 60 frames per second was a breeze. I’m writing this review for Cyberpunk 2077 shortly after CD Projekt Red published the “Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode” update to demonstrate. This patch enables path-traced ray tracing for gamers with high-end PCs (GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs and above). In the near future, every light in a video game will have its direction calculated and displayed in real time, a concept known as physically-based lighting.

Audio

The loudspeakers in our Alienware m18 are distortion-free, even at the highest volume levels. While composing this critique, I enjoyed listening to a few of my go-to tunes. Whether I was racing around Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 or blasting bad guys in Hell in Doom Eternal, the games had crisp, clear audio. Bass is lacking, which is to be expected but still disappointing. It’s disappointing that such a large and costly gaming console can’t compete with smaller and less expensive PCs, like as the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 and the MacBook Pro 2023, when it comes to bass.