The Alienware M15 R2 seems like the perfect marriage of design and functionality, this sleek laptop designed by Dell has everything a gamer would want at their disposal. Just by the looks of it, the Alienware M15 looks revolutionary. With every inch of the laptop being used to deliver a better experience to the user, this is a laptop that you cannot go wrong with.
Design & Display Quality:
The Alienware M15 is modeled after the Area-51m but still manages to up in a lot of cases, the display, for instance, the review model we got had a 4K 60 fps screen which though is great for media viewing purposes it still lacked a bit during gaming situations.
While 60 fps is still somewhat better than what most consoles can offer at the moment, you really have to make a choice while purchasing the option of going for a 4K display which will limit the frames per second or get the 1080p OLED screen that will let you push the visual limits.
The 1080p screen though does not feel like it is any different and the OLED makes for a better screen color calibration and you can get a really good experience from that.
Coming on to the design, it looks like it was designed by the aliens it is trying to depict. Every corner and angle looks like it was designed with a thought that will give it the coolest look a laptop could have but also a ton more in functionality.
The laptop comes in two variants a black and a white variant, and we’re huge fans of the white variant. It helps to pop the accent color out and once you figure out the Alienware FX software, you can customize the laptop to your wishes.
Speaking about customization, this laptop takes things further as now you can customize every single key on the laptop. This is a neat little thing that helps to define your personal laptop from another.
The lights are minimal and the logo on the power button and the back of the laptop can be assigned specific colors too, this subtle array of lights give it a purpose instead of illuminating
The keyboard is something I felt uncomfortable using at first, it seemed a lot more compact than what I’m used to but upon using this laptop for quite a bit I got so much used to it that coming back to my regular laptop seems odd. The keys track perfectly on the M15 keyboard and there is a satisfactory sound that accompanies it.
Specs & Performance:
Now coming on the meatier aspect of the hardware of the laptop. The laptop has an i7-9750H, with that you get 16 GB of DDR4 Ram, 1 TB SSDs, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q Graphics card.
All this combined makes for a great computing and gaming experience, in our testing we found that the Alienware M15 R2 aces through on almost every game on 1080p resolution but it does struggle to perform and give the same performance on 4K.
While that is a big leap, you will still see a bunch of screen tearing issues when on 4K gaming, popular games like Apex Legends and Far Cry 5 give amazing performance but there is still a limit as to how much you can push the graphics output. This is due to the fact that the M15 R2 has NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 MAX Q variant which is comparable to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 desktop variant.
The processor is by far the best thing about the laptop which is a Generation Intel Core i7-9750H that you can turbo boost to 4.5 GHz mark.
But with so much power comes the heating issues and this laptop during our testing heated up quite a lot. When you are in intense gaming sessions, the laptop will heat up a lot and will make noise which will be noticeable, but that is I guess the by-product of packing so much hardware in such a little machine.
The Tobii Eye Tracking mechanism is meant to help gamer’s to have a better experience, but it feels like a gimmick at the moment. It does track your eye movements but it isn’t completely reliable, at the most it can do is give you a glimpse into peaking at other targets while your crosshair is set on a target.
Other than that the USB ports are plenty which means that you will be able to connect multiple devices at the same time. Though one thing about this otherworldly laptop which might disappoint a lot of people are the facts that the RAM is soldered on.
This prevents any sorts of upgrades you want to make in the future and with the M15 maxing out at 16 GB of RAM it will surely someday feel lacking. Other than this the motherboard is upside down, this makes it extremely difficult for anyone to under-volt the processor of the laptop for a better gaming experience.
The audio is loud enough to make sure that you listen to every subtle element in the game without having to blast everything to your ears, all of this and the cooling vent is housed under what looks like a honeycomb aesthetic on the laptop that can be found on the underside of the laptop and just below the screen.
Price Factor:
The only aspect which makes opinions divide on this laptop is the pricing, it is priced at around ₹ 2,13,689.99 which is incredibly steep and there are alternatives present which can make the purchase of this laptop a bit questionable.
Verdict
All in all, the Alienware M15 R2 is a beast of a machine and will excite every gaming enthusiast and you can get some of the best gaming experiences a laptop can give with this. The Alienware M15 R2 is a behemoth for gaming and you will have to shell out a large amount to get it.
