REVIEW: Alienware m15, an expensive gaming notebook with caveats

Launched recently in Brazil, the Alienware m15 is a big bet by Dell and Alienware for the Brazilian market, even more because this model has a national assembly and arrives with strong specifications to populate the segment of gaming notebooks in the country. The end result is interesting, however, there are some key points we need to talk about. Dell/Alienware kindly sent the Alienware m15 to the showmetech, and after a few days of intense use, here's our full review.

Design and construction

A Alienware is a famous subsidiary of Dell for some years now since it was purchased by the company, and continues to be a strong brand with regard to the production of accessories and computers with the gamer seal in its veins.

With Alienware m15 things couldn't be different. To begin with, the model box is already quite large and gives the impression of a premium product soon dear. When opening, it's simpler than I imagined, without big frills, after all, what really matters is what's inside.

Even carrying this “root” gamer spectrum in its essence, the brand's new onslaught is more sober and personally I like it much more than those ultra exaggerated notebooks. The m15 is a well behaved gamer model, but which at the same time has an enviable charm.

the whole model is matte black, but that Alienware kindly calls this color Dark Side of the Moon. On the lid there is a darker art with typography that reflects the words “m15”, in addition to the classic logo of the brand very small in the central part and that is flashing RGB – who knew…

Os LEDs don't stop there. Although the Alienware m15 is really a more clean, there is a very beautiful luminous outline on the back, initially in blue, but which can be customized. By the way, all lights can be customized, but we will talk about that in the following topics.

the keyboard is backlit and it can be in the color that the user prefers, and here we have the first low point of this notebook. In the first paragraph of this analysis I emphasized that the model is assembled right here in Brazil. However, the company still had the audacity to launch the m15 with an American keyboard layout. Then no, we don't have ABNT2. I would easily understand such a decision if the product were purchased by import and on demand, but we are talking about a national production chain that doesn't even have its own keyboard for Brazilians.

In addition, the keyboard is good for typing and playing games. does not have switches mechanics or anything, it's the membrane pattern we're used to. Also in this part of the chassis, we have air inlets in the shape of a beehive to carry out part of the cooling system and the , also with RGB, but without fingerprint reader.

The part rear, in addition to that outline of LEDs, it has air outlets, and these are the main ones and those responsible for the heat exhaust system. On the sides there are still small grids that help with this, but they are only of assistance.

O touchpad it is standard size and there is absolutely nothing big in it. It's just there to do its job. The 15.6 display has a more “internal” hinge, so to speak, and is quite sturdy. At the bottom there are more honeycomb-shaped air vents to dissipate heat.

At the top of the screen there is still a small webcam with only 720p resolution. This is basically unacceptable on a notebook that costs more than 10 thousand reais, and the problem could easily be circumvented with a 1080p webcam. A pointless ball out from Alienware.

The construction is made of a mixture of aluminum, plastic e magnesium alloy in certain parts of the chassis, but I must confess that it does not fill the eyes so much. For the very high price it is housed in, the Alienware m15 gives the confidence of being resistant and well made, however, I expected more and I can feel that although it is good, it could have that touch of more premium materials throughout the casing.

For transporting this gaming notebook it doesn't do too bad. The weight stays in the 2,4 kg, while the dimensions are:

• Front height 1,29 cm;
• Rear height 1,925 cm;
• Maximum height 2,285 cm;
• Width 35,62 cm;
• Depth: 27,25 cm.

With this, it is possible to transport it around without so many difficulties, but you will have to deal with the great external battery.

Connectivity and ports

Speaking of the connectivity part, let's first go to the inputs. In total, the Alienware m15 has 2 USB 3.2 Type-A 1st Gen (one with PowerShare), 1 USB Type-C (Thunderbolt™ 4*), USB 3.2 Type-A 1st generation, 1 HDMI 2.1 output, power input, RJ45 Ethernet port, and headphone and microphone jack p3 distributed along the sides and back.

In addition, the model is compatible with Bluetooth 5.1 and networks of Wi-Fi 6 through Killer Wireless and Killer Ethernet interfaces. So you can imagine that the internet speed must be pretty fast, right? Well, that was just my imagination.

Unfortunately the model we received for testing came with an unusual error: it does not connect to WiFi. As soon as I called I spent a lot of time trying to find out what was going on, and mostly feeling slightly embarrassed for not being able to connect to the internet. Could it be a laptop error? Windows 11 bug? — which, by the way, comes from the factory on the device and was my first experience with this operating system — or did I really not know what I was doing?

Apparently it was a laptop problem. I went to one forum from Dell and found similar complaints. The way to reverse the situation was to reinstall the internet drivers following a step by step, but getting there was a headache.

Errors happen, especially in the strange world of computing, but a crucial error of this type and in the first few minutes of using it was a real bucket of cold water for this editor. The worst thing is that I was disappointed, so imagine if I, as a possible buyer, had spent more than 10 thousand reais and when I finally turned on the m15 I would be stuck in this imbroglio.

Screen and sound

Moving on to another important topic, which I luckily liked is the screen, although I also have my downsides. Here we make use of a screen with a standard size of 15.6 inches, IPS panel, which corresponds with good colors and ends up not disappointing, Full HD resolution (1920×1080), 165 Hz refresh rate, quite impressive, and a response time of 3ms, which, let's face it, could be lower.

Adding it all up, we do have a good screen to play games, watch movies, work, etc. However, some things don't make sense. First, let's go to the resolution. This Alienware m15 model specifically is the top of the line we found in Brazil, coming with a RTX 3070. That said, it doesn't make much sense to limit the performance of a card of this magnitude, which is left over at 1080p, to run games at that resolution.

I understand the fact that the refresh rate is 165 Hz and the display FHD for the competitive scenario, but even so, there seems to be a gear blocking the full potential of this hardware. I definitely think the best decision would be to have brought the model with the RTX 3070 along with a Quad HD screen.

All in all, it's a good screen, which will guarantee a good experience and lots of fluid frame rates for the player. But the experience was only complete for me when I plugged this gaming notebook into an external Quad HD monitor and kept playing.

In terms of sound, the m15 has super simple speakers that not even Dell specifies properly on its official website. So, don't expect much and keep in mind that the sound quality will disappoint the most discerning ears, and serve as a quick fix when you don't have a headphone or speakers close by.

Battery

When we talk about battery and gaming notebook in the same sentence things start to get a little hazy and there's nowhere to run. In this case it is not so different. The Alienware m15 has a battery with 6 cells and 86 Wh, but it's no use: if you want to play you'll have to have a taken close by.

The battery is quite reasonable, and it lasts a considerable time when the notebook is performing simple tasks, such as in Word, browser, etc. However, in games, you will have around 1 hour or less to look for the giant charger, and the same goes for watching a movie or another. It doesn't last that long.

Speaking of the charger/external battery, get ready for a heavy and big model, but at least it has blue RGB on the tip to be cuter. If the ironic tone wasn't so cool, at least the charge is pretty fast and that left me positively surprised.

Customization

If there's one thing the Alienware m15 does well, it's the customization part. Fortunately the user has an interesting range of possibilities to customize the appearance, LEDs, noise profile, heating and overlock of the system.

The application Alienware Command Center it is already integrated, it is possible to customize the entire color scheme of the keyboard, power button, back logo and even the back light strip. It's pretty cool and simple to do. You can add a breathing light effect, keep each part of the keyboard one color, leave the logo flashing, or simply turn everything off to save battery power.

Apart from overclocking it also has a specific part and is not the most complicated. However, if you are more layman in this part I advise you not to do it on the machine, because we always run an unnecessary risk when trying to “increase the power” of this system.

By the way, speaking of potency, the last interesting feature of the Command center are the usage profiles. Thus, the user can choose between 5 different types, from the turbo mode that leaves the fans at their full capacity, to a more silent ou cold, which makes the Alienware m15 cooler and without noise. It is also possible to add games to a kind of library and determine which usage profile will be used for each game.

Noise and heating

In addition to the battery, another great villain of gaming notebooks and especially this Alienware m15 is the heating and consequently its noise. It is normal for this type of device to have this problem, because we are talking about very powerful parts in a small space to release all the heat produced. The result is fans turned maxed out to try to do the job.

Internally, some components easily reach 92/94ºC, with peaks up to 97ºC. In the keyboard part, where we support the hand to play, it can be VERY warm if this model is at the maximum profile. By the way, I definitely do not recommend that you use this notebook on your lap when you are under stress loads. For this, choose the profile Cold ou Silent and manner in use.

The rear is the one that heats up the most thanks to the exhaust system and comes to give that little burn in the hand if the user makes a mistake. But of course, these are the extreme cases that we tested to find out how far this gaming notebook goes.

Speaking of noise, there's no escaping it either: prepare your ears while playing, and don't use the Full Speed ​​Mode. This profile simply puts a turbine inside the Alienware m15 and the noise becomes unbearable. In normal gameplay, whether in Balanced Modes ou Performance, the noise is acceptable, although it is still loud. The settings that I recommend for everyday use, Cold or Silent, are very functional and fulfill their role very well.

System

Now, speaking of the internal settings, the Alienware m15 is definitely from another planet. For starters, the processor that arrives in this model is an Intel Core i7 11800H, 8 cores, 16 threads, base clock of 2.3 Ghz with a beautiful Turbo Boost up to 4.6 Ghz. The RAM memory comes in 16 GB in dual channel (2×8) with a very fast frequency of 3200 MHz. The internal storage, in turn, is a massive 2TB M.1 SSD.

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The big star, however, is a great RTX 3070, a card from the most high-end segment from NVIDIA that comes with the possibility to run any game in Full HD left over, and especially games in Quad HD resolution, which is the scenario I most recommend. You can even run games in 4K with the appropriate settings adjusted.

The i7 11800H does well in whatever task we put in front of the Alienware m15. In everyday use and in games, this processor is sure to swim in arm's length. As for video editing and more complex tasks, things also remain quiet, as its 8 cores do the job. This is also possible thanks to the high speed of the memories, which can still be expanded to 32 GB.

The 1 TB SSD that comes with this notebook leaves nothing to be desired and will bring almost instantaneous Windows loading to the user and very short loading times in games thanks to NVMe technology.

Performance

synthetic tests

We performed some synthetic tests on the main software available to stress the Intel Core i7 11800H, the RTX 3070 and other components of the Alienware m15 system. In these benchmark, the higher the number of points, the higher the performance of the card and CPU.

3DMARK

O 3DMARK It is one of the main tools for performing synthetic tests and tangential to the capabilities of the Alienware m15. The first test performed was the Time spy to benchmarking using DirectX12 with functions such as multi-adaptation and multi threading with render at 2560x1440p resolution. GPU tests seek to measure the graphics card's ability to handle shadow particles, tessellation, volumetric lighting, etc. Processor testing demonstrates the demand for computational physics processing and other simulations.

The second test is aimed at PCs with cards that support ray tracing, Port Royal, and tests dynamic reflections, ambient occlusion, post-processing effects, tessellation, depth of field, procedural generation, physics, etc.

The third test of this software is the Fire Strike Extreme, designed for testing powerful GPUs with heavy tessellation benchmarking, volumetric lighting, smoke simulations, dynamic particle lighting, CPU physics and post-processing.

PC MARK 10

O PCMARK has the great advantage of testing everyday applications, such as rendering images and videos, using a browser, playing videos, creating spreadsheets, video conferences, etc.

Cinebench R23

Tests of CINEBENCH serve to put the processor and graphics card under maximum load in the rendering of complex scenes and scenarios. The tests put the 8 processor cores, and later only one main core to render a realistic scene with anti-aliasing, reflections, lighting, shadows and several other effects that make up about 2000 objects.

Blender

Finally, the Blender is an open source tool used for modeling, animation, texturing, compositing and video rendering. In this test we used the BMW demo to render.

Tests in games

We've talked about technical aspects for far too long and as a gaming notebook, we want to see what the Alienware m15 can deliver in terms of gaming performance. In our battery of tests we made comparisons between Call of Duty: War zone, Fortnite, Forza Horizon 5 e Resident evil village in the resolution Full HD e Quad HD on Ray Tracing e DLSS.

Call of Duty: War zone

Warzone is one of the hottest multiplayer titles at the moment and was an interesting challenge for the Alienware m15. Full HD gameplay with everything on ultra averaged between 90 to 10 frames without drops, but certainly my choice would be to play in Normal mode to try at least 144 frames and play at a competitive level.

In Quad HD, the RTX 3070 was more comfortable and without so much bottleneck due to the higher resolution. The gameplay remains very good at around 70 frames, although I already believe that turning on the DLSS improves the situation and, of course, lower the quality the gameplay is excellent.

Resident evil village

One of the biggest releases of 2021 so far, Resident evil village it has a good optimization on PCs and arrives with very realistic graphics when taking players to villages and castles in Romania. In the tests, we put all the qualities on the maximum setting in Full HD and the result was a gameplay between 60 and 70 frames. It's not bad, however, I felt a bottleneck between the components, especially the RTX 3070, which could go further.

So, I went to test things in Quad HD and took the opportunity to turn on the Ray Tracing and FidelityFX Super Resolution in Quality mode. The choice was very correct, and our gameplay was excellent and very close to 95 frames for most of the time.

Forza Horizon 5

recently released, Forza Horizon 5 is a graphical masterpiece created by the Playground team of developers, and has a good performance on PCs. On the Alienware m15 things were no different, and this gaming notebook ran with everything at maximum and ray tracing on high between 73 to 85 frames on average.

In Quad HD the experience was much better. The Alienware m15 kept pretty much the same frame rate, with some slight swings to around 60 frames, but nothing that bothered me. Incidentally, the visual quality is considerably better and without some unpleasant aliasing.

Fortnite

Finally, we tested the acclaimed Fortnite to close our test battery. The Epic hit ran at full quality, without Ray Tracing, at an average of 90-100 frames throughout.

In Quad HD resolution, the gameplay was in the range of 115 to 130 frames with everything in Epic quality and using DLSS in Balanced mode to help. I think this is a great way to play, especially lowering the textures to reach 144 frames.

An annoying problem…

During our testing, our Alienware m15 unit came with an apparent defect. After minutes of play, the device would lower the frequencies of the RTX 3070 from 1700 MHz to home 800 Mhz. This means a performance reduction of more than half in almost all scenarios. It's the difference between playing COD Warzone at 90 frames, and after the problem, playing at 40 frames.

I understand that this does not reflect the quality of all Alienware m15 notebooks, and we have already contacted Dell, who will send a new unit for further testing. The consultancy explained to us that if the problem happened to a consumer, it would be forwarded to the technical support, and consequently the return and exchange of the damaged device. However, the new m15 unit has not yet arrived in our hands, so we will update this text as soon as more tests are carried out.

Update 10/01/2021: After the issue, Dell kindly sent us another unit of the Alienware m15, which this time showed no performance losses in our tests. Once again, it is worth noting that the punctual error is susceptible to happen both to us, the press, and the final consumer. However, it is understandable that the same error does not represent the true quality of the notebook, but rather, it was a tremendous annoyance.

Conclusion

Finally, is it really worth investing in the Alienware m15? Before my verdict, let's talk about values. The m15 with the RTX 3070, at its lowest price, is found by R$11.999 No. Submarino. To be honest, a high-end gaming notebook is essentially expensive, there's no way around it. The situation also worsens due to the crisis in the semiconductor industry, generating a price increase.

Speaking of competitors, the closest model I found is the Avell A65 MOB, with the same processor and graphics card. However, the avell sells this notebook not as a gamer product, but for workstation and work, but theoretically nothing prevents you from using it for games. As I have never tested this model, I cannot comment on its quality in a direct comparison, but I can talk about prices, and this laptop is in the range of 18 thousand reais.

As we can see, the high-end gaming notebook market is somewhat scarce in our country. It is easy to find several interesting models until a RTX 3060, which is in the mid-range segment — even though it is very good. For this reason, return to the previous question: is it worth the investment?

If you're looking for a high-performance portable device, whether to work with editing, complex projects or just want a notebook to run all your games wherever you are, then yes, it's worth it even for the high price, which as I've already mentioned, is really expensive, not important at the time. O Alienware m15 It's really a sturdy notebook, which has reservations, it's true, but it should serve this more specific audience well and that aims for a very high performance in games.

Technical sheet

Córdoba	Alienware m15
Processor	Intel Core i7 11800H (11th Gen) – 24MB cache 8 cores and 16 threads – from 2.3 GHz to 4.6 GHz
Video card	GeForce RTX 3070 8GB GDDR6
Operational system	Windows 11
RAM	16GB DDR4 3200MHz – Expandable to 32GB
Storage	1TB NVMe Gen3 x4 SSD
Fabric	LED 15,6? inches  WVA type anti-glare panel Full HD resolution (1920x1080)  165 Hz refresh rate 3ms response time
Keyboard	Gum (membrane) – US International Layout without numeric keypad Backlit in RGB
Webcam	Webcam 720p resolution (1280x720)
Tickets	2x USB 3.2 Type-A Gen 1 (one with PowerShare), 1x USB Type-C (Thunderbolt™ 4*), USB 3.2 Type-A 1st generation, 1 HDMI 2.1 output, power in, RJ45 Ethernet port, and headphone and microphone jack p3
speech	Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5.1
Energy	6 cell(s) – 86 Wh / 240 Watt charger
Dimensions	2.28 cm x 35.6 cm x 27.2 cm
Weight	2.42 kg
Price	R$11.999

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So, what did you think of the Alienware m15? Also check out our review of Intel NUC 11 Beast Canyon, the mini PC Gamer with console performance.

REVIEW: Intel NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon is mini gaming PC with grown-up performance