With the m15 and m17, Alienware redesigned its flagship gaming laptops with a futuristic look and high-end modern parts. We liked them for their standout style and nearly unmatched mobile performance. Today, the Alienware X Series is trimming the chassis a bit further: The Alienware x17 (starts at $2,199.99; $3,680 as tested) offers a similar but evolved design, and our review unit is maxed out with a Core i7 CPU, GeForce RTX 3080 graphics, 32GB of RAM, and a 120Hz screen with 4K resolution for fabulous gaming performance. That said, it doesn’t outperform premium 15-inch gaming rigs, and is actually heavier than the only negligibly thicker model m17, which makes us scratch our heads about this redesign. Lacking superior portability or power, the Alienware x17 is a tough sell over the (also expensive) m17 or Razer Blade 15.
Design: An Alien Evolution
Alienware’s m15 and m17 designs are proven hits, combining sleek style with top-end power, but the X Series emphasizes portability. The x17 (and x15, which we’ll be reviewing soon) features similar design cues but trims the build down further and adds a few visual tweaks.
On the visual side, the color palette has essentially reversed: The rear block surrounding the ports and cooling vents is now white and the keyboard deck is black, marking a 180-degree turn from the m15 R4. When closed, the lid and rear are now the same color, sandwiching the black between the white bottom and lid.
This black “core” makes for a handsome side profile, but otherwise the design isn’t much of a departure. The material is still a quality soft-touch plastic on the lid (with a durable finish to prevent stains) and a more standard hard plastic on the keyboard deck. The same font is used for the number 17 on the lid; the same honeycomb venting appears on the rear vents and above the keyboard; and the rear block is ringed with an eye-catching customizable LED.
It’s really the physical dimensions that have changed with the X Series, and while Alienware is talking up the slimmer chassis, it’s hardly a groundbreaking shift. The x17 measures 0.84 by 15.7 by 11.8 inches (HWD; it’s a fiftieth of an inch thinner with the 360Hz full HD display), versus 0.87 by 15.7 by 11.6 inches for the m17 R4. You won’t notice the reduced thickness without a set of calipers, but you will notice the new laptop is actually heavier than the old, at 7.05 versus 6.5 pounds. That’s simply not a real-world increase in portability, and leaves me puzzled. If Alienware just wanted a different design and visual direction from the M Series, that’s fair enough, but the company’s touting the ostensible thinness of the new system is a reach.
Shaving off a few hundredths of an inch makes no practical difference for the user, and in fact (as we’ll see) serves only to limit thermals, thus throttling performance. If the x17 were also lighter than its predecessor, it’d make more sense, but as it is, all you get is a mildly different visual design. Additionally, the power brick is still enormous—twice the thickness of the laptop itself—further cutting down the portability.
Alienware points to new thermal solutions to combat the heat issues that arise with a smaller chassis, so it’s not as if the topic didn’t occur to the engineers. The X Series uses an updated version of the company’s Cryo-Tech cooling technology, with new quad fans and smart fan controls, as well as a new thermal material dubbed Element 31. The latter is a gallium-silicone matrix that’s exclusive to Alienware and only available in RTX 3070 and 3080 configurations. The firm claims a 25% improvement in thermal resistance over the previous generation, and while head-to-heads are hard to judge, we’ll see how it performs below.
These improvements are supplemented by the return of highly efficient voltage regulation (up to 12-phase regulation in the x17), which is part of what helped the m17 sustain higher performance for longer periods, as well as software performance modes. These are accessed through the Alienware Command Center, letting you pick among quiet, balanced, performance, and full-throttle modes (as well as overclocks). I’ll touch on them in the performance section, but spoiler alert: These extra modes make more of a difference in adding fan noise than in adding frames per second.
Display and Extras: 4K, Cherry, and Plenty of Ports
There’s more of the physical build left to discuss beyond the thermals, so let’s touch on the screen next. Our review unit’s 17.3-inch panel combines 4K resolution (3,840 by 2,160 pixels) with a 120Hz refresh rate. The clarity of 4K is great, as you’d expect, and we’ve moved past the days when 4K screens peaked at 60Hz. However, this resolution is still very demanding for gaming, even with the latest GPU hardware, and it’s my opinion you’d be better served with a lower resolution. Fortunately, the x17 has two full HD or 1080p screen options—one at 165Hz, and the other at 360Hz with Nvidia G-Sync.
Next up, the keyboard is a high point. Our unit makes use of the mechanical keyboard Alienware co-developed with Cherry, the first such low-profile keyboard on a laptop when it debuted on the m17 R4. Both the sound and feel of these true mechanical keys are superior to almost any laptop keyboard, delivering a satisfying click and tactile feedback.
It makes you wish every laptop had mechanical keys, and makes going back to a normal keyboard difficult. The Cherry keyboard is an extra-cost add-on, not included by default. The keys are individually backlit, with RGB lighting customizable through the Command Center software.
You’ll also notice the touchpad is very much backlit on its own, which is something you don’t see too often (though this isn’t the first time we’ve seen it on an Alienware gaming laptop). The addition is entirely aesthetic and you can switch it off if you like, but when it comes to a glowing touchpad…why not?
Finally, the connectivity. The Alienware m17 placed some ports on both sides and at the rear, but the x17 relocates all ports to the rear block except for the power and headphone jacks, located at the rear corners of the left and right flanks respectively. Around back, you’ll find two USB 3.1 Type-A ports, two USB-C ports (one with Thunderbolt 4 support and both with power delivery), HDMI and mini DisplayPort video outputs, a microSD card slot, and a Killer Ethernet jack.
Reaching around the display to the rear ports for all connections is a bit irritating, and I often wound up having to stand and lean over the screen to see what I was doing or pick up and rotate the laptop. The power and headphone jacks’ placement on the sides makes sense, as you’ll probably use them more often.
Specs and Configurations
With the physical construction detailed, let’s take a look at what’s inside. A base model of the x17 costs $2,199.99, a pricey proposition no matter how you slice it. For that expenditure, you get an Intel Core i7-11800H processor, 16GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, a 256GB solid-state drive, and the full HD 165Hz display.
That’s pushing the limits of reasonable pricing for an RTX 3060 gaming laptop, especially one with only 256GB of storage. Given the sizes of modern game installs, I’d even be side-eyeing a budget gaming laptop with that little storage, let alone a machine that costs over $2,000, so the base model is hardly a great value. That’s somewhat to be expected in the top-end gaming tier, but you’d at least hope for a few extras to justify the cost.
As for our review configuration, it’s an eye-watering $3,680 with the same Core i7 CPU, 32GB of RAM, an RTX 3080 GPU, a 2TB SSD, and the 4K 120Hz display. That’s steep by any measure, though at least you can see where the nearly $1,500 price jump comes from, since every component except the CPU is significantly kicked up. The faster graphics and massive increase in storage account for most of the hike. We’ll see how the GPU fared in our performance benchmarks, but no testing is required to conclude you can fit a lot more games on that SSD.
Testing the Alienware x17: Predictably High Numbers
After all that preamble about components and thermals, it’s time to take out the stopwatch. We’ve pitted the Alienware x17 against an array of other gaming laptops, including the m17 R4 and a Ryzen-based Alienware m15, which will clue us in to how the redesign compares to the company’s M Series. In addition, we have Razer’s 15-inch flagship and the smaller (and less potent) Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. You can check out their specs in the table below.
Productivity Tests
The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s storage. (See more about how we test laptops.)
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
There’s plenty of parity between these systems, so there’s not a lot to say on a head-to-head basis except that the x17 finished toward the front of the pack overall. Everyday tasks are a breeze, and the x17 shows ample chops as a media editing platform, even though that’s not its primary purpose. CAD and creative professionals will want a genuine mobile workstation with a Core i9, Xeon, or high-end Ryzen CPU, but the Alienware will certainly do in a pinch.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. In GFXBench, the more frames per second (fps), the better.
In addition, we run three real-world game tests using the built-in benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege. These represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive esports shooter games respectively. Valhalla and Siege are run twice (Valhalla at the Medium and Ultra quality presets, Siege at Low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run twice at maximum settings, once with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned off and once with it on.
Here’s where we’ll see the effects of everything described earlier, as GPUs are pushed to their limits. Note that our game tests are run at 1080p resolution for comparison’s sake, but I have some anecdotal 4K results below. The Alienware x17 won the synthetic graphics tests, a nice feather in its cap considering there are other systems here with equivalent GPUs. This points to its raw 3D muscle, and is a good sign for professional use cases too.
The x17 was a bit less impressive in real-world gaming, however. Its frame rates are undeniably high, but that’s a given at this price and parts level. Looking closer at Valhalla (the most demanding of the three), the x17 was right in line with the m15 and a bit behind the Razer Blade 15. I tried some tests with the boosted performance modes, but the few frames added weren’t worth the much l certainly capable of high-end gaming. It cruises past the magic 60fps mark in Valhalla, and Siege and F1 2021 can take advantage of the display’s high refresh rate. Still, good gaming performance is a minimum requirement at this price level. The x17 doesn’t particularly outperform smaller systems, and the lighter m17 proved faster.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at the screen’s 50% and peak settings.
Gaming laptops rarely shine when it comes to battery life, and the x17 is no exception. Six hours won’t leave you super-frustrated each time you take your laptop to the couch, but it’s hardly an all-day or travel-ready runtime. Actual gaming will certainly drain the battery faster than our video rundown, so I wouldn’t lean on the battery too heavily given the power-hungry parts and 4K display. The Alienware isn’t the most portable laptop to begin with, so when you do need to move it, just be glad it will give you a few hours of life.
By contrast, the color coverage is a plus, which along with the 4K resolution and high CPU performance is good news for creatives. The screen’s also brighter than most, reaching 461 nits (and coming closer than most to its rated 500).
Powerful and Pricey, But Not More Portable
The Alienware x17 is a sharper-looking version of the former flagship m17, but we’re not sold on the redesign. While larger laptops often pack more power, it performs no better than premium 15-inch gaming rigs, so you’re really just choosing on screen size and getting a heavier machine. Compared to the m17, the new notebook adds neither power nor portability.
What we do like is the look, the mechanical keyboard (though it isn’t new with this model), and the premium extras you’d expect at this price point. The x17 does everything well, but will cost you a pretty penny, and its less expensive base model is severely lacking in storage. If money is no object and you love the look, the x17 will serve you well and even start some conversations given its head-turning design. Otherwise, it’s hard to recommend over the Alienware m17 R4 or Razer Blade 15.
