Alienware m15 R3 – Review 2020

In addition to its reputation for producing large, powerful gaming desktops, Alienware also offers more portable machines that can still get the job done for enthusiasts. The Alienware m15 is the Dell subsidiary’s flagship 15-inch gaming laptop, and the 2020 Alienware m15 R3 (starts at $1,499.99; $2,159.99 as tested) is the most updated version. It features the same head-turning look as the m15 R2, but our configuration ramps up the screen refresh rate to 300Hz, refreshes the processor to Intel’s latest 10th-generation Core i7, and offers the power of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 at a very fair price. Its battery life is a weak point, but we can overlook that for this category of laptop, which won’t be used off the charger much. With this feature set, there’s no doubt it’s a high-end laptop, but its value is about the best we’ve seen among systems costing more than $2,000. Given its top-end performance and unique design at a lower price point than competitors, the m15 R3 earns our new Editors’ Choice among high-end gaming laptops.

Standout Design: Sci-Fi Styling

The look of the 2019 m15 R2 was a complete overhaul of the previous m15’s design, introducing a slick, distinctively sci-fi aesthetic. Alienware was not about to go all-in on another ground-up redesign so soon, and so today’s m15 R3 looks very similar to that R2. I like the style, perhaps even more than I did last year after some time away from it. I could see it being somewhat divisive, however, if people prefer laptops that blend in. 

Some gaming rigs broadcast their mission with garish red and black color schemes and aggressive geometry, but the m15 has a softer appearance and minimal, unique design. Ours is the white “Lunar Light” version as opposed to the gray “Dark Side of the Moon” color option. The ringed LED on the rear, combined with accents like honeycombed ventilation and a per-key RGB keyboard, adds some flair. The Alienware looks unlike any other laptop, and in a field that is often very samey, I appreciate that when executed well.

It’s equally sized to last year’s model, coming in at 0.8 by 14.19 by 10.86 inches (HWD) and 4.65 pounds. This makes for a fairly portable and compact gaming laptop, right in the mix with the other top-of-the-line options like the Razer Blade 15 (0.7 by 14 by 9.25 inches and 4.73 pounds) and the Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX502 (0.74 by 14.2 by 9.9 inches and 4.55 pounds). None are featherweight like the best ultraportable laptops or even the lightest gamers like the 14-inch Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, but they’re very portable relative to their power level.

The chassis isn’t metal, but feels like a good quality build and the softer deck plastic is pleasant to touch. The keyboard quality is solid—keys aren’t shy on travel, but don’t feel mushy. They lack any satisfying feedback or click, though, so they don’t stand out too much other than avoiding any gaffes. The RGB backlighting looks especially nice against the white chassis as well. The touchpad is similarly good, but nothing to write home about; its glass surface ensures smooth tracking, but it’s on the smaller side.

Next up is the display, which is propped up a bit higher than other laptops atop the hinge. The bottom display bezel sits at the top edge of a tall hinge, so the actual display begins a few inches above the keyboard deck. The bezels are glossy black and all thin, which contributes to keeping the laptop’s overall footprint small. A 720p webcam sits in the center of the top panel, which seems like a given, but several recent Asus gaming laptops have lacked this somewhat basic feature.

On our model, the panel itself bears full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution and a 300Hz refresh rate. The latter is aimed distinctly at enthusiasts, though I think it’s a better fit for any gamer than the 4K screen option. Even if you’re not playing games far above 60fps (more on this in the performance section), the ability to show extra frames is more useful than a demanding resolution at which few games will run smoothly. The picture quality is strong, and it gets very bright. The quality doesn’t touch the exceptional OLED screen we experienced on the m15 R2 model we reviewed, which is tied to the 4K screen option on this laptop.

Finally for the exterior, we come to the ports. The left flank holds one USB 3.0 port, an Ethernet jack, and an audio jack. On the right, there are two more USB 3.0 ports and a microSD card slot. The rest are located around back, including a USB-C port with Thunderbolt 3 support, an HDMI port, a mini DisplayPort connection, and a proprietary connection for Alienware’s external graphics amplifier.

Performance Testing: A Great Value for Top-End Speed

There are quite a few configurations of this laptop, so let’s focus first on our review model to see what to expect in terms of performance. In addition to the 300Hz display, this unit packs an Intel Core i7-10750H processor, 16GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 GPU, and 1TB of solid-state storage (in the form of two 512GB SSDs in RAID 0 that show up as a single drive).

Being a Dell company, Alienware allows for plenty of component choices as you’re ordering your laptop. In addition to the screen options we mentioned, you can equip your m15 R3 with an RTX 2060 or RTX 2070 Super GPU, an AMD Radeon RX 5500M GPU, up to 32GB of RAM, and a range of storage capacities. Our unit is a pretty good value, but definitely within the high-end laptop tier. A lesser SKU could see you more in the midrange price bracket if ours is looking too expensive. 

To judge the performance of these components in this machine, we ran our usual suite of benchmark tests on the laptop and compared the results to those of comparable gaming laptops. You can see the names and specs of those systems in the table below before we get into the head-to-head results. All of these laptops were more than $2,000 as tested, with the Blade 15 at the top for $2,999.

Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both tests yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. (See more about how we test laptops.)

The Alienware m15 R3 posts the second highest score in PCMark 10, though in this class there are some diminishing returns on higher scores. All of these laptops are more than capable of everyday multitasking, and will have you zipping around your desktop and browser tabs when you aren’t gaming. Similarly, as shown by the PCMark 8 result, the laptops’ SSDs will have you booting up and loading files and games quickly.

Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total execution time. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here. 

The multimedia test results demonstrate that Alienware put together a very efficient machine. Despite the Predator Triton 500 utilizing the same processor as the m15 R3 and the Blade 15’s CPU being superior on paper, Alienware’s new laptop is the best performer across these three tests. It should be said that none of these are meant to be professional media-editing laptops, so pros should look into a more specialized mobile workstation. The m15 R3 can do the job, though, and will have hobbyists or those using it for media tasks in a pinch waiting less than they would with less powerful general-use laptops. As with PCMark 10, faster is still better, even if it doesn’t change real-world capabilities too much.

Graphics Tests

On to 3DMark, which measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.

Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario for a second opinion on each laptop’s graphical prowess.

Considering that, on paper, only the 2019 m15 R2’s GPU should be lesser than that of the m15 R3, the newer machine is the best performer in 3DMark and acquits itself well in Superposition (albeit in a very tight field). This again points to strong efficiency in its design, whether in thermal construction, ventilation, or power allocation. The Alienware turns that efficiency into real-world gains, but while the raw 3D numbers look good here, let’s look at the next tests before making strong conclusions.

Real-World Gaming Tests

The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it’s hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world gameplay at various settings. We run them at 1080p resolution at the games’ medium and best image-quality settings (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5 under DirectX 11, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider under DirectX 12).

You may notice a nearly identical trend from the synthetic tests, which is great news for the m15 R3. It pushed the highest average frame rates in both of these titles at their maximum settings, edging out laptops with theoretically more potent GPUs. We’ve seen before that Nvidia’s Max-Q down-tuning in high-end mobile GPUs can neuter their power compared to their full-fledged counterparts, and that appears to be the case here. 

The standard RTX 2070 in the m15 R3 beats out the Max-Q RTX 2080 GPUs in the Blade 15 and the Predator Triton 500. Even if only by a few frames per second, it is still punching above its weight in terms of the on-paper hierarchy. In general, paying extra for a Max-Q RTX 2080 isn’t worth it, and the full-strength RTX 2070 is a better value.

Outside of these head-to-head comparisons, the m15 R3’s gaming performance is very encouraging. This is an expensive premium machine, so I suppose that’s the least you may expect, but this level of laptop passes the smooth 60fps threshold for visually demanding single-player games by a large margin. 

When a laptop includes a high-refresh display like the m15 R3, it makes the extra juice matter that much more. The results from these two games may leave you wondering why you need a 300Hz display, but there are answers to that. For one, you should still see any improvement over 60fps, even if it’s only 100fps and not 300fps, in AAA games. Secondly, the screen is meant more for competitive multiplayer games, wherein higher frame rates can be a competitive advantage in addition to looking better. 

To that end, I also tested Rainbow Six: Siege, a popular multiplayer game with a built-in benchmark test. Many players run these types of games on the lowest visual setting to maximize frame rates, so I ran the benchmark at the highest and lowest visual presets (both at 100 percent render resolution). On the maximum preset, the m15 R3 averaged 215fps, and on the lowest preset, 283fps. That almost hits the screen’s 300Hz ceiling, and while you can quibble about who can or can’t see the benefit of that many frames per second, the feature is there for those seeking it. Hardcore competitive players and professionals playing on the go will be pleased.

I should note that the m15’s cooling fans are fairly audible, but on the default power setting, they’re nothing out of the ordinary. This changes when you switch between thermal modes via the Alienware Command Center software, where you can select from a number of modes such as Quiet, Cool, Balanced, Performance, and Full Throttle, which amp the fan speeds to push more power. 

On Full Throttle, the fans get very loud, and if you combine that with an optional Overclock setting, the Alienware becomes one of the loudest laptops I’ve heard in a while. In general, I didn’t find that these modes made a huge difference in performance—Full Throttle added 4fps and 8fps to Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider respectively at maximum visual settings. I’d suggest saving yourself the fan noise and heat most of the time, unless you really need the extra power.

Battery Rundown Test

After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the same Tears of Steel short we use in our Handbrake test—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.

This short battery life is pretty disappointing, so I won’t sugar-coat the result. If this were a general-use laptop or an ultraportable, it would be a deal-breaker. For a gaming laptop, it’s a disappointment, but won’t ruin your experience. You may want to use this machine on the go sometimes, and it should be able to hang for a few hours depending on use, but was likely never the best travel companion to begin with given its size. You can use it once you arrive at your destination, or turn it on briefly when traveling, but by shape alone it’s not the best fit for a lap on a train or an airplane tray table. In addition, gaming off the charger is generally inadvisable for performance reasons, and it drains the battery very quickly.

Style and Substance at a Fair Price

The latest edition of the Alienware m15 is a big success on multiple fronts, and one of our favorite high-end gaming laptops. While you can configure a more reasonable midrange solution, our test configuration is a top performer in both CPU- and GPU-based tests, offers plenty of storage, and features a fancy screen. On top of that, any model you choose will boast a unique, eye-catching design filled with fun extras and useful ports. 

The m15 R3 stands out in an increasingly competitive gaming field with its looks, and it has the powerful substance to back up its style. The one area where it falls short is battery life, which certainly limits its potential if you want to use your gaming machine on the go or turn it into your daily driver. Still, gaming laptops are not primarily made for all-day use during travel, so we can overlook this aspect and assume you’ll be on the charger most of the time.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX502 held the crown as our top pick among premium gaming laptops for a long time, but the Alienware m15 R3 has proven a better value. It’s slightly less expensive than the Asus machine as configured, packing superior gaming performance, a newer processor, a more advanced display, and a unique design. We liked what the Razer Blade 15 and Acer Predator Triton 500 brought to the table, but the m15 R3 is a better deal, earning our Editors’ Choice in this category.

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