Alienware has decided to streamline and facelift its futuristic M-Series gaming laptops in the form of the slimmer X-Series, new successors to its celebrated m15 and m17 notebooks. We recently reviewed the Alienware x17 and now come to its smaller sibling, the x15 (starts at $2,099.99; $2,549.99 as tested). In both cases, the thinner chassis actually adds a bit of weight, so while the new gaming rigs are less thick, they’re not really more portable. The redesign does work better at 15 inches than 17 inches, with the x15 topping out at 5 pounds (the x17 weighs 7.05 pounds), and our review unit delivers a high level of performance with its 11th Generation Intel Core i7 CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU. The 512GB of solid-state storage in our test unit is a bit light for the price, however, and while the x15 posted some performance highs in AAA games, it had a lower frame-rate ceiling than some alternatives. The Alienware x15 is a solid gaming laptop with advanced features, but competitor Razer offers a lighter, nicer machine with longer battery life in the form of the Blade 15 Advanced Edition.
A Sleeker 15 Inches
Given that we reviewed the Alienware x17 a few weeks ago, this isn’t our first encounter with the new design. I’ll echo what I said in that review: The visual change isn’t extreme, it’s just that the laptop is a bit thinner and the color palette has essentially flipped. The rear block surrounding the ports and cooling vents is now white and the keyboard deck is black, a reversal of the color scheme of the Alienware 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 15 on the lid; the same honeycomb venting appears at the rear and above the keyboard; and the rear block is still ringed with an eye-catching customizable LED. The build quality is definitely still a plus—the chassis is sturdy, with little flex to speak of, and doesn’t feel cheap even though it’s not metal.
My main issue with the x17 was that, while technically thinner than the m17, it’s also heavier. There isn’t much practical upside to being negligibly thinner but noticeably heavier when you’re talking about a 7.05-pound laptop—that’s not really any value added over the older model. If anything, I’d call it a negative since it limits internal space for cooling (and indeed, we were a bit underwhelmed with the x17’s performance).
This blunts our enthusiasm for the new x15: You don’t expect a 17-inch gaming rig to be especially portable, but you likely plan to take your 15-inch laptop with you more often. The same paradigm exists at this size, though: The x15 measures 0.62 by 14.2 by 10.9 inches (HWD) and weighs 5 pounds, while the m15 R4 came in at 0.8 by 14.2 by 10.9 inches and 4.65 pounds.
The weight difference isn’t too much, and the new rig is noticeably thinner, so given that the weight remains reasonable, I think the redesign makes more sense at 15 inches. It’s not technically any easier to carry, true, but it’ll take less space in your bag (and unlike the x17, the x15 will fit in most bags) and looks sleeker. Five pounds is about an acceptable limit for reasonably frequent carrying; the Razer Blade 15 weighs 4.4 pounds.
Fast Displays and Fancy Features
The x15’s display isn’t extraordinary for a high-end gaming laptop, but that still means it’s pretty fancy compared to your average notebook screen. The 15.6-inch panel comes in three flavors: full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution with a 165Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time; full HD with a 360Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time; and our test unit’s QHD (2,560-by-1,440) resolution with a 240Hz refresh rate and 2ms response time. The latter two screens feature Nvidia’s G-Sync and Advanced Optimus.
Our review model’s QHD display hits a sweet spot of resolution and refresh rate often found on desktop setups. The reason gaming laptops usually settle for 1080p is that laptops aren’t as powerful as desktops generally and it’s a strain to play games at higher resolutions. A potent machine like the x15 can push through that barrier, but make no mistake, it’s not easy—frame rates at 1440p will be lower than they would be at full HD. If you play a lot of competitive multiplayer games, in particular, you may want to opt for a full HD screen. We’ll get into the exact performance of our Alienware and its display in a moment.
Relative to the rest of the design and features, the keyboard and touchpad are fairly basic, but that’s not a bad thing. The keyboard is comfortable and responsive, though the Cherry-developed low-profile mechanical keyboard found in the x17 is not an option here. Also unlike the x17 we reviewed, our unit’s touchpad lacked customizable backlighting, though that is an option with the RTX 3080 configuration.
The ports are mostly located around back, where you’ll find two USB-C connectors (one with Thunderbolt 4 support and power delivery, another with only power delivery), a USB 3.2 Type-A port, an HDMI port, and a microSD card slot. The only connections on the sides are the power jack located on the left edge and the headphone jack on the opposite side.
The rear-facing ports can be a little inconvenient if you’re connecting peripherals often, as you must lean over or around the display (or pick up and turn the laptop) to see what you’re doing. This is a small thing, but if you’re trying to plug something in in a dark area, the rear LED ring is bright enough to sort of blind you to the ports between the lights, making it difficult to see where the connections are (like when an oncoming car’s headlights make it hard to see what’s in front of you). I thought it was silly, but when it happened to me multiple times (I had to turn a lamp on to see the ports clearly), I thought it worth mentioning.
Otherwise, the high-end feature set is mostly the same as the x17’s, and some of the more beneficial inclusions aren’t immediately noticeable. This includes the Element 31 thermal solution—a gallium-silicone matrix, exclusive to Alienware and only available in RTX 3070 and 3080 configurations, that the company claims greatly improves performance—quad fans, and automated smart fan controls.
The x15 also features highly efficient voltage regulation and switchable performance modes via Alienware Command Center. All of this is discussed in a bit more detail in the x17 review, but suffice it to say it should help end-user performance. As with the x17, the different performance modes didn’t do much to hike frame rates, but they did make the fans much louder. We don’t think the noise of the Full Speed mode is worthwhile, so all the CPU and GPU test results you’ll see below were run in Performance mode.
Rounding out the feature set is a 720p webcam with IR face recognition support for Windows Hello, Killer Wi-Fi 6 with Bluetooth, and an included USB-C-to-Ethernet dongle. Note that our test unit was running Windows 10, but it arrived before the launch of Windows 11; consumers now ordering from Dell’s site will get Windows 11 Home or Pro.
Now, let’s survey the components we’re working with and see how they performed.
Components and Performance Testing
The base model of the Alienware x15 is priced at $2,099.99 with an Intel Core i7-11800H processor, 16GB of memory, a 256GB solid-state drive, a GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, and the full HD 165Hz display.
Our test config was priced a bit higher at $2,549.99 and featured the same CPU and memory loadout but bumped the storage to a 512GB SSD, the graphics to Nvidia’s RTX 3070, and the display to the QHD 240Hz panel. In both cases, the storage capacity is on the small side for a gaming laptop, but you can get a larger SSD as you customize your order—SSD size is not locked into specific configurations, thankfully. Given the sizes of modern game installs, even the 512GB SSD is somewhat limiting, so we’d probably opt for 1TB or more. It will cost you another $100 to get that much, which isn’t cheap, but we’ve seen other vendors charge considerably more.
Now for the testing. The chart below shows the other gaming laptops we’re pitting against the x15…
Besides its x17 stablemate and the AMD-based Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition, the lineup includes the x15’s closest rival, the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition, and the smaller Razer Blade 14 (also with an RTX 3070). Ideally, we would have included the Intel-powered m15 R4 for a head-to-head with the new design, but we don’t have results for that laptop in our recently updated suite of benchmark tests. The m15 Ryzen Edition will have to do, though its RTX 3060 will be at a disadvantage.
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.
The PCMark tests are very tight, and while there is a little more variance between the systems in the media tests, these are largely similar performers. The Ryzen Edition and Blade 15 fell behind in a couple of tests, while the x15 underwhelmed in Photoshop, but by and large these are all fast systems. What they are not is specialized media machines, merely good enough, so I’d suggest a mobile workstation instead as a main machine for creative professionals. Still, if you could only buy one laptop and needed to do some content creation or media editing as well as gaming, the x15 could do the job.
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).
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.
Note that for these charts we ran the game tests at 1080p so results could be compared between laptops, but also collected results at the x15’s native 1440p resolution, which we’ll touch on below too.
There is some GPU variance between these laptops, but since the Blade 14 also has an RTX 3070 and the others range above and below that tier, these are instructive results. Generally speaking, the Alienware x15 was one of the best performers in these tests, though it showed some peaks and valleys.
Valhalla is one to look at closely as the most demanding game, and the x15 posted a solid 70fps even at maximum settings. That’s directly in line with its main competitor, the Blade 15. It’s also even better than the x17, which is why we had some misgivings about the larger machine’s performance in its review.
How did the x15 stack up to the other RTX 3070 laptop, the Blade 14? The Alienware averaged higher scores and really pulled away in Valhalla, but it wasn’t all rosy—the x15 struggled with the high-frame-rate F1 2021 and Siege, outperformed by the smaller laptop. The RTX 3080 GPUs in the Alienware x17 and Razer Blade 15 also used their greater muscle to pull away in these benchmarks.
You’d expect the x15 to beat the Blade 14 across the board given the size disparity—the Alienware has noticeably more room for thermals in its bigger chassis, especially if the company’s touted specialized technology makes a difference. In reality, there was a fair amount of game-to-game variance, with some machines handling one game better than another.
This all goes to show that you shouldn’t shop for gaming laptops by GPU alone; size, voltage, and thermal layouts have a big impact. To sum up, the x15 kept pace with the RTX 3080 laptops and topped the Razer Blade 14 in some tests, as it should, but trailed the smaller system in others. We’ve written about how individual testing for a variety of scenarios is more important than ever since we’ve observed a wide range of results from GeForce RTX 30-Series laptops, and that is proven again here.
Aside from the nitty-gritty of individual comparisons, the x15’s graphics performance is solid overall. It comfortably exceeded 60fps in our most demanding game, cleared the 100fps mark in the competitive multiplayer title, and ran the simulation title smoothly. When we tried again at 1440p resolution, its numbers did drop noticeably at maximum settings: Valhalla held at exactly 60fps (a drop of 10fps), Siege fell to 111fps (a 50fps drop), and F1 2021 managed 81fps (a modest 7fps decrease). Depending on the title, you should be able to enjoy this system’s sharper native resolution in most games.
The chassis definitely gets hot while gaming, particularly on the plastic trim above the keyboard. The fans are also quite audible when under load—I’d say louder than average—though the lower performance modes mitigate this. As mentioned, the Full Speed mode was so loud it wasn’t worth the few extra frames we observed in our testing.
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.
The relatively short battery life is to be expected, but it would have been a nice surprise if the x15 eked out a few more hours. Some of the alternatives will give you that, if you predict using your laptop off the charger often, but six hours lets you hang out on the couch or a commute without much worry.
As for our Datacolor SpyderX Elite screen analysis, the x15 boasted one of the brightest displays at maximum, only bettered by its larger sibling, and its color coverage was excellent as well. These are nice panels on paper, and they look the part in person. If you’re planning to use this laptop for some multimedia editing as mentioned, it’s a pretty creator-friendly screen.
A Well-Rounded Redesign
On the whole, the Alienware x15 is a more successful redesign than the x17, and a good gaming laptop. The slimmer chassis and slight bump in weight make more sense at 15 inches, and the performance was more in line with what we’d expect. The system’s portability and raw power don’t blow us away, but it’s a good mix of the two. If you’re shopping in the $2,000-plus gaming tier, this is one of the better options out there.
It’s not the best of the bunch, however: The Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition we reviewed was a bit more expensive (though playing with configurations can fix that), but offered a superior GPU, more storage, longer battery life, and a lighter design. Razer’s flagship remains our favorite cost-no-object gaming rig, but if you like the Alienware’s design, it’s a solid alternative.
