The Review: A Comprehensive Look at the Alienware 15 Gaming Notebook

I'm about to review this amazing computer system that I had a blast playing Minecraft on and got an incredible frames per second. This is a great gaming computer, and I hope you guys enjoyed watching me play.

For fun, I cranked up Street Fighter 4 to its maximum 4K resolution and was still getting around 70 frames per second. However, when I looked at the screen, there was no visible difference between 4K and 1080p. In fact, if I stuck my eye right up against the screen, I could kind of see the difference, but when I was actually playing, I couldn't tell the difference. This is because most games don't look significantly different at 4K compared to 1080p. Of course, there are exceptions, and some games may show slight improvements in graphics quality at higher resolutions.

I also tried running GTA 5 on this system, which had some issues running smoothly at 4K. However, when I played it on lower settings, such as medium or low, the game ran well without any major issues. In contrast, at high settings, I was getting around 40 frames per second, while in team fights, I could get up to 60 frames per second. Hero of the Storm also had some issues running smoothly at 4K, with frame rates ranging from 25-30 FPS. However, when playing on lower settings, such as 1080p on ultra settings, I was getting around 60 frames per second.

Overall, the gaming performance of this system is excellent and can handle even the most demanding modern games without any issues. Whether you're a hardcore gamer or just someone who wants to play their favorite games on the go, this system should be able to keep up with your needs.

Battery Life

The battery life of this system is a bit disappointing, considering its thickness. I was getting around 5 and a half hours of regular use, while watching movies from the drive, both of which had screen brightness set to around 80%. However, when playing games on the system with the screen at maximum brightness, I was only able to get around two hours of battery life.

The performance drops significantly when using the system on battery power. This is due to the system's cooling system, which kicks in when things get hot. The fans can be quite loud, especially when the system is under heavy load. However, it's worth noting that the system seems well-cooled overall, and the temperatures don't get too high.

The speakers are also an interesting feature of this system. They're front-facing, which means they're pointed directly at the user, and can produce surprisingly good sound quality for notebook speakers. This is a nice touch, especially considering the system's design.

Overall Impression

I have to say that I'm really impressed with this system. It's got everything you'd want in a gaming notebook: a great screen, plenty of storage, lots of RAM, and a fast video card. The case may be thick, but it's designed more for aesthetics than functionality. However, the price is where things get interesting.

In Canada, I was seeing this system listed for $1,700 CAD, which is already quite expensive. When I looked at prices in the US, I saw that it was going for around $1,800 USD, which is a bit steep even by gaming notebook standards. However, with the upcoming release of Broadwell CPUs, I expect to see some price drops soon.

If you can get this system for $1,400-1,500 CAD, then I think it's an excellent value. It's one of the best hardcore gaming notebooks out there, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants a high-performance mobile gaming system.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey how's it going guys this is Dave 2D and I am back with yet another notebook review today we're doing the Alienware 15 so I did the Alienware 13 a few weeks ago I didn't love that notebook at the time just because it was priced a little bit high they have since dropped the price on that one but this is The Notebook that I originally wanted to do the review on I feel that 15in notebooks are kind of where Mobile gaming should be I've had this one for a little bit over 2 weeks here's my review all right so a quick unboxing here black Yellen wear box uh you pop the lid and the entire inside of the box is covered in foam which is cool compartment at the bottom that has the AC adapter and underneath the notebook are some Alienware pamphlets nothing special just standard quick stuff the top of the notebook is plastic it's a fiber reinforced plastic so it's like plastic material with some carbon based fibers in there but it's not a traditional carbon fiber fiber uh it's supposedly very durable but it looks and feels like regular plastic and like all of their notebooks it has that classic alien wear logo here the bottom of the notebook is also plastic and there are four rubber feet here these are actually pretty tall the intake vents are also located back here the panel in the middle does come off and inside you have two rows of ram over here a regular mechanical drive and an M2 sat Drive there's actually room for a second M2 SATA drive right beside that first one so you can actually have three iCal drives in here and all of these things can be upgraded or replaced if you ever need to in terms of ports on the back in between the two exhaust vents we have a connector for the external Graphics amp that Alienware sells a mini display port and HDMI port so both of these outputs work fine on my 4k monitor on the right side we have an SD card slot that holds the card pretty much flush two USB 3 ports and a built-in gab ethernet port which is pretty rare these days even on gamer notebooks on the left side we have separate headphone and microphone jacks two more USB 3 ports a lock slot and the AC adapter connection so the adapter is 180 watt Beast so it's pretty big there's a really dim light up front that shows when it's powered but there's no indicator on the adapter itself to show when it's charging you kind of have to open up the notebook and look at the notebook's power button for charging status all right in terms of it Dimensions it's longer and wider than a 15-in Macbook and it seems quite a bit thicker and to answer a question that keeps popping up this is a brand skin that's on the MacBook in white carbon fiber now the difference in thickness is actually a little deceptive so remember those tall rubber feet on the bottom if you've seen my review of the HP Omen there was a bit of an issue on that notebook where the temperatures got kind of high because there wasn't enough cool air going into the air intake but the Alienware 15 has these rubber feet to kind of prop it up for a better air flow but it makes the notebook seem quite a bit thicker I'm also pretty sure I could have slid a third Penny underneath but Canada got rid of pennies a while ago so I could only find two pen pennies in the office but even when you take those rubber feed into account it's still a pretty thick notebook and weighing it at 7 lb is not exactly light either so what do you get inside this B7 pounder it has a Haswell core i7 running at 2.5 GHz a 15-in 4K touchscreen 16 gigs of RAM two drives a 256 solid state and 1 TB mechanical GTX 970 aler 1700 Canadian which should be like $13 $1,400 us right but we'll get into that later on the 4K screen has great color it's very vibrant not oversaturated and it's quite bright the viewing angles seem okay it's an IPS panel but the viewing angles aren't as good as some other IPS panels I've used but it's decent and a spider pegs this thing at 100% srgb and 99% Adobe RGB so this is actually one of the most color accurate notebook screens I've ever used calibration out of the box is pretty good as well I'd say it's as good if not better than the color accuracy of a 15-in MacBook Pro it is a glossy finish and it doesn't have the anti-glare tint like the MacBook does but because the screen is bright it's not a problem it's a 1080p webcam seems pretty good and I filmed some pretty important stuff while using it now it might just have been really good sunlight or something but the color seemed pretty good off of this webcam I don't know I'll let you decide the inside has this soft touch material kind of like the 13-in version it's nice to touch but I think the jurry is still out on long-term durability but I do like the idea of it the keyboard feels good Keys have a lot of travel typing is comfortable and I like the placement of the directional keys there are some macro keys that you can set up on the left side but they've done a really good job to keep the keyboard centered even with these macro Keys it's a really good keyboard for General use and gaming the trackpad has two physical buttons and I like them there's a surprising amount of travel on these buttons but they're still responsive and they're not spongy the trackpad itself is okay it has that classic Windows trackpad leg and it skips around a little it's better than the alien wear 13 track Pad but it's not amazing you know what is amazing though things that light up this is the first trackpad I've used that lights up like this it sounds really gimmicky and okay no it is gimmicky because this thing has no practical purpose but they did a really good job on this and like the 12-year-old kid and me loves it you can change it to a bunch of different colors and if you want to go insane you can make it flash all the time so you can control the trackpad and the lighting on the keyboard through software it's really intuitive you just kind of Click around on different zones on the notebook and then you click on the corresponding color wheel and Bam your colors change I haven't done the math but there's probably like hundreds of thousands of color combinations you can also change the color of the top surface of the notebook you can't make it cycle through the colors like this I'm just showing you the different color options all right enough about rainbow stuff so the SSD speeds are about 450 right and 500 read and the mechanical drive has just really bad numbers it's like 100 or 150 for read and write video editing performance is really good on this thing it's probably one of the best mobile video editing rigs I've ever used for starters if you remember it comes with two drives which is great for video editing and you can always add a third drive to make it your scratch disc or something which is even better it has a color accurate 4K screen fast processor and a fast GPU so this thing really feels like it was built for video editing it crushes 1080p edits and 4K edits are still really good it's not as Snappy as my 2015 MacBook Pro but in terms of render times the Alienware 15 is about 10 15% faster I played a little Minecraft and got a lot of frames per second so this is a good gaming computer that's the end of the review hope you guys liked watching okay I'm kidding so just for fun I cranked Street Fighter 4 to full 4K res and I still got like 70 frames per second but seriously on a 15in screen there's no visible difference between 4K and 1080p in Street Fighter 4 or for most games for that matter I mean if you stick your eye right up to the screen you can kind of see the difference but when you're playing you really can't tell G GTA 5 had problems running at 4K but at 1080p it runs pretty well but when you play it on high settings you get around 40 frames per second a little bit less sometimes on medium you get around mid to high 50s so it's very respectable hero of the storm I also tried at 4K just to see frame rates you get around 25 to 30 frames per second so it's not worth your time but playing at 1080p on ultra settings you get over 60 frames per second when you're laning and around 40 to 50 frames in team fights in general though gaming performance is really good and I'll be able to comfortably run any kind of modern game you throw at it just a quick blurb on battery life here it's a 92w hour battery that gets kind of disappointing battery life considering how thick it is I got around 5 and 1/2 hours of regular use 6 hours watching movies from the drive both of these had screen around 80% brightness and got a little bit less than 2 hours playing games on battery with screen at Max brightness keep in mind though that the performance drops a lot on this machine when you're playing on battery that's just how the 970 Works fan noise at idles around mid 20 DB mechanical dries have a bit of noise to them so that's why it's not completely silent but it's still very quiet now when things get going a bit like on some low-end games fans kick in gently it's around 30 DB but it's not bothersome but sometimes when hardcore 3D games are really taxing this thing the fans hit mid-40s and holy mother of God it is loud it's actually straight up unpleasant to play games without headphones when the fans are going on like this uh it doesn't happen often but yeah when it does it's annoying the good thing is that when you look at The Thermals the system seems well cooled I mean a 15-in Macbook hits 42 43° C but the Alienware 15 hits 38 39 at its warmest points it has to get loud as F to cool like this but at least it's not loud and hot right the speakers are front-facing and that's probably the only real advantage of that super thick case you can fit speakers that kind of point right at you they sound good for Notebook speakers and because they're directed at you they seem to get pretty loud here's what they sound like so there's a lot of really good stuff going on inside the alen Weare 15 it's got a really great screen possibly one of the best screens two hard drives lots of ram really fast video card like everything about it is just designed for just a really great gaming experience aside from that thickness I mean no one loves a thick notebook but the one reason why I can't just openly recommend this notebook is because of its pricing so right now in the Canadian Microsoft store this thing is priced at $1,700 Canadian and that's I mean that's on sale now normally that price would translate to like4 or $1,500 us or maybe even $1,300 us but it's actually going for 1,800 in the American Microsoft store so that's a little bit weird to me I think there will be an upcoming price drop I think with the four core Broadwell chips coming out this will drop in price now if you can get it for $14 or $1,500 us I think this this is one of the best valued hardcore gaming notebooks out there I mean everything about it just screams gamer uh but if you can't and you have to pay ,7 or $1,800 for this thing then it kind of becomes a okay Buy in terms of its overall usage though this is a great device for a hardcore mobile gamer or mobile video or photo editor and just a great notebook all around that's the end of the review hope you guys liked it uh if you have any questions comments type below thumbs if you liked it subs you loved it it's been nice and I'll see you guys next time\n"