Alienware’s place within the gaming laptop computer market has by no means been purely about efficiency (loads of rivals match it on that entrance) however reasonably model and options along with energy. Dell’s Alienware x16 R1 (begins at $2,049.99; $2,949.99 as examined) is the most recent instance of this, combining admittedly high-end {hardware}—an Intel Core i9-13900HK CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 laptop computer GPU—with Alienware’s distinctive (if divisive) seems and a bevy of spectacular options. The efficiency of our take a look at unit trailed not solely better-equipped and pricier rivals but in addition our cheaper and extra highly effective Editors’ Selection award holder, the Lenovo Legion Professional 7i Gen 8. Regardless, its implausible keyboard and beautiful show helped the Alienware x16 R1 reside as much as our rating all the identical.
Pricey However Succesful Elements and Configurations
The Alienware x16 R1 has numerous choices for consumers, notably well-off ones, and ranges in worth from $2,049 to begin, as much as $4,000 or extra, relying upon the configuration you select.
Dell’s base mannequin begins with a modest thirteenth Technology Intel Core i7-13620H 10-core processor, 16GB of reminiscence, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 laptop computer graphics, and 512GB of SSD storage.
Ramp issues as much as the highest configuration, and you may get the identical mannequin outfitted with a 14-core Intel Core i9-13900HK CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 laptop computer GPU, 32GB of RAM, and as much as 4TB of SSD storage, promoting for an enormous $4,099.99.
Our assessment unit is not fairly that loaded, however nonetheless packs the identical Core i9-13900HK processor and 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM. The graphics are solely barely extra modest, with an RTX 4080, and the SSD offers solely 1TB of storage.
Nonetheless, our assessment unit does include a number of further interesting bits, just like the AlienFX touchpad, which splashes some RGB goodness proper throughout the contact floor, so your gestures and scrolling may be color-coordinated along with your per-key RGB-lit keyboard. Our keyboard will get a step up in high quality too, with ultra-low-profile CherryMX mechanical key switches—extra on these later.
Lastly, this unit additionally has a show with the next refresh charge, operating at 240Hz versus the 165Hz show you could possibly select on the base degree.
A Design to Mild Up the Night time
With a chassis fabricated from anodized aluminum and magnesium alloy, the Alienware x16 is extraordinarily sturdy, and has an affordable thickness and weight for a high-powered gaming laptop computer. It weighs a beefy 6 kilos, nevertheless it measures roughly 0.73 by 14.4 by 11.4 inches, placing it on the slim aspect in a class stuffed with inch-thick programs.
A number of that relative thickness is to offer house for airflow and cooling {hardware}, and the x16 is full of 4 cooling followers, a number of copper warmth pipes, and a vapor chamber that covers each the GPU and CPU. (A gallium-silicone thermal paste referred to as Aspect 31 coats the important thing silicon.) The chassis itself is roofed in vents and exhaust grilles, and all of it appears to do a good job at maintaining issues cool with out throttling efficiency. The aspect impact of all that cooling gear, nonetheless, is a loud machine. Hearth up a sport like Cyberpunk 2077, and the machine roars like an plane about to take off.
Alienware’s distinct aesthetics will not be everybody’s cup of tea. The combination of glossy curves, customizable lighting, and contrasting black, white, and naked steel stamps this as a gamer’s laptop computer. It will possibly’t faux to be anything. In fact, you will discover lights all over the place: lights on the keyboard, lights within the brand on the lid, a strip of lights across the rim of the rear chassis, and even a glowing touchpad. All of it’s customizable with a staggering 16.8 million colours by means of the included AlienFX software program.
The glowing touchpad is actually an attention-grabbing function, but in addition a matter of private style. I am as keen on RGB lights as anybody, however I discovered the blaring colours on the touchpad to be an excessive amount of, and I might skip it if I have been shopping for this laptop computer for myself.
Dell’s touchpad itself feels delightfully clean, because of its glass floor, and it is exact and responsive to each faucet and gesture I take advantage of. However as touchpad dimensions develop on nearly each different laptop computer, the 4.5-by-2.7-inch touchpad of the x16 feels cramped as compared. This is not simply my creativeness, both: The Asus ROG Strix Scar 16, for instance, has an additional half-inch in both route.
What feels positively spacious, nonetheless, is the keyboard. By not making an attempt to cram in a numeric pad, the x16’s keyboard has room to unfold out, and the well-spaced keys just do that. Our mannequin additionally has ultra-low-profile Cherry MX key switches, which makes for a satisfyingly clicky keyboard. Like many, I swear by mechanical keyboards in my every day work, so I see the attraction of placing actual mechanical switches into your gaming-laptop keyboard. And, just like the touchpad, each key glows with customizable gentle, and you’ll arrange all kinds of patterns and shade mixtures within the AlienFX software program.
Plentiful (if Poorly Positioned) Ports
You will not discover many issues to complain about with the x16, and its beneficiant port choice means you will by no means be at a loss for a particular connector—a welcome change from the numerous skinny laptops these days that decide totally for USB-C or Thunderbolt connectivity.
Along with energy, the x16 has a mini DisplayPort, a full-size HDMI output, twin USB connectors, a pair of USB-C ports (one being Thunderbolt 4, the opposite not), and a microSD card slot. A 3.5mm jack is obtainable for headphones and headsets. It is a humiliation of riches in most respects.
However I’ve to complain about one factor: The port placement is simply not useful. The entire ports on the x16 are on the again of the system, in an I/O panel that is centered between two honeycombed air flow grills, with nothing on the edges. With the type of thickness and weight that is unavoidable on a machine just like the x16, Dell had ample room to place some or all of those ports alongside the edges of the chassis, making them a little bit handier to make use of.
Possibly Dell has finished some analysis I do not find out about, and perhaps the typical Alienware fan parks their gaming laptop computer on a desk or stand and infrequently strikes it, however I discover it onerous to consider that anyone finds it extra handy to have to achieve behind a 16-inch system simply to plug in some headphones.
Nonetheless, at the least you will discover two connections that stay handy, the wi-fi ones: Wi-Fi 6E for networking, and Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity for headsets and peripherals. You must be aware, nonetheless, that no Ethernet port is included, so you will want to make use of a dock or adapter if you’d like the speediest community connection.
Enormous Colour and Blistering Refresh Charges
The plain centerpiece of the Alienware x16 R1 is its 16-inch 1600p show, which scales up from the standard 15.6-inch with a 16:10 side ratio. The taller show advantages from QHD+ (2,560-by-1,600-pixel) decision, a blistering 240Hz refresh charge, 100% DCI-P3 shade, and the branded software program you need in Nvidia G-Sync and Dolby Imaginative and prescient HDR.
Dell’s show is matched in high quality by the system’s six-speaker array, which has a pair of 2-watt (W) tweeters, and a quartet of 3W woofers, offering not solely wealthy sound and highly effective quantity, however supporting Dolby Atmos spatial audio. Whereas most players will go for a high-end gaming headset for encompass sound audio and comms, and you continue to ought to take into account the fan noise, the Alienware x16 sounds fairly high-quality by itself.
Testing the Alienware x16 R1: Not-Fairly Peak Efficiency
We ran the Alienware x16 R1 by means of our normal benchmark suite, testing all the things from CPU efficiency to gaming prowess, and in contrast that efficiency with a number of the finest gaming laptops in the marketplace in the present day, just like the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 (2023), the MSI Titan GT77 (2023), and the Editors’ Selection-award-winning Lenovo Legion Professional 7i Gen 8. And, for these contemplating an improve, we additionally checked out final 12 months’s Alienware m17 R5.
Most of those rivals are reasonably comparable within the particulars: high-powered Intel Core i9 CPUs, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 and 4090 graphics, and a succesful 32GB of RAM. The Alienware m17 R5 is the outlier, with AMD processing and graphics, nevertheless it’s in the identical pricing and efficiency tiers.
Productiveness Checks
The primary benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a wide range of real-world productiveness and content-creation workflows to measure general efficiency for office-centric duties equivalent to phrase processing, spreadsheeting, internet shopping, and videoconferencing. We additionally run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive take a look at to evaluate the load time and throughput of a laptop computer’s storage. (See extra about how we take a look at laptops.)
Three benchmarks concentrate on the CPU, utilizing all obtainable cores and threads, to charge a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 makes use of that firm’s Cinema 4D engine to render a fancy scene, whereas Geekbench 5.4 Professional by Primate Labs simulates widespread apps starting from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine studying. Lastly, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to transform a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p decision (decrease instances are higher).
Our closing productiveness take a look at is PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Programs, which makes use of the Artistic Cloud model 22 of Adobe’s well-known picture editor to charge a PC’s efficiency for content material creation and multimedia purposes. It is an automatic extension that executes a wide range of common and GPU-accelerated Photoshop duties starting from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving a picture to making use of masks, gradient fills, and filters.
In a few of our exams, like PCMark 10 and Photoshop, efficiency was a useless warmth throughout nearly all of our comparability programs (the Lenovo led the pack in Photoshop), demonstrating how effectively all of those laptops are at primary duties. With energy like this, nothing about internet shopping, video calling, and even photograph modifying will pose an issue for this laptop computer.
Nonetheless, trying on the leads to exams like HandBrake, Cinebench, and Geekbench, it is clear that Intel’s HK-Sequence processor within the x16 is not fairly as peppy because the HX chips utilized in different high gaming rigs. For those who’re additionally planning to work with video, or different processor-heavy work, the x16 will do the job, nevertheless it will not be the quickest wolf within the pack.
Graphics and Gaming Checks
We take a look at Home windows PC graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Night time Raid (extra modest, appropriate for laptops with built-in graphics), and Time Spy (extra demanding, appropriate for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
To additional stress GPUs, we additionally run two exams from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses each low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like picture rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Automotive Chase exams, rendered offscreen to accommodate completely different show resolutions, train graphics and compute shaders utilizing the OpenGL programming interface and {hardware} tessellation respectively. The extra frames per second (fps), the higher.
Lastly, for gaming laptops, our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Murderer’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and aggressive/esports shooter video games, respectively. On laptops, Valhalla and Siege are run twice (Valhalla at Medium and Extremely high quality, Siege at Low and Extremely high quality), whereas F1 2021 is run as soon as at Extremely high quality settings and, for Nvidia GeForce RTX laptops, a second time with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on. All are run at 1080p.
Naturally, gaming is the place this laptop computer shines, pumping out triple-digit body charges in all of our sport exams, even after we used the laptop computer’s larger native decision. Primary gaming exams noticed large scores, as effectively, however the Alienware held a gradual place in third or fourth place in all of our artificial graphics exams. No matter you are seeking to play, the x16 is able to deal with it, with DLSS and ray-tracing assist, however (unsurprisingly) you will get higher efficiency out of a costlier RTX 4090—and even an RTX 4080 with a greater CPU—than the silicon pairing used right here.
Regardless, the extent of graphics prowess continues to be great with the RTX 4080. For those who bought the AMD-powered Alienware m17 R5 final 12 months to tide you over till this 12 months’s Nvidia launches, the RTX 4080 marks a noticeable step up, and it delivers many of the functionality of the 4090 for a barely cheaper price.
Battery and Show Checks
We take a look at laptop computer battery life by enjoying a regionally saved 720p video file (the open-source Blender film Tears of Metal) with show brightness at 50% and audio quantity at 100%. We be sure that the battery is absolutely charged earlier than the take a look at, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To check laptop computer shows, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software program to measure a laptop computer display screen’s shade saturation—what share of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 shade gamuts or palettes the show can present—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per sq. meter).
Gaming laptops have a typical weak level in battery life. Pushing high-resolution photos with a lot {hardware} and cooling requires numerous energy, so brief battery life is just about the norm. With a examined battery lifetime of 6 hours and 52 minutes, the x16 is in acquainted firm, solely 19 minutes shy of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16, and only one minute longer than the MSI Titan GT77. However the chief of the pack was final 12 months’s Alienware m17 R5, which lasted 9 hours. Simply keep in mind that these numbers are all for easy video playback, not gaming. Hearth up a sport like Cyberpunk 2077, and you will get perhaps an hour or so out of it earlier than you might want to plug in once more.
Whereas not on the absolute high, Dell’s show high quality can be high notch, with 100% DCI-P3 shade and first rate brightness, particularly for HDR viewing materials. It is not the brightest, however Dell’s display screen by no means regarded dim in my testing.
Verdict: A 16-Inch Contender, However Not Fairly a Champ
The Alienware x16 R1 is the entire bundle, with high-end efficiency, premium options, and a design you may’t ignore. From the steel chassis and 240Hz show to the mechanical keyboard and RGB all the things, it is a straightforward win for the Alienware devoted, and amongst Dell’s finest releases. Nonetheless, for those who’re prepared to spend much more cash—which, once you’re already at three grand, is mainly {dollars} and cents—you will discover much more succesful gaming laptops in arguably extra broadly acceptable and useful designs.
To that finish, you will discover some downsides, particularly the awkward port placement and the noisy followers. In contrast with the category-leading and Editors’ Selection-award-holding Lenovo Legion Professional 7i Gen 8, the Alienware x16 R1 is a worthy different, nevertheless it would not fairly dethrone the Lenovo as our favourite 16-inch gaming laptop computer. All of it comes down to cost versus efficiency: The Lenovo merely brings higher efficiency at a extra palatable worth.
