Alienware m15/m17 hands-on: A slim Area 51m

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Rating: 4.0; Vote: 1

Alienware has redesigned the m15 yet again, this time taking cues from the much loved 51m. Shot on a Canon C100 Mark 2 Peterson: Thanks for the video. I am returning my unit. Here is my comments to Dell on why: The fan noise has a whine instead of the standard whoosh sound. I am ok with the whoosh fan noise. The whine not so much. It is irritating for me and comes through anything I am doing at all fan speeds. The system still gets too hot. I do not care about how thin the system is if cooling suffers for it. Soldered on WiFi and it is a 3 year old product! Come on I can't even update it if I wanted to. Reversed Mother Board, to much work to repaste CPU for better cooling if I wanted. Soldered on memory, again I do not care how thin the unit is and would rather have memory I can upgrade and a thicker unit. Size of the unit width and depth is too big. Comparing to m15 R1 better keyboard but no number pad, better screen bezels, OLED panel seems to be calibrated on R2 - the R1 was to cartoonish. Not a big fan of the Lunar White but HAD to purchase this color to get the options I wanted! So I purchased a unit with a color I was not truly interested in and thought I might keep it but the issues with the system just make it that much easier to return because I do not care for the color. A biggy, benmarks of this system when compared to a comparable m15 R1 I had is much lower! Not sure why but the CPU is in the toilet when compared to the 8th Gen Intel CPU. Wimpy battery with no option to increase size like the R1. Battery life of 2 to 3 hours is not acceptable when you have to turn everything down and are only doing general work. I am not looking to game on the battery but want a system I can game on while plugged in and take on the road for school or to do creative work (coding, school work, watch a video) Tobii Eye tracking is ok, but I only use it to turn the screen off automatically and would much rather have Windows Hello. Also found the system will dim the screen using Tobii but sometimes the screen will not come back and has to the brightness has to be manually adjusted back up. Using a low cost NVMe and charging 4x as much for it? PC601 NVMe SK Hynix? I am sure this coupled with the RAM is a reason for lower benchmarks on a system which should have better benchmarks than the m15 R1. Note benchmarks were run when all Windows updates and drivers were updated. On a good note I was actually able to connect to the internet when the system started unlike the previous m15 R1's which I had to correct all the driver issues. All in all I like the newer design more but other choices made do not make this the system for me.
Date: 2022-03-15

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Comments and reviews: 9

Beyonders
Alienware: Beautiful Appearance All-Powerful Hard Drive, Ram, Infinite Disk Space, Strongest and Highest Level Performance Ram. Heat highly resistance
Origin PC: Beautiful Appearance, All-Powerful Hard Drive, Infinite Disk Space, Strongest and Highest Level Performance Of Ram. Heat immunity
Digital PC: Beautiful Appearance, High Advanced Performance of Disk Space And Powerful Huge Amounts Of Ram. Heat proof
MSI: Beautiful Appearance, Extremely Powerful Advanced Performance Of Huge Amount of Disk Space And Ram
Asus: Beautiful Appearance, Medium Advanced Performance Of Disk Space and Ram. Strong endurance and immunity of falling from high and almost water proof, heat resistance
Acer: Beautiful Appearance, Medium Advanced Performance Of Huge Amounts Of Disk Space And Ram. Heat resistance long term
HP: Powerful Advanced Performance Of Huge Amounts Of Infinite Disk Space And Ram. Usually uses for work, coding, video editing, and other soft ware. Even with that strong powers, HP Laptop is not design for play heavily game. It will rapidly damaged the Laptops, Desktop. Cannot endure medium falling accident, and no water proof, poor endurance in every aspect. I never uses or buy HP for game again. Only for those purpose of work and study. HP is the most weakenest Suggest you never buy HP for gaming purpose. You will constantly to fixing it repeatedly damaged from playing heavily game and the combination cost much more expensive than the one you bought it from the beginning.
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TheRealMikeShea
Good to hear they did away with G-Sync. The 2 hours of youtube I get out of the 99Wh battery (even with the power mode toggled down) in the 15R3 is absolutely abysmal and I wish I could have the motherboard or screen (or both) swapped out so I can actually get the most out of the battery. Either that or just grab one of these new ones since they're lighter and more powerful anyways.
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Christopher
Wish I had seen this before ordering a fully loaded area51m 10900k 2080 Super. it is so heavy and power supply is great if you don't plan to move around as u normally would with a laptop. I had mine 1 day and I am considering getting m15 fully loaded. Avoid 4k screen if gaming ridiculous delay
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JLB
someone PLEASE expalin the differnce between 8gb Ram and 16gb. i purely just want a sick laptop to game on at work, i wont be using it for anything else at all JUST GAMING. Is 8GB enough to run games on high/ultra with 90+ fps?
please dont just say yes or no lol!
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Thatguy808
Man if I wanted to view spec sheet I could of gone to Dell. com what type of a hands on is this. Get some legit tests going. This machine will throttle, Check David lee's review. Upside down board, soldered memory, and throttling because it overheats.
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Christopher
Great review and covering of info. Fully loaded m15R3 should of been what I bought. A51m is horrible for travel use. I had M18xR3 before the a51m. Both Re bulky but the new a51m r2 is half the weight
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duanchamp1988
I have the m15 first gen. Love it. Had to throttlestop though to bring those temps down. but i got it when it first came out and Its lasting. take it to work to game on lunchbreaks.
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Noman
It's highly inaccurate to call this heat prone machine that has a much better display but with half the gaming performance a 'slimmer 51m'. You can do better guys.
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Mr. PeanutButter
It sucks that they limit the memory to 16GB. not even upgradable in that respect. I really hope they fix that cause this machine is otherwise a beauty.
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