Alienware m15 R7 review

All Alienware laptops follow a similar design philosophy and we really love the sleek design of these laptops. However, when you’re putting down more than ₹2.5lakhs for a laptop, you’d want it to look a tad different than the ones that go around for half the price. 

If you want to know more about the design, you can read our Alienware x14 and Alienware x17 reviews here. The m-series has a near-indistinguishable design which makes talking about it a mundane effort. It’s not bad or lacklustre but we’ve written about it multiple times so we’ll spare you the repetition.

The display is unsurprisingly better than most gaming laptops. Actually, the only other gaming laptop displays that are equally good are Alienware’s x-series laptops and the Lenovo Legion series laptops.

The 15.6in display supports Dolby Vision HDR which means Netflix and most first-party Xbox games on PC look absolutely stunning. Finding Dolby Vision-supported games is a bit tricky but Netflix and Amazon Prime streams should be fun nevertheless.

The 240Hz refresh rate and the 2560x1440 resolution are only available on the 1TB storage variant and the RTX 3070Ti and above variants. Even if you somehow don’t manage to cap out the frame rate on most triple-A titles, competitive games with low settings can easily fetch 150+ FPS and the whole thing runs buttery smooth. There’s Nvidia G-Sync here as well.

Speaking of frames, the m15 R7 is very similarly priced to the behemoth that was the Alienware x17 but here you get a beefier Intel 12th-gen CPU and an RTX 3080 Ti for a few grand less. Losing out on a mechanical keyboard is fine as long as you don’t want the thock.

That said, the laptop can deal with pretty much anything you throw at it. The Intel i7-12700H is no sloucher and the same story goes for the RTX 3080 Ti. The max TDP of the GPU is 140W which means it can draw power when the going gets tough.

On Forza Horizon 5 the game got an average FPS of 57FPS on the benchmark. Although while playing the game, you can easily get around 80FPS and drop to an average low of 70FPS. We played it with all the settings on max and Ray Tracing as well. You can squeeze more frames from this thing without compromising on the image quality but that’s with any PC.

God of War (2018) is fairly on the higher side too. We got around 70FPS during random enemy encounters and sometimes would drop to 55-60FPS when there were more demanding things happening on the screen.

The slim frame does run a bit hot, especially when you’re charging the thing while playing on it. The adapter doesn’t soak up much of the heat and the belly of this beast is fairly toasty while gaming.

The Alienware lineup of gaming laptops is becoming as competitive as Lenovo’s but the high price tag is what scares us. It’s a very fine gaming laptop and that display is an absolute treat. You also get HDMI 2.1, Killer Wi-Fi 6E, Thunderbolt 4 and an IR camera for secure face unlock. These premium embellishments make the Alienware a top-tier premium gaming laptop and you should definitely consider it if you’ll put all of these features to good use.