Review Alienware m17 R3 Review: Stellar Performance

[Admin]

Alienware’s third revision of its m17 laptop is a beast when it comes to power and visuals, but you'll pay a premium for it.

Alienware m17 R3 Review: Stellar Performance : Read more

 

[jeremyj_83]

Would have been interesting to see productivity tests with a 4900HS in the graph. I did look at the Zyphyrus G14 review to see if there were any common tests between it and the m17. There was one which is Handbrake and the G14 was able to finish the test 17 seconds or 4% faster than the m17. Now the question will be what will it take for companies like Dell to use the AMD CPU in their halo gaming or workstation laptops.

 

[Rockandrolla]

More stable drivers all around. As a system builder they are still a mess.

 

[jeremyj_83]

More stable drivers all around. As a system builder they are still a mess.

Who has more stable drivers?

 

[cgeorgescu]

So you compare a huge and heavy laptop with two thin and light ones... Why? Why not compare it with a similarly heavy and big laptop that comes with GTX2080?
Ah, because it wouldn't get the slightly better framerates and it won't fare that good, right? And you have an agenda.

You see what people understand form this review? They get that a very heavy, big and expensive Dell machine is only marginally more powerful than two slim and elegant laptops that are way cheaper.

 

[Seregosa]

So you compare a huge and heavy laptop with two thin and light ones... Why? Why not compare it with a similarly heavy and big laptop that comes with GTX2080?
Ah, because it wouldn't get the slightly better framerates and it won't fare that good, right? And you have an agenda.

You see what people understand form this review? They get that a very heavy, big and expensive Dell machine is only marginally more powerful than two slim and elegant laptops that are way cheaper.

Are you stuck a few years back? The legend design made the alienware laptops way lighter and thinner than before. While the MSI is indeed lighter and smaller, it's a 15" laptop with dimensions similar to the m15r3, the m17r3 and the aero 17 hdr on the other hand are pretty much identical in dimensions. Both weigh around 2.5kg with similar size. So I really don't know what you're on about. You don't get smaller and lighter gaming laptops at 17" than that unless you want to sacrifice a lot of performance.

Well, I bought the m17r3, just waiting on it to be delivered. Why? Because it's cheaper than pretty much any other laptop with similar specs while having warranty and customer service way superior to most as long as you get the premium alternatives and it's still one of the acknowledged best brands. Of course, if I had a lot more money to spend and didn't care about warranty, I'd probably go with a razer or something instead, but I can't justify the extra price and subpar warranty(at least subpar in my country). It also has 32gb ram which most gaming laptops don't.

Got it with a 12% coupon off and on top to that I managed to get myself a 7% total price refund once it's sent because dell made a site blunder which forced me to re-order my laptop again. Shows they care about their customers. So, close to 20% off a brand new, released-last-month laptop. Also got 15% off on premium plus for 3 years(which is exactly what I needed as I'll sell it after that for 50% of the purchase price to fund a new laptop, can rest assured that it will work until then or they'll fix it for free by sending technicians to my house).

I do agree that the old alienware laptops were very bulky, but so were most laptops. I remember one I bought 6 years ago, quite bulky and was a pain to carry around, but with the slimmed design of this one it won't be a problem even though it's a 17". Also, for the battery issue, it's just a matter of knowing what to do. First of all, turn off that damn crap called tobii eye tracking. It's utter <Mod Edit>. Had it on a m15r2 I tried out last year, ended up completely nuking the drivers until it couldn't even be detected anymore. It slows down the laptop and sends the CPU running all the time so that it never enters an idle state, draining a lot of extra power for nothing. Wish I could order one without it, but at least the problem's solved if you delete all the drivers and uninstalls everything related to it so that it can't auto-install it again. Trust me, it's a power sink. Other than that, the 4k screen is very bright, can easily turn down the brightness a lot. And as with all thin gaming laptops, it's in your best interest to undervolt it for consistent performance and to lower temps along with power consumption. Then you can fiddle with power setting to lower cpu base frequency and also gotta make sure that it uses the CPU GPU when idle so that it doesn't just turn on the gaming GPU randomly when you don't need it. Bet you can raise the battery time to compete with the other laptops then. At the very least 4-6 hours instead of 2-3 hours should be easily doable for normal use. Can't hope for much more when it comes to a laptop specced for performance. Honestly glad if I can at least get 3-4 hours, that's enough, usually never away from outlets for longer than that anyway.

 

[comprodigy]

Dells really been buying these reviews lately huh? Both this and the G5 SE both didn't go to any reputable reviewer that is actually going to get into things that matter (clock speeds, temps, noise).

Alienware is infamous for bad cooling on their CPUs, and sometimes GPUs, but that wasn't tested here. Why? Were you not allowed? Why was it compared against nothing but Max-Q laptops? Why no detailed analysis of actual performance except for needless things like drive speed. Alienware got me twice with bad laptops, not doing it again, and these reviews only lead me to believe they are continuing to hide their crap design behind bought reviews.

 

[Seregosa]

Just received my m17r3 a few days ago. Out of the box, it has an unremarkable battery life of 2-3 hours while using. But it's truly not fair to say that it has a bad battey life if you don't tweak things to suit your needs. There is no real difference between this and other gaming laptops in terms of battery, it's just a matter of settings or similar stuff they come with. First of all, turning off tobii eye tracking and completely uninstalling it as it's useless for anything but waking the laptop up, which is worthless, is a good idea. That thing takes power all the time. The second thing to do is to go into advanced power settings and change network adapter settings on battery to "maximum power saving"(unless you need it to be better all the time, the have noticed no real issues with maximum power saving on, so just try it) and then change the processor power management. "Minimum processor state" should be at 5% for both, while I found "maximum processor state" to be easily good enough at 80% for battery and 95% plugged in. The thing is that this laptop is overclocked ALL THE TIME, which is the reason for the poor battery life. Look in the task manager and you'll see the processor always going to 3.5-4+ ghz even when not doing anything requiring it. This is the source of the problem. Changing "maximum processor state" will force it back to original clock speeds. Even just changing it to 99% means it will only be at around 2.3-2.4 ghz, 95% is about 2.2-2.3ghz and 80% means it'll be around 1-2ghz which is more than enough for casual use when you're not gaming or similar stuff. Can also create a shortcut to the advanced power options, or if you want to, just open alienware command center whenever you feel like gaming and change it to "max performance" and it will automatically change all these settings to the best possible for performance and then when you go back to balanced it will change settings to what you previously used.

I now get over 7 hours of battery life from casual browsing and at least 5-6 hours watching videos. That's quite good for a gaming laptop. Can probably make it even more energy efficient, like turning off wifi and bluetooth entirely or further turning down processor max state if you're in a true bind and need extra power by all means necessary.

Oh, and these settings that I have now give me a nice and very cool laptop. The fans are literally never on unless I do something requiring a lot of system resources. Even with no fans on, it stays at around 38c for gpu and 42c for the cpu on idle while browsing or watching movies. Even when in hotter locations(25C or so), it still stays around 40c for the gpu and 45 for cpu. Also, this is with the 4k screen so the 1080p screen users can probably expect it to get a bit more battery out of it, though I do run my screen at around 50% brightness for casual use because that is easily bright enough with the insanely bright 4k display. By the way, a tip is to go into "intel graphics command center", then "system" followed by "power" and turn off "display power savings". It does hardly anything at all for power savings but it has the nasty habit of brightening or dimming your screen depending on background, something I find very noticeable and annoying, took me a while to find that setting, it was truly annoying while on battery power that it brightened white screens and dimmed dark screens...

I feel like the main issue everyone has with the m17r3 is the battery life and how warm it is with "noisy" fans. These tweaks solves all of that completely unless you're cranking everything up for a gaming session, in which case you should have some headphones on anyway and it doesn't matter.

 

[Loaspra]

Are you stuck a few years back? The legend design made the alienware laptops way lighter and thinner than before. While the MSI is indeed lighter and smaller, it's a 15" laptop with dimensions similar to the m15r3, the m17r3 and the aero 17 hdr on the other hand are pretty much identical in dimensions. Both weigh around 2.5kg with similar size. So I really don't know what you're on about. You don't get smaller and lighter gaming laptops at 17" than that unless you want to sacrifice a lot of performance.

Well, I bought the m17r3, just waiting on it to be delivered. Why? Because it's cheaper than pretty much any other laptop with similar specs while having warranty and customer service way superior to most as long as you get the premium alternatives and it's still one of the acknowledged best brands. Of course, if I had a lot more money to spend and didn't care about warranty, I'd probably go with a razer or something instead, but I can't justify the extra price and subpar warranty(at least subpar in my country). It also has 32gb ram which most gaming laptops don't.

Got it with a 12% coupon off and on top to that I managed to get myself a 7% total price refund once it's sent because dell made a site blunder which forced me to re-order my laptop again. Shows they care about their customers. So, close to 20% off a brand new, released-last-month laptop. Also got 15% off on premium plus for 3 years(which is exactly what I needed as I'll sell it after that for 50% of the purchase price to fund a new laptop, can rest assured that it will work until then or they'll fix it for free by sending technicians to my house).

I do agree that the old alienware laptops were very bulky, but so were most laptops. I remember one I bought 6 years ago, quite bulky and was a pain to carry around, but with the slimmed design of this one it won't be a problem even though it's a 17". Also, for the battery issue, it's just a matter of knowing what to do. First of all, turn off that damn crap called tobii eye tracking. It's utter <Mod Edit>. Had it on a m15r2 I tried out last year, ended up completely nuking the drivers until it couldn't even be detected anymore. It slows down the laptop and sends the CPU running all the time so that it never enters an idle state, draining a lot of extra power for nothing. Wish I could order one without it, but at least the problem's solved if you delete all the drivers and uninstalls everything related to it so that it can't auto-install it again. Trust me, it's a power sink. Other than that, the 4k screen is very bright, can easily turn down the brightness a lot. And as with all thin gaming laptops, it's in your best interest to undervolt it for consistent performance and to lower temps along with power consumption. Then you can fiddle with power setting to lower cpu base frequency and also gotta make sure that it uses the CPU GPU when idle so that it doesn't just turn on the gaming GPU randomly when you don't need it. Bet you can raise the battery time to compete with the other laptops then. At the very least 4-6 hours instead of 2-3 hours should be easily doable for normal use. Can't hope for much more when it comes to a laptop specced for performance. Honestly glad if I can at least get 3-4 hours, that's enough, usually never away from outlets for longer than that anyway.

It is not a fair comparissoon. the other 2 laptops have Max-Q graphics, and the m17 the Max-P variant.
Anyway I love the design of the m17, I would buy one but the MSI ge75 raider is cheaper and more powerfull. It can achieve 71 fps in SOTTR with a 2070 super (115w). So, I don't think is reasonable to buy the m17 instead of the ge75, (if battery life isn't a problem). Oh, and the ge75 offers an 8 core processor + 2070 super Max-P graphics for USD 2,299. CHill

 

[Michaelkeating]

I really like the way this machine looks and performs. My only question is whether as a 50 year old guy who plays things like WoW, Civ, and Surviving Mars but would use it to watch movies with the wife if the 4k screen is worth getting over the 300mhz screen. It seems like the 25ms response time would not matter to me in gaming but I'm not an expert.