I wound up buying this laptop:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10870H CPU
Win10 Home
RTX 3080 (16GB, full version, not Max Q which IIRC they don't offer)
32GB DDR4 2933Mhz
144Hz 7ms 300-nits 72% NTSC FHD monitor w/ nSync
4-zone lighting, b/c I don't need swag
quite badly enough to do per-key
After a month, here's my honest feedback.
- It's the Alienware flagship laptop. To go any faster, it would have to access the Speed Force or wear a cape with an S on it.
- If it was any louder, I'd be able to hear it through my noise-cancelling gamer headphones. Seriously. Jet engine.
- If it was any hotter, I'd be able to use it to cook. While playing Outriders (which is a great game and came with the laptop), it gets hot enough that I eventually can't hold my finger to parts of the laptop. In all fairness, those are parts of the laptop that there's no reason for me to touch... but still, it would've been nice if they spent the space they wasted for a port for their "graphic amplifier" product on another fan or something.
- It's significantly lighter than anticipated, and aesthetically I'm a fan.
- I had no trouble breaking 100wpm on the keyboard, and I didn't spring for the $200 keyboard upgrade.
- The battery life is pretty bad, and I had to create my own power profile for energy saving because oddly enough it didn't come with one. To be fair, it's a 17"+ desktop replacement. I can just see Doc from Back to the Future making the energy profiles and going, "Low-power mode? Where we're going, we don't need low-power mode." Still, with a couple of tricks (and obviously not while gaming) I pulled almost 3 hours which isn't the end of the world for a desktop replacement.
Conclusions:
While Outrider isn't the most demanding game on the market, it's the most demanding game I've played so far because I basically can't put it down. I did play League; at one point, I broke 600fps and I never came close to dropping below the 144 gSync's refresh rate. On TFT, I actually broke 800fps at one point but TFT isn't exactly challenging. It doesn't lag on Outriders (other than the first 0.5-1.5 seconds of the intro video while it revs up). Literally 0 lag; I'm most of the way through the game and settings are maxed. Whether that means I'm getting 144fps or 344fps I have no idea. Supposedly the Command Center software will allow you to o/c but it's so fast and hot that I haven't bothered playing with it yet. I would need a laptop pad or something to cool it down to even bother.
Side note: Alienware has a built-in feedback mechanism that automatically opens when you start the control center. If you try and leave it mediocre feedback, it "crashes" - hmm.
Cheers.