What’s going on everybody, MAtthew Moniz here and this is the Alienware M15 the thinnest
alienware ever made.
Thats the title that every journalist and reporter is using on this laptop.
Like its that big of a deal, have you guys seen the size of a regular alienware?
They are 8-10 pounds, super thick and super heavy.
They are so heavy that you could whip it at a tank and you could probably put a hole in
it.
So making a thinner alienware is not that hard to do to begin with.
Now one thing that is true, we finally do have a smaller alienware which is a long time
overdue.
Now in comparrison this is a 4.8 pound laptop making it heavier than the razer blade 15
and the msi gs 65.
And if you look at its form factor its actually quite big in comparrison.
Its a little big wider, the depth is a little bit longer and of course its thicker than
other competing products.
Its made out of all metal so it feels nice and solid.
You still have the alienware logo in the middle whether you like it or not and of course you
still have that three prong design on top of the lid.
Now on the left hand side, you are getting an RJ 45 port, a USB 3.0 and an audio in jack.
Now on the back this is one thing i love about alienware.
They always put their ports on the back which helps for cable management.
So you have a full sized hdmi, mini Display port, usb type c thunderbolt 3 so you could
hook up an external gpu or you can buy Alienwares graphic amplifier and use that instead using
this port and of course you have your dc in jack which uses a 180 watt brick.
On the other side you have two more usb 3.0 ports, so plenty of ports to connect all of
your devices.
Now alienware has made getting inside of here super easy.
You have three slots for drives, this one comes with a 2.5 inch 1 terabyte drive which
is just a regular mechanical drive, but if you want you can swap it out down the road.
The middle one is black so you can add an nvme drive and the main drive you can also
swap it out if you want something bigger.
Battery size, this one is 60 watts, but you can also buy with 90 watts which will net
you better battery life.
But you will have to forgo the 2.5 inch drive.
Now the 60 watt battery inside of here is giving about 4-5 hours of use and thats just
doing regular everyday tasks.
If you are going to game on this thing on battery its really not going to last that
long.
And this is typical for every single gaming laptop.
Two slots for your ram, and you could put up to 32GB inside of here, the wifi card is
swappable and of course you have two fans with three heat pipes running across the middle.
Now when it comes to the display this model has a 60 hert panel.
Now to be quite honest most of the gaming 60 hertz panels that i have tested this year
haven’t been that great.
This one is actually pretty good.
You get pretty good colour accuracy, you have respectable brightness and overall viewing
angles are fantastic.
The only thing i don't like about it are these bezels.
These are probably some of the ugliest bezels ive seen on a gaming laptop this year.
So thankfully the webcam is placed on the top so you will get a proper view of your
face unlike the xps where it places it on the bottom of the display the quality is not
that great and this is typical of every gaming laptop on the market.
So sound on the M15 is nothing special it is using two speakers and of course it isnt
going to be as good as the bigger and thicker alienwares.
In fact, the sound was quite tidy, so if you are gaming on this for long periods of time,
you are definitely going to want to hook up headphones.
Keyboard, I got mixed feelings about this.
I like the fact that it is full sized so you have that numeric keypad, i do love the way
the keys feel considering how shallow the travel distance is, in fact, out of all the
thinner gaming laptops that are currently on the market, dell did the best job with
such a short travel distance.
In fact, Id rather game on this keyboard than on the razer blade 15 or the MSI GS65. now
you are probably wondering, matt where is the 9 key?
Now during my live stream when i was taking off the plastic on the top grill, I guess
my hand or my watch or something hit the 9 key and it completely came off.
Unfortunately i can not put it back on, its not your typical key where you just press
it down and it pops back on.
So this causes some concern.
A lot of people in the comments are like if it came off that easily then how are the keys
on this keyboard going to look like 9-12 months down the road.
Touch pad, it is glass, it is a good size, its very accurate and its using windows precision
drivers.
The only thing i dont like is that some people with ocd might not like it that it is right
here instead of in the center and also the deck of this keyboard is using like a rubber
texture which feels great to rest your wrists on but my god is this thing going to get dirty.
It attracts fingerprints very easily and grease like crazy.
You are going to be wiping this down every single day.
Now before we talk about performance i had two issues with this laptop.
The first one, it came unactivated.
I couldn’t activate windows at all.
The second one was i couldn’t access the internet.
Sometimes i would be able to connect to a web page, and if i got on to the web page
i wouldn't be able to download something.
It just wasn't working.
Someone in the comments of my live stream said it's a known issue.
If you buy this laptop or even a lot of alienware laptops you have to kill the killer driver
in the background in order for things to work.
Well he was right, i killed the killer driver under the task manager and all of a sudden
i could activate windows and i could start downloading all the drivers that i needed
to update this laptop.
Now when it comes to performance this is the 1060 model, this is the i78750h.
So basically it has zero issues running any games comfortably at 1080p with settings set
to high or even ultra depending on the title.
overwatch , blackops, fortnight all ran perfectly on this laptop.
It's definitely not one of the faster 1060s for example, i did a render test between this
and the razer blade 15 and the lenovo x1 extreme and the razer blade 15 beat this one out.
And this is with the profile set to performance and not even overclocking it at all.
And the reason why i didn't overclock it is because i was having overheating issues.
See this laptop still gets hot, it will hit 90 degrees and then it will thermal throttle
and it will keep temperatures between 80-85.
So its doing a good job in that regard, and its keeping the boosts all the way up.
But the one main area where its getting too hot is the surface temperatures.
I'm a left handed person so i play around the p, l, m and o keys like those are my arrow
keys and around that area which is where the cpu and gpu is i was getting temperature of
60 degrees celsius.
After about 20 minutes of gaming i had to stop because my fingers were starting to hurt
from the heat.
Now if you are right handed and using the wasd keys you have nothing to worry about
but its something to think about.
Down the road, 12 or two months later how is the cpu going to be in terms of longevity,
is it still going to work or are you going to have issues.
When it comes to fan noise, nothing out of the ordinary, it does kick on, you are going
to hear it when you are gaming.
But it's not super loud.
So here are my closing thoughts, i think this is a great first attempt for alienware for
creating a thinner and lighter laptop.
I mean, the build quality of the design and the chassis itself is exceptional.
But there are still a lot of little issues that irk me.
But when you buy such an expensive laptop you shouldn't have these little software issues
when you power it on.
It ruins the excitement and the experience of buying a high end gaming laptop.
The second thing, even though this laptop is doing a pretty good job of thermal throttling
and keeping the cpu temps between 80-85 degrees, the surface temperatures are much too hot.
60 degrees celsius is unacceptable, i can't even imagine how much hotter the 1070 runs.
If you do buy this maybe wait for a couple more software updates and see what alienware
can do from their end.
So this pretty much wraps up my review of the alienware m15, let me know your thoughts
in the comments below.
Is this something you would buy or would you buy something else?
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for some behind the scenes and i'll see you guys in the next video.