The Alienware 13 R3 is a 13 inch gaming laptop with full Nvidia 1060 graphics inside, so
let’s see what it can do in some gaming benchmarks and discuss if all the features
are worth it for the price.
Let’s start by checking out the specs of the hardware.
There’s an Intel i7-7700HQ quad core CPU which has a 2.8GHz base clock and 3.8GHz boost.
There’s 16GB of DDR4 memory running at 2,400MHz in dual channel, however the two slots can
support up to 32GB.
For storage there’s a 256GB M.2 NVME SSD.
For the graphics there’s an Nvidia 1060, and this one has a 13.3 inch 1440p 60Hz OLED
panel, however it’s also available with a 1080p IPS panel.
For the network connectivity there’s a gigabit ethernet port, Killer 1550 WiFi, as well as
Bluetooth 5.0.
Overall it’s got a premium look and feel to it.
The lid is silver aluminium with the Alienware logo in the center, while the interior is
a soft black rubber which felt nice and smooth, but it will be interesting to see how this
lasts long term.
The physical dimensions of the laptop are 33cm in width, 26.9cm in depth, and 2.4cm
in height, so it seems to be on the larger side for a 13 inch laptop, at least compared
to my 6 year old 13 inch macbook pro, granted it does have much more powerful hardware.
The total weight of the laptop is listed at around 2.6kg with the battery, and mine weighed
a bit less than this at around 2.4kg.
With the 180w power brick and cable for charging, the total weight increases to 3.2kg, so it
feels comparable to many larger 15 inch laptops I’ve tested, I’m guessing there is a lot
of cooling packed into the small space.
As mentioned the screen here is a 13.3 inch 60Hz 1440p OLED glossy panel, no G-Sync available
here.
The viewing angles are excellent, the colours are still clear even on sharp angles, and
at 13 inches it probably would have looked just as good with a 1080p panel, but we’ll
see in the benchmarks how the 1060 does at gaming with this resolution.
It’s also a touchscreen, just keep in mind that as it’s glossy it will easily show
fingerprints.
I don’t generally use touchscreen laptops, but I didn’t have any issues while testing
it out.
I’ve also measured the colours produced by the screen using the Spyder 5 Pro, and
my results returned 100% of sRGB, 98% of NTSC and 100% of AdobeRGB, making it the best laptop
screen I’ve ever tested.
As we’re dealing with an OLED screen here there’s no need to perform a backlight bleed
test, as OLED screens work on an individual pixel level, so a fully black screen will
just mean all the pixels are off.
This does give us really nice looking blacks compared to typical LCD screens that use backlight
technology.
As OLED screens generally have issues with screen burn due to the nature of the technology,
it would be interesting to see how this goes long term, but as I’ve only got the laptop
for a few weeks I can’t really investigate that.
Out of the box the software does seem to do its best to limit the screen from staying
on and fully lit which should help reduce issues.
While moving the display there was almost no screen flex, it was very solid as it’s
all metal with two large hinges towards the middle.
Initially, it’s a little difficult to open with one finger as there seem to be magnets
keeping the lid closed, however there seems to be a fairly even distribution of weight
once you can get it open as it doesn’t move around.
There’s a 720p camera above the display in the center.
The camera looks ok, still a bit blurry even with decent lighting.
The microphone sounds about average, not too bad, but you’ll be able to judge both for
yourself.
The camera also supports Windows Hello, so you can quickly unlock the laptop using your
face once configured, I found it to work fine.
Tobii eye tracking is also present, and the software will do things like dim the display
when you’re not looking at it, which I had to disable for the review so it would stay
lit for the camera.
The keyboard was alright to type with, it’s got 2.2mm of key travel and I found the keys
somewhere between clicky and mushy feeling, here’s how they sounded to try and give
you an idea.
The keyboard has RGB backlighting and is controlled through the included AlienFX software, it’s
controlled in 4 separate groups of keys, no individual key control here.
The software can also control the colour of the Alienware text underneath the screen,
the power button on the right of the keyboard which is the alienware logo, the alienware
logo on the back of the lid, and the colour of the touchpad, which also lights up when
in use, so there’s a fair bit of customization possible with about 20 different preset colours
to choose for each of the 8 zones, and a couple of limited effects.
There was basically no keyboard flex at all while pushing down hard on the keyboard, and
I noticed on the website it’s noted that there’s a steel backplate which keeps the
keyboard area nice and sturdy.
The touchpad worked well, no problems there, and as shown previously it lights up when
in use.
It’s got physically separate left and right buttons which weren’t too noisy to click.
Moving onto the I/O on the left there’s a noble lock slot, USB 3.0 Type-A port, and
3.5mm headphone and mic jacks.
On the right there’s a USB 3.0 Type-C port with no thunderbolt support and USB 3.0 Type-A
port.
Most of the important I/O is found on the back, including the gigabit ethernet port,
mini DisplayPort 1.2 output, HDMI 2.0 port, Type-C Thunderbolt port, Alienware graphics
amplifier port, and the power input.
I actually found this design quite useful, as you don’t have to worry about cables
sticking out from the side and getting in the way, although you do have to deal with
the back area sticking out like this.
As for the front there’s nothing there at all, it’s just completely smooth.
Fingerprints don’t really show up on the lid, they show much easier on the rubberised
interior but were fairly easy to wipe away.
Underneath there’s some air intakes towards the back to keep everything cool, as well
as some rubber feet which rise it up a bit to let cool air in, and also do a good job
at stopping the laptop from easily moving around, and the hot air is exhausted out of
the back left and right corners.
The speakers are found on both sides towards the front.
They sound pretty good, there's a little bass and they still sound fairly clear even at
higher volumes.
Powering the laptop is a 76 Watt hour battery, and with a full charge and just watching YouTube
videos with the screen on half brightness, keyboard lighting off and background apps
disabled, I was able to use it for 5 hours and 30 minutes.
The laptop was using the Intel integrated graphics, thanks to Nvidia Optimus.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for 42 minutes.
The battery life was fairly good, while watching YouTube it lasted longer than many other larger
15 inch laptops that I’ve tested, however the gaming results are about on par with laptops
with smaller batteries that I’ve looked at previously, but I always recommend being
plugged in for best gaming performance anyway.
During normal use with an ambient room temperature of 22 degrees celsius, the CPU and GPU both
idled in the low 40s, and here are the external temperatures of the laptop where you’ll
actually be putting your hands, getting to around 32 degrees.
I’ve tested gaming by playing PUBG at high settings with default fan speeds for half
an hour and the temps for that are shown in green, and no thermal throttling was observed.
While gaming the center of the keyboard reached 50 degrees.
Full CPU and GPU load was tested with both Aida64 and the Heaven benchmark running at
the same time.
With the fans running at their default speeds no thermal throttling was observed, which
surprised me as I expected it with this hardware in such a small unit, so even in the stress
test it’s doing quite well.
Again the keyboard area is similar to before, a little warmer this time reaching 52 degrees,
but it didn’t actually feel too bad to me while using it.
As for the fan noise produced by the laptop, I’ll let you have a listen to each of these
tests.
At idle I couldn’t hear the fan at all, it was completely silent.
Under full load it doesn’t get too loud compared to other 15 inch laptops with the
same specs, I expected the fans would need to run faster to keep it cool, but as we saw
there was no thermal throttling so this wasn’t needed.
I’ll also note that there was no noticeable coil whine while testing in my unit.
Finally let’s take a look at some benchmarks, we’ll first cover some real world gaming
benchmarks followed by tests with various benchmarking tools.
In games I’ve tested all setting levels at both 1440p and 1080p with all Nvidia and
Windows updates to date applied.
Fortnite is difficult to benchmark is it depends on what’s going on in the game, so take
these results with a grain of salt.
At 1080p max settings the 1% lows are close to the 60Hz refresh rate of the display, so
to me it felt very smooth even maxed out.
At 1440p you’ll need to drop down to high settings or lower if you want to keep averaging
around 60 FPS.
Overwatch ran great, I tested just playing with the bots and at 1080p even at max settings
the 1% lows are well above the 60Hz refresh rate of the display.
Moving onto 1440p doesn’t really change much either, at max settings even the 1% lows
are still higher than what the panel can output.
PUBG was tested using the replay feature, and like Fortnite you’ve got to take these
results with a grain of salt as they depend on what’s going on in game and will vary.
Personally I thought it played well at 1080p, although the 1% lows do dip down quite a bit
compared to the averages in my test.
At 1440p the frame rates drop down quite a bit, with the minimum settings required to
average around 60 FPS in my test, so I’d probably stick to 1080p for the best experience
with this one.
In CSGO the average frame rates are well above the refresh rate of the panel, however at
1080p at lower settings even the 1% lows are close to matching the refresh rate.
At 1440p it was definitely still playable, but if you’re playing competitively you’ll
probably want to stick to 1080p.
Dota 2 was tested using a fairly intensive replay in an effort to demonstrate the worst
case to expect, you’ll probably get better results while playing than these, and we’re
not seeing too much difference when moving to 1440p from 1080p, still averaging above
60 FPS even at max settings.
I don’t personally think watch dogs 2 needs an amazing frame rate to enjoy, at 1080p max
settings to me it was definitely playable, although you can drop down a little to improve
this further.
At 1440p ultra and very high settings felt a little stuttery to me, but I found high
or lower to play pretty well.
Ghost recon was tested using the built in benchmark and is another fairly resource intensive
game, this really shows when we move to 1440p as we’re not really getting great frame
rates except at minimum settings.
Shadow of war was also tested with the built in benchmark, and here are the 1080p results,
and the 1440p results see the average frame rates drop down a bit.
Rise of the tomb raider was again tested with the built in benchmark, and at max settings
we’re able to average above 60 FPS, while we can get somewhat close to this using medium
settings at 1440p.
Overall I thought the results were quite good, I’ve said in the past that I find the Nvidia
1060 to be a great match for 60 FPS 1080p gaming at high settings, and we can see that
here even in the more resource intensive games, while the esports titles run very well even
at 1440p.
Realistically with a 13 inch screen I think playing at 1080p rather than 1440p is fine
anyway, at least for me it’s so small that it doesn’t really make a noticeable difference
in most cases, 1440p just stresses the graphics more and gives you a lower frame rate, so
I’d personally play games at 1080p here.
You do have the option of attaching an external graphics enclosure, so you could always do
that and attach a higher refresh rate monitor too which is a great upgrade feature to have
available.
Now onto the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine,
as well as Firestrike, Timespy, and VRMark from 3DMark, just pause the video if you want
a detailed look at the results.
In Crystal Disk Mark the 256GB NVME M.2 SSD performed around 1630MB/s in sequential reads
and 430MB/s in sequential writes, so pretty well for the reads but much lower in comparison
for the writes, about on par with a SATA based SSD.
As for the price at the time of recording the model with the OLED screen is the top
end option, and here in Australia it comes with 32GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, so double
what I’ve tested with here, and comes in at $3500 AUD.
In the US it seems to be available with the same specs I’ve tested with here for $1900
USD, however the non OLED models are a fair bit cheaper.
So what did you guys think of the Alienware 13 R3 gaming laptop?
Overall I found it a little on the larger and heavier side for a 13 inch laptop, however
considering the specs inside it’s not too bad and still quite a portable gaming unit.
To me the build quality felt high end and premium, as there are lots of extra features
you usually don’t see, especially the OLED screen which looked amazing, but of course
premium features come in at a premium price.
If you’re just after raw gaming power then there are cheaper options with the same specs
available, but if you’re after something else with all the bells and whistles at this
size then this might be what you’re looking for.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, and leave a like if you found
the review useful.
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one.