In my opinion Dell won CES in terms of laptop announcements, they’ve got a lot of good
improvements coming and I’ve really got to hand it to them, let’s take a look at
what we can expect from Dell in 2019.
In terms of displays, Dell announced that they will be introducing 15 inch OLED panels
and 240Hz panels throughout a number of laptops in their line up over the course of 2019,
including the Dell G5, G7 and Alienware M15 and M17, and they said that this should be
some time in April 2019, so worth keeping in mind if you plan on buying a new RTX Dell
laptop before then.
As soon as I saw the new Dell G7 the first thing I thought was, oh wow that’s thinner,
I was instantly able to see the difference. The 10 series G7 was 2.49cm while the new
RTX model is 1.99cm, so despite getting a boost in terms of graphical power we’re
also shaving off half a centimetre, or about 0.2 inches. It should be available with either
RTX 2070 or 2080 graphics, Dell don’t tend to specify Max-Q so not sure which there,
either way a pretty big jump from the previous GTX 1060 Max-Q. This time around it’s also
got an optional 144Hz display and optional G-Sync. Thank you for this Dell, you’ve
finally got a real gaming laptop on your hands now! I’m pretty sure all the 10 series models
sold with 60Hz panels, so a lot of people would be turned away as in 2018 we saw a lot
of gaming laptops make the transition to 144Hz. You might have also noticed that it’s got
an RGB keyboard now, ok now we’re in serious gamer territory, but seriously these are nice
changes over last generation and should make the G7 more competitive with the offerings
from other brands.
The Dell G5 has also been upgraded in a similar manner to the G7. At CES they had two versions
of the G5, the standard versions, and the Special Edition or SE version. The special
edition is basically the same except it’s also available in white, and underneath it
has this kind of cool clear area over the heatpipes, although let’s be honest you
probably won’t actually see it too often.
So the G series laptops are now thinner, more powerful, have thin bezels, have faster screen
refresh rates available, have the option of an OLED panel, and of course finally and most
importantly, have RGB keyboard lighting.
I didn’t see any Dell G3 models on display, and honestly I actually completely forgot
to ask about them because I was so focussed on filming all the stuff they had on show.
If I recall correctly though Bob of all trades mentioned the G3 was staying the same for
now without RTX in order to keep it as a budget option, which makes sense.
The XPS 13 has also undergone a few changes, namely the CPU has been upgraded to Intel’s
latest Whiskey Lake offerings. In this display unit at CES we’ve got the i7-8565U CPU,
which is actually a very capable chip as I’ve already benchmarked it in the Razer Blade
Stealth.
Perhaps most noticeably is the lack of nose cam. It did amuse me that in Dell’s own
presentation they even referred to it as nose cam, anyway they said they’ve been able
to get a camera that’s finally small enough to go up the top in the center despite the
really thin bezels. There’s also a new white version available called frost, which basically
just seems to be brighter and more white.
Alienware are a part of Dell so I’ll also mention the new M15 and M17 gaming laptops
here too. The 10 series M15 actually arrived at my house just before I left for CES, so
I’ll have a review of that coming soon, though let’s be honest will people care
as much at this point with these new RTX models just around the corner? Maybe not, but we’ll
have to see how pricing goes.
Anyway I believe the M17 is new, it’s essentially just a larger M15, but with a 17” screen
as you could probably guess by the name. Both the M15 and M17 will be available with RTX
2070 or 2080 graphics, but there’s more to these refreshes than just RTX , these models
should also be getting 240Hz panels too, as mentioned before. The M15 that I was using
at CES had a 240Hz display, and I could actually notice the difference, just scrolling around
in Windows felt noticeably smoother compared to 144Hz, though both leave 60Hz in the dust.
Alienware also of course had the insane Area 51M gaming laptop as well, which can have
up to Nvidia RTX 2080 and Intel i9-9900K, both of which can in theory be upgraded, but
I’ve got a whole video dedicated to the Area 51M, so check the card in the top right
if you want to know more.
Other than gaming laptops, Alienware are also launching a 55” 4K 120Hz OLED monitor, though
I suppose it’s more like a TV. In person it looked stunning, seriously OLED just looks
awesome, and having such a large OLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate is quite impressive,
meaning it will not come cheap. Either way I still think it’s a good move, I get a
lot of people asking me about which monitor they should be to use with their console or
PC for gaming, because the fact is a lot of gaming monitors out there are much better
for gaming than most TVs, so now if we start getting gaming TVs then this could change
things up.
All of these things combined makes me feel like Dell won CES in terms of gaming laptop
announcements, at least for me and of course only out of the places I visited, there were
a few that I was not able to see, however from what I’ve since heard most others simply
put new graphics into their existing models and called it a day. Dell on the other hand
are actually making lots of changes to really be competitive in the gaming laptop space.
You could argue that they should have had many of these new features last generation,
and for some of them like the 60Hz screen I’d agree, but I still think that overall
these positive changes to their products are more noteworthy than what I saw from most
of the other guys at CES 2019. The only other things that stood out to me is the Aorus 15
and perhaps the MSI GS75, and that others like Razer are also going to have 240Hz and
OLED panels on the way.
Let me know what you think of these changes made by Dell, and if you’ve seen anything
better at CES in terms of laptops? I admit I haven’t been able to check out everyone,
mostly because they ignore me as this isn’t a huge channel, so there could be something
really cool I’m not aware of, let me know down in the comments, and if you’re new
here get subscribed for more of my CES 2019 coverage.