Gadgetory

Hey how's it going guys this is Dave 2d and this is my review of the 2015 13 inch Alienware so Alienware has a huge set of notebooks they have a 13 inch a 15 inch a 17 inch and they're all gamer oriented but the 13 inch one is the cheapest of the bunch it's also the smallest of the bunch but most importantly it's the only one that Dell would send me a review unit for so that's what we have here so new for the spring of 2015 the entire lineup has been refreshed to have the new GTX 970 by Nvidia that are rocking the new Maxwell architecture so yeah I've had this for a little while played a lot of games here's my review let's start with a super quick unboxing here it's a pretty large box for a 13-inch notebook but it has a lot of padding in there so that's nice when you lift the lid the notebook is sitting there and underneath is some pamphlets and some QuickStart guides the top of the notebook is plastic and has a little Alienware jewel which lights up I'll get into that later if I had to draw a comparison the materials feel very dell inspiron fingerprints don't show at all on the surface it's like a thick grey plastic that has a bit of a metallic sheen to it but it doesn't feel like a very premium material on the bottom of the notebook there are four rubber feet they're actually made out of a very hard rubber so it's not very grippy but their main purpose is to raise the notebook off the table so that the intake vents here can suck aaron and if you remove these two screws here you can pop off the lid and upgrade your RAM as well as your hard drive so the model here has a 1 terabyte hard drive you really want to pop this thing out and replace it with an SSD now something I noticed before I replaced it this hard drive was making clicking noises every once in a while but I didn't have it in there for very long before I switch to 2 + MX 100 so this model here has a core i7 5500 U which is a dual core three gigahertz chip 16 gigs of ram a 1080p IPS panel a gtx 960 with 2 gigs of ram and the stock drive is a 1 terabyte 5400 RPM piece of crap that you probably want to replace right away and this is priced at $1,500 from dell i noticed there was quite a bit of flex on the screen but even though it flexes so much i still feel like it's relatively well made there isn't any play on the hinge or anything it's just that the materials they chosen are flexible now the chassis and the keyboard do not flex very much but I think it's more due to the sheer thickness of this machine rather than build quality this is a surprisingly thick notebook okay so on the right side of the notebook you have your right speaker two USB ports and an Ethernet jack and on the left side of the notebook you have your AC adapter hole a lock slot another USB three separate microphone and headphone jacks and lastly your left speaker these speakers are pretty big and that case is also really thick this machine comes on almost twenty eight millimeters which is over an inch that's a really thick notebook for 2015 there is no SD slot so I understand this is a gamer notebook but just keep it in mind if you're interested in this thing now on the back of the notebook you have your exhaust you have a port for the Alienware graphics amplifier mini DisplayPort HDMI port and another exhaust and in case you want to see it up close this is the corner of the notebook where they've kind of angled it off it's a design feature that's unique to Alienware and I think it looks kind of cool on the inside the material is actually a soft touch rubber it shows fingerprints like crazy but it's actually really nice to touch now I can't tell how the long-term durability of this material will be just because your palm will be rubbing on it all the time when this thing is new it feels really nice instead of chiclet keys this thing looks like one of those old-school notebook keyboards it feels good types well and the directional keys are in a great position I think most gamers will really like this now the trackpad is a completely different story the buttons feel fine they click reasonably well but tracking is particularly bad it skips around sometimes it doesn't pick up movements and honestly I'm getting so tired of seeing these really cruddy track pads with otherwise great hardware I really wish companies would spend more time when trackpads so alienware computers can light up they have some nice LED systems in them that you can configure extensively with software so you can control different zones of the keyboard and adjust the Alienware logo as well as the alien face logo software is really intuitive and the colored lighting is much brighter than other notebooks I've seen like the HP omen you can also adjust the LEDs of the front cover as far as I could tell the alien face and the two diagonal lines sadly have to be the same color I know I wanted to change it as well the webcam supposedly does 1080p stills but for video use it feels like 720p the screen I'm reviewing is a 1080p non-touchscreen they do make a quad HD touchscreen but it's about $200 more it's a matte screen so the reflections aren't super bad and the viewing angles are pretty good Dell advertises it at 350 nits and it does look pretty bright now visually color accuracy seemed pretty good but I ran a spider on it and it's coming in at 75% for Adobe RGB which is kind of par for the course with these kind of notebooks it's not ideal for a colorist but just for regular use in gaming it's no problem the AC adapter is 830 watts it's big it's heavy and it's just the way it is with these gaming notebooks and this guy has that classic Dell rubber strap to tie everything up when you travel and the AC adapter tip has this nice blue ring light but sadly it doesn't change colors or anything when you plug it in it's just a hallways on blue ok speakers this thing has one of the loudest speakers I've ever heard on a notebook they can easily break 80 decibels they're big because the case is so thick but they don't sound particularly good alright let's talk about fan noise when this thing is idle it's coming in about 20 decibels under medium load it kicks into about 25 26 decibels it's definitely audible but it's still relatively quiet now when you're running benchmarks on this things going full-tilt it's still not even that loud it only comes in around 30 decibels I mean it's very obvious that the fan is running but it's a lot quieter than most notebooks I've used at full load and just for kicks here's some thermal imaging the heat is spread across the whole keyword it's not super hot or anything it's just a very evenly spread out heat now this thing is a gaming notebook so let's talk about some games even though this is a Broadwell i7 it only has two cords so my expectations for this thing were not super-high dota 2 league and here's of the storm all run above 60 frames per second at high settings so I was very surprised if you put them to very high or ultra settings you start to drop down depending on the game you'll get about 40 maybe 50 frames per second now the previous generation of this notebook was running a GT 860m now I did a little research and it turns out that the previous 860m was also a Maxwell architecture chip so the 960m in this notebook is just a slightly faster clocked version of the same chip that was in the previous generation so if you have the previous Alienware with an 860m it's not worth the money to upgrade it and for the very first time i actually played bioshock infinite i'd heard really good things about this game and it didn't disappoint I played this thing until the batteries ran out and it corrupted my save so I'm pretty sad but the frame rates are always around 55 60 frames per second which is really surprising for a 2 core CPU now battery life on this thing is surprisingly poor it's a 52 watt hour battery so that's probably most of the problem but you're only gonna get about four or five hours of regular use you're going to be able to stretch it more obviously if you nurse it but expect four to five hours of regular use and if you're just watching movies you're going to get a little bit less than three hours but the thing I find the most disappointing is battery life during gameplay so the gtx 960m has this feature called battery boost and that essentially enables your battery to have an extended life while playing games just by limiting frame rate since like that so even with that enabled I was getting just under an hour and a half of gameplay now I burnt it down twice on two different games so Batman Arkham City and Bioshock and both of these are they're not super intensive games but they both push this computer beyond what it's capable of so I'm getting framerate cut off yet I'm still getting a little bit less than an hour and a half of gameplay and that's not particularly good but the thing is when you look at this notebook can you see how thick it is you kind of think it's going to have a giant battery in there but it doesn't okay so some closing thoughts this notebook did a lot better than I thought it would in terms of gaming performance considering that has a two core CPU but if you want to do other things like video editing and stuff I don't think this is a great choice just because of how few cores that CPU has now the thing I dislike the most is definitely the price once you add in an SSD and if you upgrade the RAM to 16 gigs of ram you're probably looking at fifteen or sixteen hundred dollars for this machine and I feel like that's overpriced by two or three hundred dollars if this thing was two or three hundred dollars cheaper I think this would be a great value but the way it stands right now before Dell puts this on sale I don't I couldn't really recommend this as a purchase but that's the end of the review I hope you guys liked it if you liked it give me some thumbs and if you loved it give me some subs it's been nice and I'll see you guys next time