Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave 2d and I am back with yet another notebook review today we're doing the Alienware 15 so I did the Alienware 13 a few weeks ago I didn't love that notebook at the time just because it was priced a little bit high they have since dropped the price on that one but this is the notebook that I originally wanted to do the review on I feel that 15-inch notebooks are kind of where mobile gaming should be I've had this one for a little bit over two weeks here's my review all right so a quick unboxing here black yellow and wear box you pop the lid and the entire inside of the box is covered in foam which is cool the compartment at the bottom that has the AC adapter and underneath the notebook are some Alienware pamphlets nothing special just standard QuickStart stuff the top of the notebook is plastic it's a fiber reinforced plastic so it's like plastic material with some carbon-based fibers in there but it's not a traditional carbon fiber it's supposedly very durable but it looks and feels like regular plastic and like all of their notebooks it has that classic Alienware logo here the bottom of the notebook is also plastic and there are four rubber feet here these are actually pretty tall the intake vents are also located back here the panel in the middle does come off and inside you have two rows of RAM over here a regular mechanical Drive and an m2 SATA Drive there's actually room for a second empty SATA drive right beside that first one so you can actually have three physical drives in here and all of these things can be upgraded or replaced if you ever need to in terms of ports on the back in between the two exhaust vents we have a connector for the external graphics and fat alien work cells a mini DisplayPort and HDMI ports so both of these outputs work fine on my 4k monitor on the right side we have an SD card slot that holds lead card pretty much flush to USB 3 ports and a built-in Gigabit Ethernet port which is pretty rare these days even on gamer notebooks on the left side we have separate headphone and microphone jacks 2 more USB 3 ports a lock slot and the AC adapter connection so the adapter is a 180 watt Beast so it's pretty big there's a really dim light up front that shows when it's powered but there's no indicator on the adapter itself to show when it's charging you kind of have to open up the notebook and look at the notebooks power button for charging status all right in terms of its dimensions it's longer and wider than a 15-inch MacBook and it seems quite a bit thicker and to answer a question that keeps popping up this is a D brand scan that's on the MacBook and white carbon fiber now the difference in thickness is actually a little deceptive so remember those tall rubber feet on the bottom if you've seen my review of the HP omen there was a bit of an issue on that notebook where the temperatures got kind of high because there wasn't enough cool air going into the air intake but the Alienware 15 has these rubber feet to kind of prop it up for a better airflow but it makes the notebook seem quite a bit thicker I'm also pretty sure I could have slid a third penny underneath but Canada got rid of pennies a while ago so I could only find two pennies in the office but even when you take those rubber feet into account it's still a pretty thick notebook and weighing in at 7 pounds it's not exactly light either so what do you get inside this beefy 7 pounder it has a Haswell core i7 running at 2.5 gigahertz a 15 inch 4k touchscreen 16 gigs of ram 2 drives a 256 solid state and a one terabyte mechanical gtx 970 all for 1700 canadian which should be like 13 $1400 us right but we'll get into that later on the 4k screen has great color it's very vibrant not oversaturated and it's quite bright the viewing angles seem okay it's an IPS panel but the viewing angles aren't as good as some other IPS panels I've used but it's decent and a spider pegs this thing at 100% srgb and 99% adobe RGB so this is actually one of the most color accurate notebook screens I've ever used calibration out of the box is pretty good as well I'd say it's as good if not better than the color accuracy of a 15-inch MacBook Pro it is a glossy finish and it doesn't have the anti glare tint like the MacBook does but because the screen is bright it's not a problem it's a 1080p webcam it seems pretty good and I film some pretty important stuff while using it now might just have been really good sunlight or something but the color seemed pretty good off of this webcam I don't know I'll let you decided the inside has a soft touch material kind of like the 13 inch version it's nice to touch but I think the jury's still out on long-term durability but I do like the idea of it the keyboard feels good keys have a lot of travel typing is comfortable and I like the placement of the directional keys there are some macro keys that you can set up on the left side but they've done a really good job to keep the keyboard centered even with these macro keys it's a really good keyboard for general use and gaming the trackpad has two physical buttons and I like them there's a surprising amount of travel on these buttons but they're still responsive and they're not spongy the trackpad itself is okay it has that classic Windows trackpad leg and it skips around a little it's better than the Alienware 13 trackpad but it's not amazing you know what is amazing though things that light up this is the first track pad I've use that lights up like this it sounds really gimmicky and ok no it is gimmicky because this thing has no practical purpose but they did a really good job on this and like the twelve-year-old kid in me loves it you can change it to a bunch of different colors and if you want to go insane you could make it flash all the time so you can control the trackpad and lighting on a keyboard through software it's really intuitive you just kind of click around on different zones on the notebook and then you click on the corresponding color wheel and ban your colors changed I haven't done the math but there's probably like hundreds of thousands of color combinations you can also change the color of the top surface the notebook you can't make it cycle through the colors like this I'm just showing you the different color options alright enough about rainbow stuff so the SSD speeds are about 450 right and 500 read and the mechanical drive has just really bad numbers it's like a hundred or 150 for read and write video editing performance is really good on this thing it's probably one of the best mobile video editing rings I've ever used for starters if you remember it comes with two drives which is great for video editing and you can always add a third Drive to make it your scratch disk or something which is even better it has a color accurate 4k screen a fast processor and a fast GPU so this thing really feels like it was built for video editing it crushes 1080p edits and 4k edits are still really good it's not as snappy as my 2015 MacBook Pro but in terms of render times the Alienware 15 is about 10-15 percent faster I played a little minecraft and got a lot of frames per second so this is a good gaming computer that's the end of the review hope you guys liked watching ok I'm kidding so just for fun I cranked Street Fighter 4 to full 4k res and I still got like 70 frames per second but seriously on a 15-inch screen there's no visible difference between 4k and 1080p in Street Fighter 4 or for most games for that matter I mean if you stick your eye right up to the screen you can kind of see the difference but when you're playing you really can't tell GTA v had problems running at 4k but at 1080p it runs pretty well but when you play it on high settings you get around 40 frames per second a little bit less sometimes on medium you get around mid to high 50s so it's very respectable here's the storm I also tried at 4k just to see frame rates you get around 25 to 30 frames per second so it's not worth your time but playing at 1080p on Ultra settings you get over 60 frames per second when you're laning and around 40 to 50 frames in teamfights in general though gaming performance is really good and I'll be able to comfortably run any kind of modern game you throw at it just a quick blurb on battery life here it's a 92 watt hour battery that gets kind of disappointing battery life considering how thick it is I got around 5 and 1/2 hours of regular use 6 hours watching movies from the Drive both of these had screen around 80% of brightness I've got a little bit less than 2 hours playing games on battery with screen at max brightness keep in mind though that the performance drops a lot on this machine when you're playing on battery that's just how the 970 works fan noise it idles around mid 20 decibel mechanical drives have a bit of noise to them so that's why it's not completely silent but it's still very quiet now when things get going a bit like on some low-end games fans kick in gently it's around 30 decibels but it's not bothersome but sometimes when hardcore 3d games are really taxing this thing the fans hit mid 40s and Holy Mother of God it is loud it's actually straight up unpleasant to play games without headphones when the fans are going on like this it doesn't happen often but yeah when it does it's annoying the good thing is that when you look at the thermals the system seems well cooled I mean a 15-inch MacBook hits 40 to 43 degrees Celsius but the Alienware 15 hits 38:39 at its warmest points it has to get loud as if to cool like this but at least it's not loud and hot right the speakers are front-facing and that's probably the only real advantage of that super thick case you can fit speakers that kind of point right at you they sound good for notebook speakers and because they're directed at you they seem to get pretty loud here's what they sound like so there's a lot of really good stuff going on inside the Alienware 15 it's got a really great screen possibly one of the best screens two hard drives lots of RAM really fast video card like everything about it is just designed for just a really great gaming experience aside from that thickness I mean no one has a thick notebook but the one reason why I can't just openly recommend this notebook is because of its pricing so right now in the Canadian Microsoft Store this thing is priced at $1700 Canadian and that's I mean that's on sale now normally that price would translates like fourteen or fifteen hundred dollars u.s. or maybe even thirteen hundred dollars u.s. but it's actually going for eighteen hundred in the American Microsoft store so that's a little bit weird to me I think there will be an upcoming price drop I think with the four core Broadwell chips coming out this will drop in price now if you can get it for fourteen or fifteen hundred dollars u.s. I think this is one of the best valued hardcore gaming notebooks out there I mean everything about it just screams gamer but if you can't and you have to pay seventeen or eighteen hundred dollars for this thing then it kind of becomes a okay buy in terms of its overall usage though this is a great device for hardcore mobile gamer or a mobile video or photo editor and just a great notebook all around that's the end of the review hope you guys liked it if you have any questions comments type below thumbs have you liked it subs have you loved it it's been nice and I'll see you guys next time