Gadgetory

last year we reviewed the Alienware 13 r3 and thought that it was a fantastic little machine but it has a bigger batter more bloated brother that's coming to take all your lunch money but in a world that is trending towards thinner and lighter can bigger be better let's find out the Vitesse from Phoenix features a lightweight design and in a vago 3310 optical sensor check it out and enter for a chance to win one at the link in the video description the first thing you'll notice about the Alienware 15 is wow this is an oh wow holy crap this thing is heavy coming in at almost 50% heavier then the 13-inch model I think it's fair to say most people wouldn't want to carry it around in a backpack everyday which actually got us thinking both are very similar and there's less than a 100 dollar difference between the two that we have so then which one would we rather have so what started as a standalone review morphed into also a comparison so the Alienware 15 straddles the line between tasteful industrial design and over-the-top leat gamer I think the RGB lights on the sides of the frame kind of push it overboard but those can be disabled through alien wares alien effects software and the beauty of this thing is more than skin-deep on a desk or in your bag the laptop has a solid premium feel that comes from its magnesium and reinforced steel chassis the quality feeling plastics of the outer shell especially around the keyboard and trackpad and the overbuilt screen hinge it really doesn't seem like Dell cut any corners in the construction of these machines spec wise the Alienware 15 is available in everything from low-end configs that cost more than the dell inspiron gaming for no tangible performance improvement all the way up to our beast that sports a gtx 1070 for graphics a quad core Core i7 and 16 gigs of DDR 4 RAM yielding performance that was consistently breaking through the 60 FPS barrier and often cracking three digits in triple-a titles and all of this is with no worries about thermal issues the CPU settled in at a somewhat toasty 87 degrees in our synthetic tests and the GPU landed at a breezy 74 degrees Celsius neither of them were in danger of overheating or throttling at any time and this is unusual for a laptop we have no complaints about acoustics either the cooling fans are nearly silent while the speaker's pack a really nice punch Dell has gotten serious about audio on their devices lately but does the screen live up to the rest of the specs I mean sure the horizontal viewing angles and brightness are good the windows hello enabled webcam is a nice touch but compared to the OLED display on the Alienware 13 colors look flat there's a lack of depth to the blacks and adding insult to injury it isn't even available with touch support meaning that you might be fooled into thinking that it's outright terrible by comparison until you move the cursor running at a hundred and twenty Hertz with g-sync this thing is buttery smooth and once you try high refresh rate gaming you'll be hooked going back to the 60 Hertz on the 13 feels like putting on skate shoes for a basketball game but if the higher refresh rate is worth it depends heavily on your use case for csgo or overwatch sure but if you're a filthy casual like me playing sightseeing games like rise of the Tomb Raider or Witcher 3 the OLED panel along with its crispy higher resolution compared to all but the top tier 15 inch model not to mention it's better out of the box calibration and 95 percent coverage of the Adobe RGB color space contributes more to the experience both gaming and otherwise the keyboard and trackpad on the Alienware 15 other than some macro keys are identical to the 13 it's kind of weird when you think about it considering how much more space we have I mean come on Dell this move feels a little bit like you had bad leftovers and you needed some laptops to put them on how about a number pad maybe here and a much larger trackpad let's say I don't know up here I mean to be clear I'm not saying that this reuse is a terrible thing the RGB trackpad looks dank AF and behaved well in our testing outside of a couple glitches with two finger scrolling and as for the keyboard the backlit keys still have a nice long action to them that avoids being mushy gaming was a pleasure and getting up to full speed and accuracy while typing was no problem as long as that accuracy is near-perfect backspace and actually the indent on the S key instead of the W where everybody else puts it are both small skid marks on what is otherwise a really solid keyboard now let's say you were to save some costs up front how easy is it to upgrade this thing down the road well after removing the seven screws from the bottom panel I was pleasantly surprised although one MDOT - and the hard drive bay are occupied there are actually two more MDOT two slots making it super simple to upgrade your speedy storage ram is easily accessed and the battery which held up about like you'd expect for something so powerful so not amazing is a quick swap making the Alienware 15 about as simple to upgrade as a laptop can be so bottom line then both are fantastic notebooks and if you have the money either of them will probably make you happy but you came here for a winner and for once we're actually going to give you one if you plan on gaming four hours everyday the Alienware 15 is a pretty easy choice with more power and the 120 Hertz display option this thing is wicked - game on but for anything other than gaming the better Portability and the utterly unique and amazing screen of the Alienware 13 helped it take home the prize do you need a website well I would be happy to help you out not personally by hooking you up with squarespace.com Squarespace for just 12 bucks a month and they throw in a free domain if you buy it for the year gives you a cloud-based website creation platform that is just freakin awesome and if you have any trouble with it they've got 24/7 support via live chat and email just pick out a template put in the pictures and text you want I mean maybe you don't even want a complicated site maybe you just want like a one-page thing about this is who I am or this is who we are and this is a few things about us you can set that up in a matter of mitts got lots of other great features like their logo designer and the ability to publish content in Apple news format directly from the Squarespace blog module did I mention every site comes with a commerce module Wow so start a trial with no credit card required and start building your website today then when you decide to sign up for Squarespace for real head to squarespace.com slash LTT and use offer code LTT to get 10% off so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video well you know where that button is but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is a t-shirt store where you can buy cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join