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Alienware Announces its New Alienware m15 and Finally Succumbs to the Thin Gaming Laptop Trend

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There was a time when gaming laptops were as monstrous in performance as in size and design. There was no such thing as "less is more", and manufacturers always seemed interested in surprising us with grotesque designs that were far away from the aesthetics of ultrathin laptops.

But that has changed, and the new generations of discrete graphics cards for laptops has ushered us to a new generation of machines in which thinness is finally a virtue, not a symbol of weakness. The Dell Alienware m15 is the first gaming laptop from this manufacturer that bets on this kind of design, and the result seems to be a well balanced machine that represents a good compromise between power, thinness and weight.




Alienware seemed reluctant to give up in the field of "bulky" designs, and the truth is that its proposal is interesting especially when compared with the Alienware 13 that precedes it: it is 14% thinner, but even being a laptop with a 15.6 inch screen (versus Alienware's 13 13.3 inches) its weight (2.2 kg) is 20% lower than that model.

The specs reveal small sacrifices, however: we can choose between an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or a GTX 1070 Max-Q, while for the CPU we can choose between an quad-core Intel Core i5-8300H or a six-core Intel Core i7-8750H. The entry model brings us a 1080p 60 Hz panel, but from there we can go to 1080p 144 Hz or even a 4K 60 Hz resolutions and refresh rates. These machines came loaded with up to 32 GB of RAM and up to a 1 TB SSD plus another 1 TB hybrid drive. The standard Alienware m15 has a 60 Whr battery, though we can jump to a 90 Whr version that offers 10.6 hours of continuous video playback according to Dell.

The Alienware m15 will be available on October 25th, and will have a starting price of $1,299.

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ARG!!! Seriously... stop with this "thin for the sake of thin" crap. If you can't pick up a fifteen pound notebook because it's too heavy then you really need to think about doing some light weight training.
 
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15Lbs.... really, for a laptop ?????

Although I agree with your "thin" sentiments, do you really think today's lazy, bloated-ass, couch-potatoed wimpy pussyfoots are gonna be willing to tote that around for even 5 mins....

The last time I picked up a lappy that heavy was back in the early 90's, which was a rubber-clad tank called the "Panasonic ToughBook" designed for the military to use on the battlefield...
 
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Maybe I was exaggerating but you get the idea. This whole "thin for the sake of thin" is infecting everything. Just how the hell are you supposed to do proper cooling when the device is thin? I blame Apple for this crap, talk about putting form before function.
 
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Agreed, normally what Apple starts they usually end up finishing, and it appeared for quite some time that they were winning the "thin as can" be race, as we watched each new generation of their lappys (and iMacs too) get thinner & thinner....

Then the WinTel crowd figured they could also cash in on the trend and said "hey, apple is selling a shitload of thin lappys, so we can too".... too bad they initially overlooked what was at that time apple's real winning cards....their OS and their build quality.

But then, they finally got their shit together and started making some really nice machines that were almost as good as macbooks, and the rest as they say, is history :)

And for everyones FYI, I witnessed all of this first hand, as I owned several apple & wintel lappys during this era and saw apple's dominance and QA/QC go downhill to the point when they finally gave up and starting working towards everything iOS related...

what a waste :(
 
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As a happy owner of a current gen AW13 I think there is not much to see here. They simply made the 13 wider and thinner, so essentially you gave the same heat-exchanging area. It might be visually more appealing and offering a larger screen size, however they took away the gorgeous OLED display option and the machine is wider and deeper so IMHO it's less convenient to handle. I think it was a simple trade-off, as the AW13 was already light enough to carry it around as your daily driver.

As for weight-critical design methods I agree with you, that it is waay overdone, but some of the earlier (and even current gen) 17" laptops really are heavy, not to mention the Acer twenty something inch behemoths....
 
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My friend got some newer alienware laptop with a 1060 in it.They are really well made and powerful too. It's super thick though.
 

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My friend got some newer alienware laptop with a 1060 in it.They are really well made and powerful too. It's super thick though.

Yup only those keep cool
 
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While looking nice, its likely to have the same faults as all the models since the 2015 "Echo" series. Last decent laptop AW released was the AW 17 R1
 
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15 lbs. ?
2.2 Kilograms = 4.85016977 lbs.

Heavier than my lappytop but, I only have HD4000. Mostly useless as a gamer, except for some older indie games...
 
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15 lbs. ?
2.2 Kilograms = 4.85016977 lbs.

Heavier than my lappytop but, I only have HD4000. Mostly useless as a gamer, except for some older indie games...
All of the actual gaming laptops I have owned have reached or have been 10LBS+
 
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Maybe I was exaggerating but you get the idea. This whole "thin for the sake of thin" is infecting everything. Just how the hell are you supposed to do proper cooling when the device is thin? I blame Apple for this crap, talk about putting form before function.
You shouldn't blame Apple for this. They make their laptops for documents and just office use, so the case is very different with Alienware. But to be honest I do prefer thin laptop for very light gaming than carry big heavy coffin with me with 15 minutes of battery life.
 
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The Thin laptop/device trend is stupid. Sure it's nice to not have a bulky device, but when it's literally like paper it's getting silly. I'd rather have a bigger battery and better cooling in a Gaming Laptop than it being "thin" because, uh, it "looks cool"?
 
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Agree, these thin laptops can't even properly cool the U series quad-cores(8250u / ryzen 5), when you can't cool a 15w CPU that means the design is flawed imho. \
Besides that CPU can't even turbo at even close to max speeds due to that watt limitation
 
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