Alienware M15 R3 Review: A Painfully Pricey Gaming Laptop With The Best Features On The Market

Aadhya Khatri - Sep 10, 2020

If you have to ask how much it costs, you probably can’t stretch your budget enough for it. However, it doesn’t hurt reading our Alienware M15 R3 review

If you have to ask how much it costs, you probably can’t stretch your budget enough for it. However, it doesn’t hurt reading our Alienware M15 R3 review to see if it’s worth a few months of savings.

Alienware M15 R3 (2020) Review

Alienware M15 R3 Design

The laptop features the best 15-inch design we have ever seen on any Alienware devices.

It isn’t the slimmest laptop available on the market and Dell didn’t exactly want to jump on the bandwagon of zero-bezel either. However, it’s under an inch in thickness and doesn’t go past 2.5 kg in weight so the whole appearance shouldn’t trouble users too much.

Alienware M15 R3 screen — It isn’t the slimmest laptop available on the market and Dell didn’t exactly want to jump on the bandwagon of zero-bezel either

Let’s continue our Alienware M15 R3 review with the power supply.

You may think this feature doesn’t contribute much to experience but it does, at least with this laptop which aims at portability. The 240W power supply is wide, thin, and flat, which makes it looks more compact than the thicker but narrower design.

Overall, the appearance of Alienware M15 R3 is more eye-appealing than previous generations of this lineup.

The keyboard bed on this laptop is solid with no bounce or flex. The keys have 1.7mm of travel and the noise level is low.

Alienware M15 R3 keyboard — The keyboard bed on this laptop is solid with no bounce or flex

But if you are familiar with a more mechanical and crisp feel may want to spend some time getting used to the keyboard.

Dell has done a good job engineering this laptop with 12-phase graphics voltage regulation and improved chassis coating to reduce staining and smearing.

Since this’s a gaming laptop, cooling is big deal. Alienware M15 R3 dissipates heat by copper heat pipes, larger fans, and vapor chambers.

According to Dell, the four-way stereo speaker can provide twice more treble, 2.5 more bass, and 30% more volume.

These features sound impressive enough but they are merely the highlights, the list of improvements is long, so keep going with our Alienware M15 R3 review to see what you can have with this laptop.

Other details of the design have more to do with aesthetic concern.

Alienware M15 R3 features RGB lighting for both the rear halo and the keys on the keyboard. Users can configure them both via the AlienFX app. If you think the light is showy, you can always disable the feature with a keyboard shortcut.

Alienware M15 R3 RGB lighting — Alienware M15 R3 features RGB lighting for both the rear halo and the keys on the keyboard

In terms of connectivity, the laptop offers a headphone jack, Gigabit Ethernet, a MicroSD card reader, Alienware Graphics Amplifier Port, three SuperSpeed USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A sockets, USB-C with Thunderbolt 3, and Mini-DisplayPort 1.4.

Alienware M15 R3 Specs

Next on our Alienware M15 R3 review is the laptop’s specs.

It belongs to the groups coming with lots of configurations with a large number of component options for AMD, Nvidia, and Intel.

You have the choice to choose the i5, i7, or i9 Intel Core H-Series chipset. Unfortunate for fans of AMD, there is no option for Ryzen processor. But Intel chips have superb quality suitable for gaming.

Alienware M15 R3 specs — It belongs to the groups coming with lots of configurations with a large number of component options for AMD, Nvidia, and Intel

When it comes to the graphics card, the number of choices is large. You have the GTX 16 Series from Nvidia that comes as a reasonable price and optimization for Full HD resolution, RTX GPUs with ray-tracing ability, with choices to upgrade to Super variants with more power.

Alienware M15 R3 is a bit thin on the Radeon offers with only the AMD’s Radeon RX 5500M available.

In other specs categories, the laptop has a wide range of options include a 4TB SSD option and 32GB of DDR4 RAM. You will probably have to pay through the nose for them but don’t be discouraged, there are cheaper options for tight budgets.

Alienware m17 has a nearly identical specs sheet and performance but it doesn’t have a 4K display.

Alienware M15 R3 Battery Life

The last part of our Alienware M15 R3 review is about the battery.

Great battery life isn’t something to expect with an eight-core gaming laptop with a huge GPU. However, the Alienware M15 R3 pulls a respectable show with five hours out of the PC Mark 10 battery test and seven hours of movies.