Alienware M17 R4 Review RTX 3080, 3070, 3060
Here is the Alienware M17 R4 Review This is an Alienware m17 R4 gaming laptop so the fourth generation of the 17 inches relatively speaking slim is a sort of light gaming laptop from Alienware which is really del since they do own Alienware this also comes is a 15-inch size as the m15r4.
But today we are going to look at the bigger chassis so what’s new in this generation well the biggest thing is Nvidia RTX 3060, 3070 and 3080 graphics inside and also the fact that they are we don’t use max P and max Q anymore Nvidia says.
But they are the max P system max P versions with our RTX 3070 having 140-watt GPU inside if you go for that RTX 3080 with 16 gigs of VRAM.
It’s 165 watts that out does even the MSI ge76 raider 17 inches would have which had a 155-watt RTX 3080. The design is the same it’s the same legend design available in your choice of lunar light which is our dark side of the moon with the so-called endurance clear coat.
So, you can eat your Doritos and not destroy your laptop’s finish and that is magnesium alloy for the casing underneath despite the fact it might look to you like plastic so how are the thermal that’s always the thing you want to know with Alienware’s.
We are going to find out now but before we talk about thermals and other goodness two other things are new optional cherry MX switches so for those who like that kind of mechanical keyboard feel this is like ultra-low travel relatively speaking for a mechanical keyboard.
It’s 1.8 millimetres of travel which is pretty long for a laptop that’s available to you of course it’s going to sound a little more clicky but for those who like that they’ve just introduced that option also new is the full HD 360-hertz refresh 5 millisecond IPS display which is the one that we have so that replaces the 300-hertz refresh rate that was available before between 15 and 17 inches.
Let’s talk about the two elephants in the room number one there is the fact that well I mean there’s always a new CPU generation coming right but intel 11th gen h45 45-watt mobile CPUs will be coming probably by June 2021 and Alienware always update their laptops and they will have that.
So, while on the desktop intel 11th gen was not much of an improvement pretty much architecturally very similar still 14 nanometers, we do see the drop down to 10 nanometers for intel 11th gen h45 the 45 watt eight-core six-core CPUs that are going to be available.
Alienware m17 R4 Laptop Spec:-
| Specification: |
| 17.3” FHD 144Hz 7ms Optimus and Mux G-Sync options (low Blue Light), |
| 360Hz 5ms G-Sync, 4k 60Hz 500 nit glossy 100% Adobe RGB |
| Intel Core i7-10870H and Core i9-10980HK 8-Core CPU options |
| Nvidia RTX 3060, RTX 3070 140 watt, RTX 3080 16GB 165-watt GPUs |
| 16GB/32GB DDR4 2922MHz dual-channel ram, soldered |
| M.2 NVMe SSD, RAIDO options available. 2 full-size M.2 slot, 1 half-height |
| Alien FX zone and per-key RGB keyboards, Cherry MX optional |
| Thunderbolt 3 |
| Killer WI-FI 6 AX1650 (Intel Card) + Bluetooth 5.1 |
| 4 × 2-watt stereo speaker |
| 86 WHr battery, 240 watt or 330-watt charger |
| Starting Price: $1650 |
There so it could help certainly with thermals mostly not performance probably so much but a bit with the thermals and perhaps with the battery life but there’s the other elephant in the room even more power efficient is Ryzen of course with a seven-nanometer process and dell has just announced only for the 15 inches that there will be an Alienware m15r5 which is the Ryzen edition.
Unfortunately, that one’s gimped in some ways though it doesn’t have Thunderbolt 3 which is understandable because so far AMD has not had thunderbolt reasons that could change in the future.
They did get rid of the Alienware graphics amplifier which is just as well because well delta discontinued that but also for the GPUs on that Ryzen model, not max P, they’re lower wattage and they top out at the 30 30-70.
So as Alienware laptops typically appeal to hardcore gamers a lot who want the best performance most games today aaa titles depend more on the GPU than the CPU so you want the max wattage which still makes the Alienware attractive all right we got that all out of the way right.
So let’s get into it for the display options on this one you have the one that we have the new 360 hertz and that has g-sync and by the way, this will always get confusing a little bit with Alienware’s and some display options may be available only with some colour chassis why don’t them the rest of the options are what we saw last year there’s a 144 hertz full HD display all these are 300 nit
These full HD displays by the way that one’s seven millisecond response time that one’s the one that’s attractive for those who care about battery life probably more for those of you looking at the m15 which is more portable than the m17 my guess anyway.
Because that one has Optimus so you can switch you can use fn f7 you can switch between dedicated integrated graphics if you get our 360 Hertz display you have got g-sync and you got dedicated graphics only.
Also, there is a 4K UHD wide gamut display option and that one is 500 nits and 25 millisecond response time at only 60 hertz.
So clearly geared towards content creators it’s a nice enough looking display the 15 inches will use an OLED, not the 17 inches though and I prefer the 17 inches a little bit better because I don’t think that the OLED display is that attractive on the 15 inches it looks a little old Jen a little bit yellow to me too glossy too shiny but anyway that one’s not so geared towards gamers and it’s a little bit of a disappointment.
Because razer has been offering 4k displays with a 120-hertz refresh rate at least for a while so for those who would care about a bit higher frame rates over 60 well that’s not an option but for content creators, the 4k is still there for you it’s the same all right those are our display options and one last thing to say ours is pretty good with backlight bleed.
But the bottom right corner it’s more like IPS glow that corner is a little bit lighter than the rest we’ll talk about the display metrics of ours it’s a pretty good contrast on this is over a thousand to one it has full SRGB coverage it has 83 or so of a P3
So, it’s not that far off-colour gamut wise from ASUS’s lovely rogue Zephyrus g15 display which is a pretty wide gamut display and the response times on it are quite good and the g-sync and the response time on it are quite good and the g-sync for those who love g-sync well you’re not going to see any tearing here.
Alienware M17 R4 Laptop Display Specs:
| Display Metrics: |
| 328 Nits |
| 100% sRGB |
| 81% Adobe RGB |
| 83% FCI-P3 |
| 2.2 Gamma |
| 6300K |
| 0.28 Black Level |
| 1140:1 Contrast |
| AUOEC91 Panel |
Alienware M17 R4 Review RTX 3080, 3070, 3060 Benchmark
It’s very nice and as you wonder why you need 360 hertz right even if this laptop could maybe drive cs to go at exceedingly high frame rates or something like that even apex you can get into mid 100s easily and not for your frame rate.
It also offers more multipliers for better syncing of the GPU to the display so there are other things to say about it experientially to me it does look a little bit better than last year’s 300-hertz option just a little bit crispier metrics wise doesn’t look that different.
So, I don’t know why it is but each generation hopefully does get better all right enough of the display keyboard other than the new cherry MX mechanical option is the same as last generation and I still find it a very nice tactile and comfortable keyboard with very bright RGB backlighting you have your option of getting zoned backlit or perky ours is the best buy model with the 8-Core i7 CPU the RTX 3070 and the per-key RGB lighting and the 360-hertz display.
So, this one is a retail model usually dell sends us review units that loan us those units so we can review them so this one has not been cherry-picked for thermals which will be important.
We do get the thermals trackpad on this is glass and it is quite good it’s a Microsoft precision trackpad the speakers on it same as the last generation it does have four two-watt speakers but lacking in base definitely and compared to MSI ge76 raider which has two those being subwoofers or woofers that sounds better folks
So, thank goodness for headphones and this does have a single headphone jack not separate mic and headphone jacks like the area 51m has it’s a 17-inch laptop even if it is thin and fairly light at six and a half pounds.
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You know any way you’ve got your ethernet onboard three USB ports thunderbolt three the Alienware graphics amplifiers that are of no use to anybody anymore.
This mini display port 1.4 and HDMI 2.2 so for those who have those fancy 4k OLED 120hz displays you can connect that up again the negatives with this design are to keep it so thin and light ram is soldered on here still 16 or 32 gigs of ddr4 293-megahertz ram that’s your two options dual channel and you’ve got at least several m.2 SSD Slot you’ve got two full-size ones and in fact, you can order with raid 0 if you want and then theirs a half-height slot in there.
So, storage expandability is good the Wi-Fi card is a killer Wi-Fi 6 card and it’s actually an intel card and that is soldered down too.
So, boo on that because we like to see upgradeable laptops but then this is how they are making it so thin and light you know the story with this until they change the design if they ever do like they do with the Ryzen edition.
We’ll see we still have a vapour chamber and cooling for the CPU inside and we still have the inverted motherboard so if you wish to replace it you’re going to take the motherboard completely out even if MSI got rid of that with their stealth series.
So, I really would like to see Alienware find a way around that we’ll see maybe with intel’s more power-efficient CPUs they won’t need as much space for cooling they might be able to do that.
Let’s talk about cooling and performance because that is probably why you are here it’s better than I expected okay for generations now I have moaned about anywhere laptops the thin ones, not the area 51m particularly the r2 which is a 10 pounder with a thick chassis and lots of room for cooling.
But the 15 and the 17 have just run hot and loud and with each generation, it gets a little bit better finally, with the fourth-generation ranch this will probably be the last with this design and they will change it over and who knows will happen next but this thing runs decently in terms of thermals and fan noise.
So, in this one, I found that even playing a triple a demanding title like cyberpunk 2077 I could leave the fans on balance mode without seeing the CPU temperatures get astronomical which is nice instead of putting it on high performance for cooling which guarantees that it’s going to go and roar on balance mode it ramps up nicely if you put in high-performance mode.
The fans are just pegged at a fairly high level which is stupid because you don’t want to do that when you are web browsing right anyway balance mode does the trick here again this is just a retail sample from the best buy store so not cherry-picked by dell or something like that and I was shocked at how good the thermals were on this playing a game like cyberpunk which gets the GPU pretty darn hot and creates heat pollution.
Because you have shared heatsinks here CPU temperatures are in the 70s to mid-80s sometimes GPU temperature is around 77 Celsius so that’s quite good and that’s without under vaulting or anything our sample did undervolt pretty well I use throttle stop on this and by the way Alienware does not block you from under volting.
That so I went to a 100 millivolt undervolted on this or 0.1 really on the core and cache and it dropped temperatures down some but I didn’t feel an urge to run an undervolted it’s so delightful now if you go at the 15-inch one smaller chassis hotter noisier so don’t generalize too much but I expect to see somewhat better cooling for the fourth generation in the 15 inches the ones that we have visually to show you is the r3.
So that’s the last-gen fan noise is pretty similar to last year and the fans have the same sonic quality shall we say a bit high pitch it’s a thin chassis so some might find that annoying I know sometimes I do it’s not speechy and horrible.
But you know what I mean it’s not the low wish of air for a big old desktop replacement kind of thing the improvement is that you don’t hear them cranked up as high as often and you don’t have to run it on max fans all the time and we tested a variety of games all sort of different games but all of them pretty demanding.
So good stuff in terms of performance we have the eight cores i7 that’s the 108 70hand you can also get it with the core i9 HK processor 8 cores.
I advise against that just because thermally speaking you’re already somewhat constrained here why mess with a good thing that the i7 performs pretty well and doesn’t thermal throttle at least ours hasn’t.
So, with the i9 you might be looking at throttling and then your square won’t be that much better will they or your frame rates and games when it comes to the GPU the 3080 with 16 gigs of VRAM and 165 max watts must be a delight but the 3070 is considerably cheaper and is pretty darn good as you can see from the frame rates that we got in games I mean I’m not feeling like I’m wanting something in terms of performance of this laptop compared to the Alienware area 51mr2 and this one gets 5 to 10 frames better in GPU intensive games like cyberpunk 2077.
If you’re playing something like far cry 5 it’s not going to matter as much because that one hits the CPU more than the GPU the Alienware area 51m has a desktop CPU and the one that we have for comparison and test is the 10 700 8K overclockable processor there so in most cases this one is going to win.
Because of the better GPU the 3000 series maybe when the area 51m hard 3 comes out well that’ll be more interesting than in terms of heat that you feel from the chassis yes it does get hot now when I test laptops I either have them on a stoneware counter or I have them on this passive laptop cooler there are no fans in the thing but just to give it a little elevation and to raise it.
So not helping it out too much but the bottom will get hot the area above the keyboard that strip, where you’re not going to touch when you’re gaming, will get quite hot to the touch even if the core temperature is perfectly acceptable like 75 centigrade or something like that.
So, a thin laptop toasty to the touch yes, it is now because of the shortage of GPUs and for some of the laptops Ryzen CPUs there’s not a lot to compare this to that’s readily available on the market the MSI g76 raider is somewhat available and is another fairly large 17-inch laptop but it is thicker the thicker does help with thermals though to be honest in my tests and in playing games.
I didn’t I was shocked about this I didn’t see the CPU running that much cooler however I didn’t replace the MSI and that did bring temps down whereas repasting this alien where would be more of a pain in the neck obviously the MSI has two rams slot and a socketed Wi-Fi card so that’s a plus their MSI does not have g sync for the display for those of you who are a fan of it
However, I like the keyboard better on the Alienware and the backlighting is a little bit brighter I like the touchpad a bit better too there’s going to be some give and take for each they are both very high-performance laptops.
Alienware M17 R4 Battery Life:
It’s going to depend somewhat on your preferred aesthetic and brand between those two more than anything else to be honest those are two of the highest performing laptops on the market when it comes to Ryzen based laptops like the ASUS rogue Strix 17 the problem is you just can’t get one right, I mean now if you order one, they say maybe you’ll get it in June Ryzen has great advantages in terms of better battery life and better thermals.
It doesn’t run as hot, especially since the cooling solution is pretty decent on it we did review the ASUS rogue Zephyrus g15 which is a surprisingly thin and light inch version and that one can get toasty.
Because you don’t have much room for cooling there but still that one was a delight however does not have a mux switch so you’re going to be running on switchable graphics at all times it does have ram slots which are nice choices again the Alienware at least you can buy dell’s website you might have to wait a couple of weeks for it to get to you and best buy is stocking them now in the united states so availability wise I think dell may have a little bit of an advantage there versus the Ryzen ones until their rise in laptop ships.
Ok, how about battery life this is going to vary depending on which display you get if you get the one that has switchable graphics your battery life is going to be best if you get our 360-hertz display that’s running the GPU all the time good luck battery life is two hours that’s what it is this is for somebody who doesn’t need long battery life but wants the ultimate in performance for the display.
If you get the 4k display 4k display is just to use more power so that will again become an issue even though it’s not a high refresh display same as the last generation 86 watt-hour battery you’re going to get either a 240 watt or a 33o watt charger depending on which CPU and GPU you pick our i7 with the 3070 comes with the 240-watt power adapter which is pretty weighty the 330 watt is something you do not want to drop on your foot something to count when you’re carrying this thing around opening this up is just like the last generation.
That’s the Alienware m17 r4 obviously the distinctive style with this machine and you know it feels like a quality piece I got to say generally speaking the build quality on this is pretty good.
I know some peoples have problems with quality control with different brands of laptops including this but this is one solid machine the performance and the cooling on this impressed me well not the performance I mean because I expect it a lot that’s something Alienware delivers
But usually at the price of letting the CPU run unchecked to thermal maximum stuff and the thermals on this were pretty darn good I like the new 360Hz display it might be overkill for most people but it sure is nice looking and again it gives you more multipliers for syncing the display to the GPU more smoothly and for you content creators there is that 4k display option which is very pretty even if it’s not high refresh rate for gaming too.