Alienware m16 R2
Gaming laptops are often on the cutting edge of technology, housing some of the industry’s best hardware. Powerful Meteor Lake processors, visually stunning RTX 40-series GPUs, the works. With that in mind, you’d think that professionals looking for high-end machines would be clamoring to buy one of these machines for themselves, but that’s not really the case.
Gaming laptops aren’t exactly ubiquitous, but why? Well, it might have to do with their flashy RGB lights that light up like Disney’s Electrical Parade.
Also: One of the best work laptops I’ve tested has MacBook written all over it (but it’s even better)
Gaming devices often come equipped with RGB lighting, which looks cool, but can be pretty distracting, especially when you’re in a work meeting trying to look serious and have a laptop lit up like a Christmas tree in front of you. Subtlety is the name of the game here.
Thankfully, manufacturers are taking notice of this potential shift in customer preference. Dell, for one, has come up with a solution in a new gaming laptop that also has the working professional in mind: the Alienware m16 R2
F4, F5, and F6 are for keybinds, letting you tie custom actions to them, with F3 reserved for saving your keybinds. All the usual audio control functions have been moved to the far right. Besides the keyboard, I enjoy how the edge of the palm rest at the front of the machine is noticeably round. It’s softer on the wrists when compared to other laptops, ensuring a comfortable typing experience.
Features like these allow the m16 R2 to pull double duty at being a gaming and work-centric laptop and indicate that Dell put a lot of thought into designing the model.
One thing worth noting, though, is that I did find the trackpad to be a little small. Perhaps they wanted to make room for the speakers above the keyboard, in which case I say it was a worthwhile move since the audio sounds great for a laptop. Just keep in mind that they’re not powerful enough to fill a room.
Also: I tested Dell’s XPS successor, and it made my $3,000 Windows laptop look bad
The Alienware m16 R2 runs on an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, a processor I notice is commonly found on many 2024 laptops. It’s a good option as it offers solid performance while not inflating the price tag too much. To see what it’s capable of, I ran it through the Geekbench test, where the processor earned a score of 12,725, outperforming the Ultra 9’s average score of 12,611. So on the right laptop, the Ultra 7 can be a better chip than the higher-end hardware.
Alongside the CPU are the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card and 16GB of RAM, though it would’ve been nice to have 32GB. I experienced a dip in performance when I was playing Helldivers 2 at high graphical settings. But 16GB is fine; it gets the job done in most situations.