alien ware

what’s going on everybody, matthew monizhere and this is the alienware m15 the thinnest alienware ever made. thats the title that every journalist andreporter is using on this laptop. like its that big of a deal, have you guysseen the size of a regular alienware? they are 8-10 pounds, super thick and superheavy. they are so heavy that you could whip it ata tank and you could probably put a hole in it. so making a thinner alienware is not thathard to do to begin with. now one thing that is true, we finally dohave a smaller alienware which is a long time

overdue. now in comparrison this is a 4.8 pound laptopmaking it heavier than the razer blade 15 and the msi gs 65. and if you look at its form factor its actuallyquite big in comparrison. its a little big wider, the depth is a littlebit longer and of course its thicker than other competing products. its made out of all metal so it feels niceand solid. you still have the alienware logo in the middlewhether you like it or not and of course you still have that three prong design on topof the lid.

now on the left hand side, you are gettingan rj 45 port, a usb 3.0 and an audio in jack. now on the back this is one thing i love aboutalienware. they always put their ports on the back whichhelps for cable management. so you have a full sized hdmi, mini displayport, usb type c thunderbolt 3 so you could hook up an external gpu or you can buy alienwaresgraphic amplifier and use that instead using this port and of course you have your dc injack which uses a 180 watt brick. on the other side you have two more usb 3.0ports, so plenty of ports to connect all of your devices. now alienware has made getting inside of heresuper easy.

you have three slots for drives, this onecomes with a 2.5 inch 1 terabyte drive which is just a regular mechanical drive, but ifyou want you can swap it out down the road. the middle one is black so you can add annvme drive and the main drive you can also swap it out if you want something bigger. battery size, this one is 60 watts, but youcan also buy with 90 watts which will net you better battery life. but you will have to forgo the 2.5 inch drive. now the 60 watt battery inside of here isgiving about 4-5 hours of use and thats just doing regular everyday tasks.

if you are going to game on this thing onbattery its really not going to last that long. and this is typical for every single gaminglaptop. two slots for your ram, and you could putup to 32gb inside of here, the wifi card is swappable and of course you have two fanswith three heat pipes running across the middle. now when it comes to the display this modelhas a 60 hert panel. now to be quite honest most of the gaming60 hertz panels that i have tested this year haven’t been that great. this one is actually pretty good.

you get pretty good colour accuracy, you haverespectable brightness and overall viewing angles are fantastic. the only thing i don't like about it are thesebezels. these are probably some of the ugliest bezelsive seen on a gaming laptop this year. so thankfully the webcam is placed on thetop so you will get a proper view of your face unlike the xps where it places it onthe bottom of the display the quality is not that great and this is typical of every gaminglaptop on the market. so sound on the m15 is nothing special itis using two speakers and of course it isnt going to be as good as the bigger and thickeralienwares.

in fact, the sound was quite tidy, so if youare gaming on this for long periods of time, you are definitely going to want to hook upheadphones. keyboard, i got mixed feelings about this. i like the fact that it is full sized so youhave that numeric keypad, i do love the way the keys feel considering how shallow thetravel distance is, in fact, out of all the thinner gaming laptops that are currentlyon the market, dell did the best job with such a short travel distance. in fact, id rather game on this keyboard thanon the razer blade 15 or the msi gs65. now you are probably wondering, matt where isthe 9 key?

now during my live stream when i was takingoff the plastic on the top grill, i guess my hand or my watch or something hit the 9key and it completely came off. unfortunately i can not put it back on, itsnot your typical key where you just press it down and it pops back on. so this causes some concern. a lot of people in the comments are like ifit came off that easily then how are the keys on this keyboard going to look like 9-12 monthsdown the road. touch pad, it is glass, it is a good size,its very accurate and its using windows precision drivers.

the only thing i dont like is that some peoplewith ocd might not like it that it is right here instead of in the center and also thedeck of this keyboard is using like a rubber texture which feels great to rest your wristson but my god is this thing going to get dirty. it attracts fingerprints very easily and greaselike crazy. you are going to be wiping this down everysingle day. now before we talk about performance i hadtwo issues with this laptop. the first one, it came unactivated. i couldn’t activate windows at all. the second one was i couldn’t access theinternet.

sometimes i would be able to connect to aweb page, and if i got on to the web page i wouldn't be able to download something. it just wasn't working. someone in the comments of my live streamsaid it's a known issue. if you buy this laptop or even a lot of alienwarelaptops you have to kill the killer driver in the background in order for things to work. well he was right, i killed the killer driverunder the task manager and all of a sudden i could activate windows and i could startdownloading all the drivers that i needed to update this laptop.

now when it comes to performance this is the1060 model, this is the i78750h. so basically it has zero issues running anygames comfortably at 1080p with settings set to high or even ultra depending on the title. overwatch , blackops, fortnight all ran perfectlyon this laptop. it's definitely not one of the faster 1060sfor example, i did a render test between this and the razer blade 15 and the lenovo x1 extremeand the razer blade 15 beat this one out. and this is with the profile set to performanceand not even overclocking it at all. and the reason why i didn't overclock it isbecause i was having overheating issues. see this laptop still gets hot, it will hit90 degrees and then it will thermal throttle

and it will keep temperatures between 80-85. so its doing a good job in that regard, andits keeping the boosts all the way up. but the one main area where its getting toohot is the surface temperatures. i'm a left handed person so i play aroundthe p, l, m and o keys like those are my arrow keys and around that area which is where thecpu and gpu is i was getting temperature of 60 degrees celsius. after about 20 minutes of gaming i had tostop because my fingers were starting to hurt from the heat. now if you are right handed and using thewasd keys you have nothing to worry about

but its something to think about. down the road, 12 or two months later howis the cpu going to be in terms of longevity, is it still going to work or are you goingto have issues. when it comes to fan noise, nothing out ofthe ordinary, it does kick on, you are going to hear it when you are gaming. but it's not super loud. so here are my closing thoughts, i think thisis a great first attempt for alienware for creating a thinner and lighter laptop. i mean, the build quality of the design andthe chassis itself is exceptional.

but there are still a lot of little issuesthat irk me. but when you buy such an expensive laptopyou shouldn't have these little software issues when you power it on. it ruins the excitement and the experienceof buying a high end gaming laptop. the second thing, even though this laptopis doing a pretty good job of thermal throttling and keeping the cpu temps between 80-85 degrees,the surface temperatures are much too hot. 60 degrees celsius is unacceptable, i can'teven imagine how much hotter the 1070 runs. if you do buy this maybe wait for a couplemore software updates and see what alienware can do from their end.

so this pretty much wraps up my review ofthe alienware m15, let me know your thoughts in the comments below. is this something you would buy or would youbuy something else? like the video if you liked it, subscribeif you haven’t already, follow me on instagram for some behind the scenes and i'll see youguys in the next video.