*OFFICIAL* Alienware m15 Owner's Lounge

exactly ! that's why no AW anymo for me. it's just so unattractive compared to the competition. And now they're making their laptops slimmer sacrificing performance. i won't pay 3/4k for a brand new overheating laptop anymore, these things have start to become portable 2 pit electric ovens which also can be used for gaming... and other media consumption (if you put some aluminium foil on top of the keyboard, i bet you'll be able to BBQ on it.. )

 

It is copycat of Legion Y740 and it could be a heavy smoker if the heatsink is same as of 1st gen m15 with 200C-500C as throttling point.

 

Will you take a break with this Lenovo cr..p? 57Whr battery.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenov...0H-RTX-2070-Max-Q-Laptop-Review.413926.0.html

 

@etern4l I think you're being very polite to Dell. I think the future of AW brand is meek and will be merged with XPS.

 

Why do you think that? Has anyone at Dell suggested that? What did @Ultra Male tell you about trolling?

 

You know brother, i'm glad you brought that up cause i've been claiming that since the m15 came out ! it made me think about this:


and now what they did was just downscale the 51m chassis to the m17, and m15. i won't be surprised in a few years the 51m dissapears (when sales start to go down again probably) of the charts, and the m17 becomes the flagship again so they can push more soldered parts. It's like handing someone a coat for the rain, while taking all their clothes away. Why ?! why ??!! whhyy ???!!!

Azor is bluffing like Hell just to keep people swiping them creditcards on the Dell order page, but transparency?? oh hell to the naww.. he rather let your house burn down that intervene and own up their mistakes.
But hey, as long as mainstream users keeps buying them, they'll continue their practices and continue to lock down the systems more and more. I bet the GT76 outperforms the 51m by a wide margin, only due to the bios alone not even hardware. The 51m still hasn't even broken Prema modded Clevo's so i don't think it ever will.

 

Looks like my laptop will have to last a couple more years now

 

Anyway, not my problem, but if I was in a market for a new laptop portable gaming laptop I would grab the current m15 before they start rolling out that new cr..

 

Exactly lol

 

I like the styling of the new models, but hate that they soldered the ram, thats Asus zephyrus bad design decisions. Soldering the CPU and GPU I can understand, MXM boards are just too problematic and costly still, CPU's often cannot be upgraded when a new generation with a new socket is released. But memory something a bit more fragile it seems when it comes to batches and you cant exchange them now. Also dont get why they use those hideous glossy bezels. THey scratch too easily even with microfiber cloths and detract attention from the screen because everything is reflected.

How is this a copy of the legion? The legion is a copy of the original Alienware 15R3/17R4 with the hinge forward design. Even the port placements are taken from those alienwares.

 

I can see the styling may appeal to some, but overall it's clear something has been terribly wrong with Alienware lately. They killed off the successful AW15/AW17, focused on the A51m pseudodesktop (that's fine I guess, if they did it right), delivered the sub-par m15 (crippled in cooling and battery life departments), and now they are trying to make it look like their failed pseudo-desktop.

 

The AW15/AW17 were for the current market too heavy I think without any extra benefits. I have both the AW15R3 and Razer Blade 15 2019 2070MQ. Even though I liked the AW15R3 a lot, its quick, it doesnt throttle, it runs cool etc, it is still 3.5kg heavy. Imo just on the limit of what I would carry. The RB2019 is 2.1kg which is so much more portable, but it cools well enough and is a bit quicker in a much smaller package. No person would choose the big AW15 with updated specs over that. So they had to adapt. The problem with the M15 is mainly as far as I know that the laptop feet are not high enough, so it chockes the fans. The AW15R3 had the same issue. Temps go down a 5 to 10c when it is on a laptop stand.

 

Straight up murdered the 13

 

The AW15 was fine. They could have slimmed them down a tiny bit, but def should have kept the large battery and just focus on improving cooling. Frankly if someone who doesn't suffer from a disability can't carry an AW15 in a backpack, they need to start hitting the gym a bit, or see a physician.

The crippled m15 still beats the 2019 Blade IMHO. Yes, the Blade is a bit smaller and has slightly better thermals out of the box, but it can't be repasted. It also has the weaker 80W GPUs, only one M.2 slot, no AGA option, and no 3 BD on-site service.

 

Kinda condescending isnt it how you put it? I carried the AW15R3 in a backpack day in day out to the office for about 14 months and ofcourse it is doable, but it is by no means convenient, also the footprint is kinda difficult, so you had to buy 17inch laptop backpacks which looked like Ninja turtle back shells. Also to find a cabin suitcase that could house it for in an airplane was difficult (the 17 you couldnt even bring in a cabin case because of its size). It was a nice laptop but just on the edge of usable as a daily driver and still a tad heavy. Just doesnt feel good in your backpack in 35c weather during summer, made your back all sweaty and sticky. Kinda disgusting tbh.

And why cant you repaste the Blade 15? It is one of the easier laptop to do, the benefits are smaller though because they already use decent paste. Yeah you can only have 1 M2 drive, the GPU can be boosted to 90watt if you select GPU boost in Synapse 3, service is indeed a factor. But I got it insured myself. My point is, the Blade 15 is just a far more convenient package to carry with you daily and doesnt have major downsides, or the AW15 better upsides to warrant its 1.4kg extra weight in my opinion.

The M15 would be better if the feet where just double as high so it could breath normally, if it wouldnt have that crappy looking glossy bezel etc. Apart from that it is a solid laptop, which does need a repaste though. I considered getting it over the blade because the extra M2 slot, but they only sold the 144hz version in red and through Dell and needed a laptop ASAP, not in 2 to 3 weeks.

Dont get me wrong, I liked my AW15 R3 a lot, it is a solid laptop,but it form factor is slightly outdated and can be heavily improved upon. The battery life is great but that counteracts the weight a lot.

 

I never knew it was called Hinge forward mechanism since AW internally said it was Kardashian's baby or whatever.

 

As far as I knwo they called it like that in some of their podcasts, but another Dell laptop in the past had it too, forgot which one though. I do like that Lenovo makes the pricing of their legion laptops very accessible.

 

My bad with the Blade repaste comment, I've read somewhere that the vapour chamber heatsink causes difficulties.

I've carried the AW15 around daily, never considered the weight an issue, apart from a couple mountain hikes when the backpack also contained the PSU, a DSLR and a bunch of other stuff.

All that said, I doubt anyone could notice any difference between the blade and the m15 in a backpack. What is the 90W boost about? Is it time-limited?

With the latest BIOS my 2070 takes 90-100W under load resulting in TimeSpy score of 7580. For the equivalent Razer I see this result overclocked:

https://www.reddit.com/r/razer/comments/aly8ky/blade_15_rtx_2070_maxq_benchmark_results/

So at the end of the day the m15 is almost 10% faster on equivalent hardware type, within practically the same form factor, unless you want to argue about grams and mm (plus the single M.2 deal breaker and no expedient and convenient support).

Oh yes, and the laptop benefits from a pad - there are tiny portable ones for use on the go so it's a non issue. Would bet the Blade benefits from one too.

To be fair, I did have to wait 2 weeks for stupid build and shipping from China, and the laptop arrived DOA. It was quickly fixed onsite though.

No worries though @rinneh, the way things have been going at Alienware, we'll all be packing Razers in 3 years' time lol.

 

Maybe.. but I try to help fellow AW users too.
What I said was judging from the trends of AW products for the past 5 years. Drivers and Software issues aside, the hardware they put out has issues from overheating out the box, 800MHz CPU clocks bug, DC Cable burn-ins etc...
Dell is one of the smartest company and have lot of best people working with them. Dell, EMC2,VMware and their subsidiaries can come together to create one of the best HW/SW platform that can leverage newer techs into their consumer/enterprise products and make them simply unique from the competition. But, they churn out the same thing.
I remember when I was a newbie at NBR, I couldn't figure why my PC is slow eventhough it has 16GB RAM, NVMe SSD, Best processor etc... I didn't know anything about throttling and other crap too. But, the more time I spent here I learnt many things that you're on your when it comes fixing your PC for the way it was meant to be.

 

But sadly India doesn't have Legion y740 only y540 is available.

 

The pseudo-reviewer is a bought and paid for muppet. Thermal throttling and heat are no joke with these machines, you moron. These honeycomb grills look like they would have less throughput. Soldered RAM means they can finally charge an arm and a leg for their subpar RAM upfront, no upgrades. Ram fail=Mobo replacement. Keeps talking about the 5.2GHz Thermal Velocity Boost under 50C gimmick.

OK, this is too much - time to sub to Razer forums or something.

 

That sucks, and importing would be I expect too expensive right?

 

The Dell support is indeed a plus, very expensive in Europe though, i hate how much it nowadays cost to get just a year extram . Something that shouldnt be bought automatically. I wish manufacturers made their stuff more reliable. Same goes for Razer, I insured it because I am worried something goes wrong over time.

From what I can see with the blade the power usage goes up to 90watt with GPU boost enabled which just boosts the power limit. The CPU is always limited at I think 45watt unless you turn CPU boost on but that disabled GPU boost automatically. Its not time limited, just thermal limited. But the fanspeeds are very conservative out of the box. I mean they rather let the CPU touch 90c and the GPU 80c with low fan noise than just boost the fans up to 5000rpm which still isnt too loud but brings the temps down a solid 5 to 10c. The single m2 slot is a thing yeah, but I do prefer this chassis over the m15. The m15 would be my thing with non glossy bezels and higher laptop feet. I think it is ridiculous that users always have to prop up the back. The AW15R3 was more of a desktop replacement for me with the 3ssd bays and one 2.5inch bay. Still using that one for music production.

 

I'm not surprised they've redone the chassis given the thermal performance of the old one didn't really align with users' expectations but I am amazed it has happened so quickly!

The soldered on RAM is a bit meh IMHO but at the time I ordered my 2018 'Classic Collector's edition m15 r0.8 ' it was cheaper for me to just buy it fully populated to 32GB than to down spec and swap out the RAM. So I imagine I'll never change the memory anyway in this machine's lifetime. Soldering storage as other fruity companies do is one step too far for me - I have had that fail, and it's really easy to outgrow.

I'm not sure I understand the anger in some of the other posts though - the beauty of capitalism is you have other choices, so just vote with your wallet and m15 r3 will follow the money...

 

First of all, the standard warranty, in the UK at least, is premium support with onsite. That's already a huge improvement over Razer. Extended warranty can be thought of as expensive if someone is on a shoestring budget (it's around £250/year in the UK), but you get actual service an excellent SLA, unlike what an insurance policy might offer (sure, it's good to be refunded eventually, after the machine has been a month in a repair shop).

That's a severe limitation, hopefully Dell won't copy this and other unhelpful ideas from other manufacturers, alas - as we can see with the soldered RAM - all bets are off these days.

That's very bad, particularly from the component and battery health perspectives (Li-ion batteries prefer the temps to be in the 20Cs). I prefer the m15 Balanced mode which keeps the temps down even on idle, although I do think it should be even more aggressive under load. The m15 Performance fan profile is not that useful in practice unless I know I'll be loading the system to the max for extended periods of time. It's not really needed in games given that my CPU runs 60-80C and GPU at 65C in balanced mode during gaming. The laptop is barely warm to the touch near the top, cool elsewhere.

Agree with the glossy bezels are not ideal, but they've been a non-issue in practice for me - the only problematic scenario would be direct sunlight in which case the laptop wouldn't be usable anyway. Please stop with the feet, it's ridiculous you have to resort to raising that point. My m15 runs fine without any cooling pad or raising the back, it's just that I like to keep it as cool as possible for obvious reasons.

 

What have they redone though? Chasis dimensions are the same. As far I can see the new grilles are smaller are have less throughput than the old ones. Heatsink looks the same. All I've heard so far is marketing BS and news of bad design decisions (I don't like the new design either).

I believe that the current m15 is currently the best laptop in its class, with not much in terms of viable competition, so I'm sorry to see it getting butchered and infected by fruitosis. My wallet vote is only good if I can actually buy a better product with it.

 

A good video on fruitosis abnormalis, the pursuit of sexy syndrome, sticking 8 cores into a CPU based on the same technology and with the same TDP, or the "4.8GHz" speed claims:

 

Are your temps with or without tweaks because all out of the box m15's that I encountered are running very hot. The TDP limit in place prevents it from downthrottling ofcourse but it also prevents it from going up when you repaste it with liquid metal or something like that.

Also the raising the back is an issue with the past 3 generations so, no I wont drop that subject. Reviewers, users etc and my own experiences all shown choking of the fans because of the too shallow feet on the laptop. Maybe your ambient temps are cool enough that it isnt an issue. But when I am in a 25c warm office I could see my temps rise 10c with the AW15R3 and tests shown that the M15 still has this problem.

I am not here to pick a battle which laptop is better or which brand, especially I have both brands of laptops in my possession and in use. But the M15 isn't criticized so much if there wasnt a reason for it. Just as the Blade 15 was in 2018 with their really bad display cables which killed the webcams over time.

 

Of course with tweaks, but I don't recall hitting 90C on the CPU in games either. Who cares about out of the box performance. Out of the box I was using old Bios, old drivers and old Windows. Irrelevant in practice. Out of the box reviews don't exactly praise the Blade for its amazing temps and performance. Speaking of performance, what's Time Spy score does your Blade manage with all the tweaks in?

The feet thing is just such nonsense. Are you telling me that the Blade shows no temp improvement with raised back or a cooling pad? Quite hard to believe. How tall are Blade's feet?

 

I havent isntalled timespy on my unit yet. Only have BF5, Destiny 2, Division 2 and some other single player games running on it and compared the temps and speeds that it can hold vs the Triton 500 which I owned for 2 weeks prior until I saw the temps creeping up from a bad paste job. The blade shows a mild temperature increase but not that big. The feed are about 4mm high. the AW15R3 that I own are the feet about 2mm on the back and 1.25mm on the front of the back feet (They are wedge shaped)...which is really poor, temps can differ during the warmer days for a solid 10c when raising the back.

Balanced mode limits the CPU TDP on the AW M15 too right?

 

Hmm, I've seen you posting about your Blade weeks ago and you still haven't installed a standard DX12 benchmark? It's a small free download from steam, takes a few minutes. If you're too busy we can just rely on that result from reddit - 6900 OCed...

No, balanced mode doesn't limit TDP.

Back to this feet thing - on my m15 they are about 3-4mm. I actually went ahead and verified this short feet calamity theory of yours by running SotTR benchmark in 4K on max settings.

Directly on the table - max GPU temp 71



Obviously, very reasonable temps right off the bat.

On a pad, fans off - max GPU temp 66



So, max package temp is about 6C lower, average temp is just 2C lower.

On a pad, fans on - max GPU temp 62



A further reasonable improvent in CPU temps - 3C max, 6C avg.

In summary, temps are fine to begin with, raising the back helps a little, as do the fans which is always good.

Feet height are about the same as on the Razer, which is not to say they could possibly be a bit taller. If the argument is that the cooling solution could be stronger then I couldn't agree more.
Kill the fruitosis, go back to the roots, make the laptop larger, make the fans more powerful or add more fans. Make it run cool our of the box, just don't follow Apple and their copycats who are in business of ripping off the technically illiterate.

When I think "fruitosis" in the gaming laptops space, Razer is the first thing that comes to mind (small Apple-like chasis for one thing), and couldn't agree more with Linus above on how bad that syndrome is for us consumers. Now Dellienware seems to be joining the ranks.

 

9c temp difference on the GPU is quite sustantial dont you think? Not that the temps in your case are bad without the back lifted. Quite the improvement on the AW15R3/R4 though because the feet are really tiny there. But out of the box the temps are quite bad. I think we should not expect that every user can do a repaste. What paste do you use by the way?

But yeah timespy isnt really a thing I tent to run. Timespy doesnt thermal stress the CPU and GPU at the same time enough in my opinion so I directly tested with the Division 2 and Battlefield 5 and that for a couple of hours. Most laptops run well the first 30 minutes. Its the hours in a row that trashes thermals in my experience.

 

I don't like double-post, but this m15 R2 gem deserves it:

" Outstanding battery life: A Lithium Ion 76WHr battery delivers longer uninterrupted gameplay."

Hahaha. It's sad actually. I don't know what that is actually? It's worse than fruitosis, if there is one thing macs are decent at, it's battery life.

 

I love the new keyboard

 

Doesn't look like that much of an improvement, and doesn't have the numpad anymore. Pales in comparison with the one on the AW15.

 

It is called 3dmark lol, not dx12 benchmarks if you meant free version timespy and firestrike, and firestrike is not dx12, but dx11.
About power limit, i saw ownanddisown m15 review, it is some cpu tdp to 25 watt similiar with blade, correct me if im wrong though, or maybe there's some bios or ec setting change by an update. You can check on cpu power on hwinfo64 when gaming in balanced mode.
Is that SoTR gaming temperature, without clock frequncy limitation, turbo boost on? It's great if it's, what fps do you get on benchmark?

 

Who cares numpad, that thing is a lot sexier than m15 imo, this's the point of thin light laptops, cool to bringing around.

I love overall looks, always wanted mini 51m, now waiting the review.

 

I don't think you understood what I wrote earlier. Yes, TimeSpy is a DX12 benchmark, I haven't mentioned FireStrike - I tend not to use is because it's DX11 and stresses the system less (as evidenced by lower temps).

Really, you saw that it some old review? Well, maybe there was a limit at some point. I've had the laptop since April and there is no lower TDP limit in balanced mode - it's 45/90W, I know how to check it.
TurboBoost is on, clocks are 3.9GHz almost constantly. FPS depend on settings. With DLSS on and everything maxed out (beyond just Ultra) at 4K I get 27-28fps in the benchmark, the gameplay feels smooth - no issues. Let me benchmark on just Ultra instead.

Update: 43fps on "highest". It seems to frame limit rendering to 60fps in many places though, even though I disabled VSYNC. Sigh.

 

That maybe the point for you - don't worry, you will grow out of it, but for people who actually need to use the machine on the go, battery life is important and Dell just butchered that.

 

I see, this is gaming laptop i personaly don't care about the battery life there's ac adapter for it, for productivity works etc i bring ultrabook and maybe powerbank to charge if i go to jungle lol, 7 8 hours ultrabook battery is more than enough. With current thin light gaming laptop with some tweak i could get also that battery life, but to me it is pointless limiting and reducing this and that from a gaming laptop.

 

Why not get the A51m instead then?

I actually need to be able to use the GPU on the go, so an Ultrabook is out - also people buy these to game on the go. Good idea with using a powerbank though. Last time I checked a while back they were too small to be worth a bother, but now I actually found a 41Whr unit on Amazon - nice, thanks.

 

So if you want gaming stick with AC adapter, believe me, and lucky us doesn't have to bring huge 600 watt power brick or two ac adapter. Oh i don't think alienware will adopt usb c charging like some zephyrus gaming laptops at least for this model, only xps can do that, so forget that powerbank, correct me if i'm wrong though.

 

This is what I meant:

Litionite Hurakan 120W / 41600mAh Aluminium Portable Power Generator - 1x AC Outlet - 3x USB (1x Quick Charge 3.0) - LED Torch - Emergency External Battery for Smartphone/Tablet/Laptop/Drone/Camera/PC https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B076DFXLWX/

AFAIR Dell used to sell something like this a while back, but the capacity was around 20WHr so not very helpful. Apparently, this thing is actually 154Whr. There is also a 222Whr model. Of course, one would have to lug the AC adapter in addition to the 1.8kg power bank, so I'd rather Dell supplied a sufficiently large battery to begin with (instead they've been dumbing the battery down on the 15" models) - but looks like a viable solution for extending the battery on longer trips or when more intensive workload is expected.

 

I think we'll have to wait for some benchmarks and a tear down before we know whether the cooling is improved - the PCWorld video seemed to say they'd only allowed 45W for the CPU but who knows if that's accurate.

Azor's video claims that there's one SODIMM slot as well as the soldered down memory (about 2:35 in) so perhaps it is a form factor thing.

The styling is a bit Marmite IMHO but then again I suppose that's par for the course with gaming laptops.

But none of this really matters to me as long as my 2018 model soldiers on for at least another 4 years - at this rate it will be on r7 by the time I'm thinking of upgrading and perhaps we'll all be moaning about the AMD CPU and GPU they chose

 

Yeah, let's take those SODIMMs away... one at a time... hehe hahaha.



Even if one SODIMM is graciously provided, any upgrade will be limited by the parameters of the soldered RAM, which will likely be the same cheap RAM Dells has been providing historically, e.g. my m15 came with CL17 or CL18 memory (HyperX Impact is CL14).

Form factor is the same, isn't it, plus it has a much smaller battery!!!

True, we are unaffected for now, however, it's sad to see this arguably industry leading brand going off in a generally bad direction. Soldered RAM aside, surely the confusion of bearings for Dell must be caused by Apple and their thus far primary copycat in the gaming laptop arena: Razer, with their tiny macbook like chassis designs resulting in their laptops performing 10% slower than the rest of the pack with similar hardware.

It's truly becoming a race to the Apple bottom (line).

In case someone missed it, that Linus video again to remind ourselves what the future is increasingly likely going to look like:

 

Can't wait for June 11th! this will be my new travel work system, 51m will be home float around unit.

 

All the 5.2GHz of power to you my friend, and "you can even do some RAM upgrades" lol

 

Ye its not like I keep a system long enough to upgrade anyway, about 1 year and I am ready for something else.

 

Well, I upgraded my m15 straight away with faster RAM, which sadly won't be possible in this "improved" even more fruity variant.

 

You can use the Win 10 feedback system to let MS know that this is happening. If it is a windows power setting and not something in the m15 firmware, then they'll be able to address it and fix.