Alienware X15 R1 VR Ready Gaming Laptop - 15.6 Inch 360Hz FHD 1080P Display, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, Intel Core i7-11800H (11th Gen), 16GB DDR4 RAM,

Finding an affordable gaming laptop can be a tall task, as the high-end models may be out of reach for casual gamers looking to save money. Dell offers a great solution with its G15 series. While it doesn't have the spectacle and fireworks of its more expensive contemporaries, the G15 provides a solid alternative for gamers on a budget.Out of the box, the G15 5525 is a thing of beauty. The body showcases several points of articulation, from its speckled light gray color and its textured outer shell, to its bright red back-lit keyboard and the cross-hatch speaker pattern inside. It is weighty but not too heavy - probably on the top end of portability but still functional. The screen brightness is acceptable with decent viewing angles, good contrast ratio, and it ... MoreFinding an affordable gaming laptop can be a tall task, as the high-end models may be out of reach for casual gamers looking to save money. Dell offers a great solution with its G15 series. While it doesn't have the spectacle and fireworks of its more expensive contemporaries, the G15 provides a solid alternative for gamers on a budget.Out of the box, the G15 5525 is a thing of beauty. The body showcases several points of articulation, from its speckled light gray color and its textured outer shell, to its bright red back-lit keyboard and the cross-hatch speaker pattern inside. It is weighty but not too heavy - probably on the top end of portability but still functional. The screen brightness is acceptable with decent viewing angles, good contrast ratio, and it folds out to around 120 degrees.Performance on the G15 5525 series will vary depending on what you're doing and the games you want to run. The G15 5525 comes with Windows 11 Home, and setup takes only minutes. Browsing the web is fast and the Windows dashboard is smooth. Battery life is pretty decent as well. While it is capable of handling most games, the system comes with only 8GB of memory out of the box which is just low by today's standards. However, fiddling around with the power plan and graphics settings for a few minutes will do you a lot of good and save you some headaches as this laptop has plenty of juice to get your game on. Aside from a lot of the bloat-ware preloaded into this machine, it is a great device.Overall, the G15 5525 is an affordable alternative to some of the high-end laptops out there. It is a great option for students or on-the-go workers who want some casual gaming access on a decent machine. While not the most powerful device, it's a beauty of a laptop that's not just eye candy.

Performs pretty much as desired with the build I have: RTX 3080, Ryzen 9 6800, 32GB RAM. I've been testing this out with Cyberpunk 2077 with all settings turned up (except aggressive ray tracing). It does chug a little bit when first loading up a map or another heavy graphical area. Chugging does even out after the initial load though. Dolby Atmos does actually make these speakers shine, and the sound quality is quite good. I'm honestly rather impressed with that! Coming from an MSI GS66 Stealth, this machine does perform pretty well. The LEDs that light your power button, lid Alienware logo, keyboard, and the ring around the ports on the back, are pretty customizable and cool.The cons are mostly personal nitpicks or firmware oddities.Keyboard: I don't love the ... MorePerforms pretty much as desired with the build I have: RTX 3080, Ryzen 9 6800, 32GB RAM. I've been testing this out with Cyberpunk 2077 with all settings turned up (except aggressive ray tracing). It does chug a little bit when first loading up a map or another heavy graphical area. Chugging does even out after the initial load though. Dolby Atmos does actually make these speakers shine, and the sound quality is quite good. I'm honestly rather impressed with that! Coming from an MSI GS66 Stealth, this machine does perform pretty well. The LEDs that light your power button, lid Alienware logo, keyboard, and the ring around the ports on the back, are pretty customizable and cool.The cons are mostly personal nitpicks or firmware oddities.Keyboard: I don't love the feel of these keys as much (I just have the basic keys, not the mechanical switches). I preferred the scissor switches used in the MSI GS66 Stealth. They have a shorter travel distance and feel like they need a lot less force to actuate, despite not being mechanical. Not ALL parts of your keycaps will light up. eg. the numerals in the number row light up with shine-through characters, but their shift-key characters DO NOT, so if you don't have those memorized and need to type one of those characters in dim lighting, you'll need to turn on some lights. Same thing with the Function keys, the Fkeys are lit up, but their laptop Fn functions don't.Firmware: Sometimes, on startup from a full shutdown, my own LED lighting profiles don't take, and will fall back to the default blue lighting scheme. I'm still not sure why it does this on some start-ups. I've also had issues where screen brightness starts up TOO bright, and then when I go to adjust the brightness, the visual meter pops up and appears to be adjusting in value, but don't actually change my screen brightness at all.Sleep mode is also a bit of an odd one, though it's not uncommon for laptops to experience sleep issues (see LTT's video on laptop sleep mode and why it's been an issue lately). This laptop has the tendency to suddenly fire up its fans for a split second while it's in sleep mode, and it will do this in regular intervals, so I tend to have to fully shut it down if I don't want it waking me up.

This entry level gaming laptop game packaged well and comes with a big 180w charger brick. The connector on the charger is the same barrel plug that has been on most Dell Laptops for at least the last decade and a half. But if you plug in an older/lower wattage dell charger with the same plug, and try to power on this laptop, it will quickly remind you that that 80 or 90w charger isn't going to do the trick long term.The hardware is from 2022 releases, with the newest Ryzen 5 CPU generation, and DDR5 for the system memory. I can't tell, but I assume the drive is PCIE Gen4 (latest) speed, and the graphics card memory is listed as DDR6.This laptop is Chunky with a Captial C, and heavy. This is not a form factor you might be used for the notebook that's also a ... MoreThis entry level gaming laptop game packaged well and comes with a big 180w charger brick. The connector on the charger is the same barrel plug that has been on most Dell Laptops for at least the last decade and a half. But if you plug in an older/lower wattage dell charger with the same plug, and try to power on this laptop, it will quickly remind you that that 80 or 90w charger isn't going to do the trick long term.The hardware is from 2022 releases, with the newest Ryzen 5 CPU generation, and DDR5 for the system memory. I can't tell, but I assume the drive is PCIE Gen4 (latest) speed, and the graphics card memory is listed as DDR6.This laptop is Chunky with a Captial C, and heavy. This is not a form factor you might be used for the notebook that's also a gaming laptop, i.e. thin, light, powerful, and very very hot when gaming. This is more like the standard gaming laptop case from 5 or so years ago. The speckling on the off-white plastic caught me off guard, but now it's growing on me, I kind of like it. Reminds me of cookies and cream. The screen is nice, 1080p, capable of fast refresh, not overly bright, but gets the job done. The hinge on the screen comes in a little on each side, be careful not to get something stuck in there when closing the laptop.Now for the guts. I took the back off and added an 8gb DDR5 stick in to the open memory slot on the laptop. 16gb of ram works a lot better for many of the tasks a gaming laptop will be tasked to do. 8gb is the absolute minimum and consider upgrading to 16gb as the first (and cheapest) thing to do if you think you need more oomph out of this laptop. When having the back off, you will notice that there is only a place for ONE SSD drive slot, which is of course taken by the mini 512GB drive that this laptop comes with. Again, 512GB is the bare minimum for a gaming laptop, I really think they should have gone with a 1TB drive to start. Because you can't just add a second drive in here, it's much more of a process to move to a bigger drive than just adding a 2nd memory stick like I did.The sound is pretty good for a laptop, but I usually wear over the ear cans when using my laptops, there is a headset jack for the wired versions, and a USB-C connector for the all-purpose wireless headsets. Bluetooth is also an option. The wireless Wi-Fi card is AX, so plenty of speed if you got the router for it.Speaking of the USB-C connector, it is on the back with the HDMI port, the charger plug port, and one USB-A standard connector. So, if minimalist look is your goal, you can pretty much hide all your important connections behind the laptop.As far as gaming, this is entry level with an entry level graphics card, the 3050, with a definitely entry level amount of graphics ram at 4GB. It did well on Forza Horizon 5 at medium settings at native 1080p resolution looking good, kept the frames per second from dropping too low. The "G" button (press Function Key and F9) on the keyboard will boost the fans to the max to help out on intensive use. It will get fairly hot when going full tilt, but not as much as say a notebook style gaming laptop. You should be able to play older games with most of the bells and whistles set on high.I recommend this laptop for entry gaming, but would recommend adding 8GB of ram to make it perform a bit better all around.