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Alienware 15 review: Bigger, but not necessarily better
Getting your hands on a bleeding-edge gaming laptop is an exercise in chasing chip architecture. It's sort of a waiting game. You wait for Intel and NVIDIA to upgrade their GPU and CPU standards, you wait for early adopter manufacturers to put them through their paces and, finally, you wait for the machine you want to hit the market with the new bells and whistles. In spring, we saw Dell's Alienware 13 kitted out with Intel's new Kaby Lake Core i7-7700HQ CPU and NVIDIA Pascal graphics -- and now that same combo is available in the company's larger 15-inch notebook.
Alienware: VR rigs will become the new Wii thanks to laptops
Almost exactly seven years ago, Alienware joined the Tokyo Game Show for the first time to launch its redesigned machines since Dell's acquisition. This week, the American company is once again present there to launch the Alienware 17 and 15 laptops for Japan, with one of their main selling points being their VR capability, courtesy of NVIDIA GTX 10-Series graphics. While this won't change the fact that high-end VR rigs are still relatively expensive, global marketing director Joe Olmsted reckons the mobility aspect will be enough to turn VR into the new home party machine that can be shared between friends -- much like what he did with the Nintendo Wii back in the days.
Alienware will give recent laptop buyers a free upgrade
It's tough to buy a laptop when new processors are imminent -- you can't help but feel that the system you just bought will be rendered obsolete weeks later. That might not be a problem if you snagged one of Alienware's latest laptops, though. The Dell-owned PC maker is promising free upgrades if you bought one of its updated portables (those introduced on August 27th) and new processors reach the relevant Alienware line within 30 days. In other words, you're not hosed if a Skylake-based system shows up while you're still getting used to your days-old machine. The company tells us it has "high confidence" that Skylake will show up by late September, so you'll be future-proofed as long as there isn't a delay.
Dell revives the Alienware 18, upgrades its smaller gaming laptops
It's a rare, satisfying feeling when a community rallies together to ask a company to bring back a discontinued product and it actually works. Today is one of those days: Dell announced at PAX that it's bringing back the Alienware 18 -- the most powerful portable gaming machine the company's ever made. The revived 18-inch rig is being touted as a 'special edition' and will pack in a 4th Generation Intel i7 processor, up to 32GB of RAM, a 1TB HDD (with an optional 512GB SSD) dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M or 980M graphics, depending on the configuration. Too big? Too much? No worries --- Alienware is refreshing its 13-, 15- and 17-inch laptops, too.
Which gaming laptops are worth buying?
For years, the wisdom has been that if you wanted a dedicated gaming machine, you bought a desktop. Gaming components were too unwieldy to fit in a notebook form factor, and if you tried to put together a machine with desktop-caliber components, it always ended up too big and heavy to be truly portable. However, recent gaming laptops have defied that history, packing lots of power into thinner and lighter chassis. They're still not as slim as Ultrabooks, and meanwhile there's still a gap in performance versus desktop machines. Even so, your days of lugging around a large desktop tower to LAN parties are over. We've taken a look at some of the more recent entries in the race to build a smaller gaming machine to find ones that can fit your needs -- and budget.
Alienware unleashes a pair of slimmed-down gaming laptops
Last summer, Alienware unveiled a 13-inch gaming laptop. It was by far the thinnest and lightest machine the brand had put out in years -- and it was a helluva lot smaller than the Alienware 14 it replaced, too. Well, it looks like there was more where that came from: Dell just announced a slimmed-down version of its Alienware 17 notebook, along with a brand-new 15-inch system -- the first machine of this size that Alienware has offered in two years. What's more, the company is discontinuing its massive 18-inch model, confirming that as far as gaming laptops go, there really is such a thing as too big.
