Alienware M15 Ryzen Edition R5 Review: Brains and brawn

The M15 Ryzen Edition is a great laptop but is it worth the premium?

Alienware's name in the hardware market has been synonymous with gaming. They have made good on that association through years of iterative and innovative designs that have both brain and brawn.

The M15 Ryzen Edition R5 is meant as a showcase for AMD's R7 5800H processor, which has been paired with Nvidia's capable RTX 3060 laptop graphics and a sleek, modern design that will turn heads, so how does it perform?

Design

Despite being a gaming focused brand, Alienware doesn't go overboard with the aesthetics. The M15 feels carefully crafted in a way that fits in both at home and at work.

The chassis looks futuristic with the bold alien logo and the large '15' font on the lid. It feels really comfortable to hold too, with rounded edges all over. The M15 has a nice weight to it and looks stunning in the black version we received for review.

I also love how understated the RGB lighting is on the M15. There is a thin-strip of light surrounding the honeycomb style vents at the back, and the Alienware head logo lights up too. That's it.

You can customise the lighting on your keyboard, Alienware head and the RGB strip individually. The M15 shows a lot of restraint where other gaming brands prefer to douse their designs in multi-color hues. Both approaches have their fans, I prefer the more sleek and understated aesthetic here.

The screen is propped by a hinge, that is surrounded by extra real-estate at the back. It creates an interesting illusion of the screen being separate from the keyboard, almost like its a monitor for a desktop.

Of course, all of the top-of-the line hardware inside means its heavy to lift and hold. You are definitely going to feel this weight while carrying it around.

Another nice touch is that the smoothed and rounded edges carry over to the charging brick, that has an Alienware head logo of its own, which means there is a nice cohesion in the overall package.

As for ports, Alienware keeps it fairly simple. There is a ethernet port and a headphone jack on the left, two USB type-A ports on the right and another USB Type-A on the back, flanked by a charging port, HDMI port and USB Type-C port.

It's not the best in terms of options, but what is here is likely to cover anything you need.

Display

The 15.6-inch panel has a 1080p resolution with a refresh rate of 165Hz and a 3ms response rate. Sure, it's not the highest in terms of resolution, but this is still a very good screen.

The colors pop, the whites don't look washed out and the blacks look good. The screen accounts for 87% of DCI-P3 color gamut, which easily beats most of the competition.

It can get really bright too and the high refresh rate means everything looks really smooth in motion.

Keyboard and trackpad

The M15 has an island style keyboard that is comfortable to use, and really clicky. You can actually feel the bounciness as the springs respond to your inputs. This means it provides very nice feedback to your fingers.

If I were to nitpick, I would say the keys do feel slightly stiff at first but begin to ease out as your fingers get used to them.

Another nitpick is that you cannot customise the lighting on the keyboard in detail. You are limited to four zones - Left, Right, Center-Left and Center-Right. This wasn't a huge deal breaker for me, but if you crave per-key lighting control, you need to look elsewhere.

The trackpad looks a lot smaller than what I am used in gaming laptops but performs really well. Like the keyboard, it has a nice, clicky feedback to everything you do and all Windows 11 gestures worked well.

Also Read: Alienware M15 R6 Review: This might just be the most powerful 15-inch gaming laptop of 2021

Performance

OS: Windows 11 Home 64-bit

Display: 15.6-inch, 1080p with 165Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time.

Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with Radeon graphics (Up to 4.40GHz)

Memory: 16GB dual-channel DDR4 @ 3200 MHz

Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 laptop GPU with 6GB VRAM

Storage: 512GB, M.2, PCIe SSD

Do I really need to spell it out? This machine is a beast. It handles both productivity and gaming without breaking a sweat. There is a caveat though, the RTX 3060's 6GB of VRAM, which shows its limitations in some titles.

Doom Eternal for example wouldn't let me turn on RTX with everything set to maximum in the settings because the VRAM requirement far exceeded what the GPU has.

Generally, it manages to handle most AAA games at medium to high settings. This combined with the high refresh rates make for a smooth gaming experience.

For the titles we tried out - Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Doom Eternal, Dying Light 2 and Halo Infinite - we were able to lock in a mix of high and medium settings for smooth gameplay.

The laptop shines in productivity tasks too, with Premiere handling 4K video in real-time with barely a stutter, and day to day applications like Chrome, Meet etc. performing without any problems.

The M15 is a good showcase for Windows 11 too and handles it admirably well.

One thing I noticed is that the M15 tends to get hot beneath the chassis while under load. It's not uncomfortable but it is definitely noticeable.

Battery

Let's face it, with specifications like that, this laptop was never going to have stellar battery life. At best, with minimal to light usage, I could eek out maybe 5 hours and that number goes down significantly under load.

Despite AMD CPUs having a reputation for being battery-efficient processors, there is nothing much here the 5800H can do, especially combined with the other resource hungry hardware.

You can probably get through a work day with light usage but don't expect anything spectacular. You are going to have to keep that power brick handy.

Conclusion

At a starting price of Rs. 1,34,990 for the base model, which features Ryzen 7 5800H, RTX 3050Ti, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD storage, the M15 isn't exactly cheap.

Compared to the competing products in the price bracket, it definitely feels fair and beats out specifications from brands like Acer, MSI or Asus at a similar price point.

Overall, it's a really good product and one that we recommend.