Alienware m16 review: Is Alienware's first step into the 16-inch club worth buying?

(Image: Dell/Alienware)

The m16 marks Alienware's first foray into the 16-inch gaming laptop segment. It's a powerful machine with a familiar design and top of the line internals if you want to configure it that way. With a starting model featuring a Core-i7 13650HX and an RTX 4050, it's unsurprisingly pricy but does it make up for it with performance?

Design

When it comes to aesthetics, the m16 shares a lot in common with the m15 and its revisions over the past few years. When we reviewed it, we thought it looked "futuristic," but done in a way that is sleek enough to fit at both home and work.

The same holds true for the design of the m16 – it’s a little larger and a bit heavier, but the base design aesthetic is the same. It's still every bit as sleek as before, with a quality that screams at you when you pick it up for the first time. It's girthy but it's not afraid to bask in that fact. The little changes start with a new anodized aluminum coating, instead of the soft touch aluminum coating on the m15.

Elsewhere, the honeycomb patterned vents above the keyboard look pretty much the same as the m15, and the overall aesthetic is quite minimalist, even with the copious amounts of RGB customization and lighting on offer.
Alienware has included a full assortment of ports with two USB Type-C ports, one USB Type-A port, one HDMI 2.1 output, Mini DisplayPort 1.4, a headset jack, ethernet and USB 3.2 ports. That's quite an extensive selection.

The keyboard is the same solid piece of kit that is on other m-series variants. The keys are nice and large, with enough spacing between them, so they don't feel cramped. It's also surprisingly quiet, it doesn't have the "clicky-ness" that some might value but makes up for it by offering a soft touch, almost silent experience.

On the other hand, the trackpad is nice and clicky but feels small and cramped, unlike the keyboard. It functions great, but I do wish it was a little bigger and had more space.

(Image: Dell/Alienware)

Display

The 16-inch, 2560 x 1600 resolution, 240Hz IPS panel pretty much excels as an entertainment interface. It has great colours, sharp detail, good viewing angles and overall, is just a joy to experience.

If there was one nitpick thought, it would be that it didn't seem to get too bright. It was bright enough to be legible but not remarkable. Ghosting or motion blur, on the other hand, was minimal. Dell also includes a 1080p webcam on top of the display.

The stereo speakers get nice and loud, and overall this is a nice aesthetic package. But enough about the looks – how does it perform?

Performance

Our review unit was the top-of-the-line, 13th Gen Intel Core i9-13900HX unit, with Nvidia's RTX 4080 mobile GPU and 32GB of DDR5 RAM.
As you would expect, games were barely an inconvenience for this machine.

Cyberpunk 2077, FarCry 6, Alan Wake 2, and pretty much any demanding game you can think of. While gaming, the laptop tends to stay warm but not hot. It does get pretty loud though, the overzealous fans kick in almost instantly where you start a new game session.

Luckily, you can adjust this in the Alienware command centre, and in my experience, there was little difference between balanced, quiet and performance – all three modes seemed to perform roughly the same, minus a few frames here and there. I pretty much just left it at balanced and called it a day.

As for the temperatures, I noticed a lot of high spikes in CPU temperatures, even when doing normal office work such as editing or writing documents. Occasionally, the fan would spin up for no reason even when I wasn't doing anything too strenuous on the system. It's a mild annoyance, but I didn't really see any major problems because of this.

The temperatures seemed a bit high, even when doing normal stuff like streaming or watching YouTube videos. You probably aren't going to use this on your lap, given the weight, but it does get noticeably warm around the keyboard and honeycomb vent area.

The battery life, as expected, tops out at about three or four hours while streaming or doing normal tasks around the desktop. This number drops significantly when you are gaming, so you are not going to be using this beast without a charger. This is par for gaming laptops though, and the m16 doesn't change the status quo here.

(Image: Dell/Alienware)

Conclusion

Starting at Rs 1,82,990 for the base Core-i7 13650HX and RTX 4050 model with 16GB of RAM, the m16, as is Alienware tradition, is quite pricey. The model we reviewed retails for Rs 3,17,990.

For that price, and considering you are looking for a gaming platform anyway, you should be better off just building yourself a PC. But if you want the flexibility and portability that a gaming laptop can provide, the m16 does make an enticing proposition.