Alienware 13 R3

In the last few years, Alienware has introduced some uniquely-designed desktops with the head-turning Alienware Area 51 and space-compressing Alienware Aurora R5. Now, the space age computing company introduces one of the world’s thinnest gaming laptops yet with the Alienware 13 R3. 

The 13 R3 also sports the company’s new hinge-forward design, quad-core Intel Core i7 HQ-series processors and Nvidia Pascal graphics – making it a VR-capable machine. However, this 13-inch gaming notebook’s killer feature is an OLED display that’s so vibrant, it can almost make you forget about the $1,799 or £1,749 (about AU$2,400) price you’ll have to pay for all this beauty. 

Luckily, you can also get in on the ground level with a $1,199 or £1,249 (about AU$1,600) model with a standard HD screen. 

Design

Alienware’s designs have always set its devices apart from all other gaming laptops with more lights and premium materials. This year, however, the biggest differentiator is that  hinge-forward design reminiscent of the Dell Adamo. 

To get a 21% thinner, 0.87-inch (0.22cm) thick chassis, Alienware has moved the heatsinks normally positioned beneath the keyboard to a bump that extends 1.5 inches behind the screen. Alienware also makes smart use of the extended rear for full-sized ports, including HDMI, Ethernet and the company’s proprietary Graphics Amp connector.

However, the laptop’s extended, 10.6-inch depth and boxy shape makes it hard to stuff in many 13-inch laptop bags. It wasn’t until we tried our backpacks meant for 15-inch notebooks that the Alienware 13 would actually fit. What’s more, with the laptop weighing in at 5.8 pounds (2.6kg) – nearly a pound heavier than most 15-inch notebooks – it’s one dense package.

Despite the need for bigger bags to carry around this laptop, we dig the new design. The thinner shape is accentuated by an equally sharper frame, etching away the subtle curves of the previous model. Rather than looking like an armored briefcase from space, the new design evokes a much more modern clamshell notebook.

From the side, you can see the strata of this laptop’s build transition from one solid sheet of aluminum to another with soft-touch coated magnesium sandwiched in between. 

Alienware’s older designs would normally mask these transitions with metal that curved around the edges, but we like exposed nature of it, like a Manhattan apartment with exposed brick walls and wooden rafters.

One thing we do miss about the older model is the exterior track lighting. While Alienware’s larger gaming laptops come with strips of lighting along the edges, you won’t find them here. Alienware says it came down to making the laptop thinner or flashy, and it chose the former, as it would also help prolong battery life. 

Technically speaking, though, the new Alienware 13 actually features more customizable lighting zones than ever before. 

The keyboard is now separated into four distinct zones (one more than its predecessor) while the trackpad comes with a backlight for the first time on 13-inch models. Combined with the Alienware logo on the lid, stylized power button and the glowing branding on the bottom screen bezel, users can individually program these eight areas to show off 20 distinct colors complete with lighting effects.

Reengineered to the nth degree

Alienware’s new and thinner design is evidently different from years past, but beyond the skin-deep changes, there has been plenty of reengineering on the inside. 

This year, Alienware has introduced copper elements to improve the ventilation, which you feel with most of the heat being drawn away from the keyboard and touchpad. This is also one of the few thin gaming laptops that doesn’t sound like a shop vacuum while under load.

Alienware has also introduced a steel plate to reinforce its Alienware TactX keyboard, eliminating any bit of keyboard flex. What’s even more impressive is that the keys offer 2.2mm of travel that’s even more satisfying than some mechanical keyboards we’ve used. 

Likewise, the 13 R3 is the first Alienware to feature touchpad buttons, whereas the older R2 model had a press-to-click touchpad. It’s still no replacement for a gaming mouse, we never felt like we needed to dive for one whenever we were just checking Facebook on this machine. 

Side-firing speakers are usually a disappointment, but these reengineered ones produce loud and clear sound with enough bass to make them decent for gaming. What’s more, they sit up high up enough off the base of the notebook so they’re not muffled out when you put it on your lap. 

OLED? Oh yeah

We’re not ones to be easily wowed, but our bottom jaw was on the floor upon first laying our eyes on the new Alienware 13’s OLED display. 

Colors virtually drip off the OLED panel with a richness rivaling any production monitor we’ve seen before – even the new MacBook Pro’s P3 color space-enhanced display. And, as if that wasn’t impressive enough, the Alienware 13 also produces the deepest blacks that seamlessly blend into the surrounding screen bezel.

More than a few times, we caught ourselves lingering on Windows 10’s lock screen backgrounds just to bask in the saturated color and sharp contrast. Likewise, this screen elevates the quality of everything you look at whether it be movies and pictures or the black text of this very review. 

On top of being one of the most vivid displays, the Alienware 13’s OLED screen lends itself surprisingly well to games, thanks to a one millisecond refresh rate. That’s faster than the TN panels you’ll find on most gaming laptops and monitors, with image quality that’s prettier than any IPS screen – or even the Razer Blade’s IGZO display.

Thanks to the hinge forward design, the display also sits directly above the keyboard for a more intimate typing experience. What’s more, the screen now hovers above the rest of the notebook,tethered by two hinges, allowing you it back a full 180-degrees. 

Most gamers probably won’t find any use out of this wide degree of articulation given the laptop will likely either just be sitting on a desk or hooked up to an external monitor. But, the added flexibility could come in handy if you’re using the Alienware 13 laying down or sitting on top of a cooling platform. 

The Alienware 13 R3 starts at a refreshingly affordable $1,199 or £1,249 (about AU$1,600) price, and it’s a well-equipped configuration at that. The base spec includes an 180GB solid-state drive (SSD), Intel Core i5-6300HQ processor and an Nvidia GTX 1060 with 6GB of video RAM – the same GPU available on the highest-end configuration. 

That said, with only a 1,366 x 768 resolution TN screen and 8GB of memory on tap, you’ll probably want to plug in this gaming laptop into an external monitor and add more RAM to boost your gaming experience.

The $1,499 or £1,349 (about AU$2,000) configuration comes with a more agreeable Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) resolution IPS screen, 256GB SSD and 16GB of RAM. You’ll have to pony up with $1,799 or £1,749 (about AU$2,400) to get the OLED display, but on the plus side, this also nets an Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor bump. 

Compared to the Full HD version of the $1,799 (£1,749, AU$2,599) Razer Blade, the Alienware 13 comes at a major bargain for nearly the same specs. Sure, this Alienware 13 model doesn’t include an Intel Core i7 chip, but a Core i5 HQ processor is more than sufficient, and you’ll save 300 bucks. 

Another worthy rival is the Aorus X3 Plus v6, which comes with a larger and sharper 13.9-inch QHD+ (3,200 x 1,800) resolution display, the same graphics chip plus a faster and unlocked Intel Core i7-6820HK processor. Although the X3 only comes in one $1,899 (£1,849, AU$2,799) SKU with a 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM, it’s more affordable than an equally-specced Alienware 13 that runs for $2,099 or £1,899 (about AU$2,805). 

Performance

Alienware tells us this is the first time it has put a quad-core Intel HQ-series processor into a 13-inch gaming laptop. It’s a huge improvement over the dual-core U-series processors that proved to be a performance bottleneck for older models. The two extra cores lend themselves to much faster video rendering and powering through games. 

Additionally, the onboard Nvidia GTX 1060 allowed us to enjoy perfectly smooth rounds of Overwatch with deliciously rich colors on the Alienware 13’s OLED display. Gears of War 4 and Titanfall 2 also ran beautifully on this 13-inch gaming laptop, though you’ll run into problems with running certain graphically challenging games, like Hitman.

Now that the Alienware 13 has jumped onto the quad-core CPU bandwagon, it’s an absolute powerhouse that keeps up with larger notebooks, like the Asus ROG Strix GL502 and HP Omen 17. On the processor end, this 13-inch laptop scores just as well as Asus’ 15-incher, while the HP Omen 17 and Razer Blade pull ahead with scores in the mid-13,000s. 

When it comes to gaming on Ultra settings, the Nvidia GTX 1060 inside the Alienware 13 delivers a playable experience above 30 frames per second (fps). However, it doesn’t hit 60 fps quite as well as the GL502 or Omen 17 and their Nvidia GTX 1070 GPUs. If you’re fine with taking things down a notch to high settings on the Alienware 13, you’ll get much smoother frame rates.
 

Battery life

Battery life is one performance benchmark in which the Alienware 13 falters. Alienware told us it bumped up the capacity of the batteries from 51 Watt-hours to 76 Watt-hours. However, we only saw, at best, 4 hours and 30 minutes of use through a frenzied day of Black Friday shopping. 

We saw shorter runtimes in our benchmark tests, with the Alienware 13 lasting only an hour and 45 minutes on PCMark 8’s battery test. The 13-inch gaming laptop didn’t fare much better on our movie benchmark test – looping a locally stored 1080p movie at 50% brightness and volume – calling it quits after 3 hours and 15 minutes.

Compared to its predecessor, the new Alienware 13 offers disappointingly shorter battery life. Among its peers, the last generation Aorus X3 Plus v3 performs better despite having a higher-resolution screen and more power-hungry Maxwell-series GPU. 

We liked

So far, we’ve only seen a few OLED displays make their way to the HP Spectre x360 and Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga. This is the first time an OLED screen has made its way to a gaming laptop – where it arguably fits best. The 1ms refresh rate serves up perfectly smooth gameplay all while displaying the most vibrant colors and deepest blacks we’ve ever seen on a gaming laptop.

We disliked

The new Alienware 13 might be thinner, but, thanks to that extra hump in its rear, this 13-inch gaming laptop was a tight fit for most of our bags. Another knock against this notebook’s portability is its short battery life. You won’t be able to venture far from a power plug with, at best, five hours of juice in the can.

Final verdict

The Alienware 13 is an impressive gaming laptop through and through. Thanks to the new quad-core processors and Nvidia Pascal graphics, it keeps in step with larger 15-inch and 17-inch machines. You also won’t find a gaming notebook with a screen that looks as good as this notebook’s OLED display. It produces unrivaled colors and black levels with a lag free refresh rate to keep up with the fastest shooters.

Admirably, Alienware has thoughtfully redesigned almost every element of the 13-inch gaming laptop around its new hinge-forward design. It’s hardly the first notebook to feature this design, but Alienware turned the thinner frame to its advantage for better cooling and sound. 

And, with a starting price of $1,199 or £1,249 (about AU$1,600), the entry-level Alienware 13 is a fine launching point for gamers even despite the barely HD display. Full HD gaming on this machine is competitively priced at $1,499 or £1,349 (about AU$2,000), and the OLED screen is well worth the $1,799 or £1,749 (about AU$2,400) price of admission.