Alienware 13 (2016) review: The first OLED gaming laptop has landed - farberparocce

Not long past, we got our work force along a 2-in-1 notebook with an OLED screen—the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga—and were mesmerized by its display. It's one of those technologies that once you see it with your own eyes, you can never go back to the old way of things. You get ahead that person at parties who says, "You're still using an Liquid crystal display? I accustomed have united of thosein 2015."

With the launch of Alienware's all-late 13-inch notebook computer, the Alienware 13, mechanized gamers stool like a sho last get the Revelation of Saint John the Divine that comes with gazing upon an OLED panel. Though this technology has had more or less issues coming to market, it's been trickling dead over the course of this year—and putting LCDs on notice. Once seen atomic number 3 crisp and squeaking-reticuloendothelial system, LCD panels suddenly appear pixelated, washed out, and nowhere near as vivacious when compared to OLED. The Alienware 13 was my first time experiencing an OLED empanel in person, and I ensure you information technology's stunning—to set up it softly.

Additionally to the fashionable display, which also supports touch gestures, this surprisingly small and dense notebook sports overstep-shelf hardware throughout. Its Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU makes it VR-capable (it's the best sub-14-inch notebook we've seen that is), and information technology likewise supports Alienware's Art Amplifier technology, if you decide you need many ponies under the goon in the future.

The display

The basic cover with OLED displays is that they reproduce much richer colors than LCDs, and also low, dark black, which makes an LCD's black take care Gray by comparison. Boilers suit sharpness and impregnation are as wel way beyond what I've seen on LCDs over the years. OLED panels are more vitality-efficient than LCDs, excessively, so it makes perfective sense for a notebook to be rocking one of these.

This Alienware laptop has an Organic light-emitting diode control board that runs at 2560×1440, despite being just 13.3-inches in size. If you're not in to OLED due to price, its "smooth" look, or what have you, Alienware also offers the 13 with either a 1366×768 TN operating theatre a 1920×1080 IPS panel, both LCD.

I advocate the OLED option, though. Like that line in Ferris Bueller's Day Dispatch says, "It is no choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one upward."

The chassis

Like the display, the Alienware 13's build offers something unique. As an alternative of being a bland, formative slab, the Alienware 13 is angular and has the look of distinct metallic. And contempt being still largely plastic (the lid and underbelly are entirely aluminum, though), IT feels incredibly rigid. The gross construction just seems dense, like there's non a individualistic area inside the notebook that's hollow.

This feel of density is also attributable the Alienware 13's weight down, which tilts the scales at almost 5.5 pounds. That's heavier than other 13-column inch gaming laptops by about a pound or then. But the solidity is reassuring, and even things equivalent the display flexible joint are squiffy and offer nothing flex some.

Speaking of the hinge, it's part of a redesigned chassis for this updated model that Alienware calls a "flexible joint presumptuous" design. The screen sits about an inch forward from the rear of the chassis (instead of flush, same on the previous framework), and then the laptop looks alike information technology has unity of those extra-big batteries installed. Alienware says this design choice allows it to offer more rear ports, larger fans for accrued cooling without additional haphazardness, and an improved talker system of rules.

The company too says that the redesigned chassis is "upfield to 21 percent thinner" than the previous model. In my opinion, the new look is much more smooth and a big betterment over the previous (and chunkier) model. Alienware also improved the finish on the plastic secondhand for the palm rest to prevent fingerprints and smudges, and it works beautifully.

Arsenic distant as ports go, this 13-inch laptop has virtually as umteen ports Eastern Samoa a larger system. There are two USB 3.0 Type A ports, unity Thunderbolt 3 port, a USB 3.0 Type-C port wine, gigabit ethernet, HDMI 2.0, Mini DisplayPort 1.2, audio out, a ringlet time slot, and also knucklebones for a microphone and headphone. There's also an Alienware Graphics Amplifier interface.

The laptop is also easy upgradeable, though the only components you lav really access are the memory and the SSDs. In our test system, one of the M.2 modules was empty, and the RAM was in plain sight subsequently removing the bottom eyelid.

The hardware

Course, this laptop has more than going for it than its display and human body. Under the cowling you'll find an Intel Core i7-6700HQ—a quad-core mobile part with HyperThreading, for eight logical cores. Its base frequency is 2.6GHz, but it can rise upwardly to 3.5GHz when it needs to. Happening the GPU head-on, the 13 packs a GTX 1060 mobile part, which is designed for high frame rates at 1080p with settings cranked. This version of the 1060 comes with 6GB of retention in case you want to game at the dialog box's autochthonic res of 2560×1440.

Our review model also had 16GB of DDR4 RAM running at 2,400MHz, but you can configure one with as bittie American Samoa 8GB if you'rhenium happening a budget. For storage, it ran a lone 512GB PCIe-NVME SSD from Toshiba, but you can as wel opt for dual 1TB PCIe SSDs: one for the OS and one for information. When we discharged up Arsenic SSD, the drive benchmarked about 1.4GB/s in sequential learn speeds, and 900MB/s write speeds.

Keyboard, trackpad, and speakers

The RGB lighting on the Alienware 13 deserves special mention, since it's got more features than you'd normally expect. Not lone can you select the distort of zones crossways the keys, but you rear pick the color of the trackpad, the Alienware logo below the display, and the outlander head along the eyelid of the laptop computer. All in all, IT adds finished to eight different lighting zones, which is double up what is typically offered.

The TactX keyboard is superb. Though it's not mechanical, it has a similar go off and actuation design, with "steel-reinforced" keys (whatever that agency). The bottom line is that the keys feel perfect in my notion. I typed happening this machine all solar day, and it was sublime.

The trackpad is a little nervous for my taste, but reducing its sensitivity helped a allot. More often than not, I had nary issues exploitation it. Information technology supports gestures, also, and switching from a MacBook Pro's trackpad to this Alienware's felt pretty natural.

Alienware 13 (2016) RGB keyboard backlighting shot

The loudspeaker system is surprisingly good for a laptop this diminutive. Alienware includes sound customization software for some play and multimedia, and it's quite efficacious, allowing you to customize the fit easily. I was impressed with the overall volume and the clarity among vocals, bass, and midtones. I'm not an audio snob, but I thought these speakers sounded meliorate than the reasonable systems I've heard on so much large laptops.

Performance

Okay, let's set about to the nitty-gritty. We ran this baby Alien through our usual gantlet of play and CPU tests to see how the overall system held up to torture. We don't have many a 13-column inch gambling laptops to compare it to, so the benchmark charts include results for bigger systems. Its nearest peer here is probably the 15-inch MSI GS63VR Stealth, which has the same Processor and GPU.

3DMark Fire Impinge on Extreme point

This agglutinative test is usually quite exact in helping sort GPUs by their overall ability. Since the GTX 1060 is a midrange GPU, we're using the Extreme tryout as conflicting to the more crooked Extremist test.

alienware 13 2016 3dmark fire strike extreme overall

In general, laptops perform as you'd predict in this examination, so if there are whatever irregularities with a laptop's hardware, they customary reveal themselves present. Because the benchmark focuses primarily happening GPU performance, we hoped-for the Alienware 13's GTX 1060 to cope with the public presentation of other laptops with the same GPU (most notably the MSI GS63VR). As you can see, the two notebooks were extremely close, with the MSI property a minuscule 1.5 percentage advantage, which is within the margin of error for this test.

Tomb Raider

This courageous has aged, but it can still put around strain on a GPU. Because it's an sr. game, we run it using the Ultimate preset, which used to be reticent for flagship GPUs but can now atomic number 4 run with cards like the GTX 1060.

Despite the GTX 1060's midrange position, it's still rather powerful, and was able to scarper this game connected Final at 91 frames per second. That's an amazing advance for what you can expect tabu of these little play notebooks. Non surprisingly, both GTX 1060 laptops we've tested then far offer the same level of performance, with the MSI notebook computer running at 93fps.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

We also tested the Alienware 13 with this newer, Thomas More demanding title—its 4K texture pack buttocks bolt down a GPU's onboard computer storage.

At 1080p, the Alienware 13 still ran this game at 87.3 frames per second. That's mass awesome, but, again, a act slower than the MSI GS63VR, which was 5 percent faster scorn sporting the same computer hardware. Perhaps the MSI has better cooling and allowed the GPU to reel up a bit much.

Handbrake

This real-human race encoding benchmark is a CPU test done and through, measurement how long IT takes a system's mainframe to chew through a 30GB MKV lodge and spittle out a smaller MP4 file exploitation Handbrake's Mechanical man Tablet preset. This test scales well reported to clock speeds and core counts—so the more, the best on altogether fronts. It's also a well-behaved test of a notebook computer's thermal design, atomic number 3 best cooling testament allow the CPU to run at higher clock speeds and so finish the run quicker.

The Alienware 13 took 53 minutes to complete this test, once again just a tick slower than the MSI GS63VR's 51.5 minutes. This kind of backs up our theory about the MSI having marginally better cooling, atomic number 3 we noted the Alienware 13 didn't run at its maximum time speed of 3.5GHz during this test. Information technology instead hummed on at about 3.1GHz for the duration.

Battery Life

Despite its small size, the Alienware 13 packs a hefty 76 watt-hour stamp battery. For equivalence, the Origin EON17-X, which is the sizing of a teensy sea vessel, has a 79 watt-hour battery, and the MSI GS63VR offers just 65 watt hours. We father't normally fund excessively much attention to battery life in gaming laptop reviews, but a system this size is certainly designed to be affected happening the road, so this information is Eastern Samoa alpha A any about gaming performance.

With the keyboard lights out of action, I ran our 4K video summation test, which involves performin a 4K movie file on loop until the barrage dies. The screen luminance was put away between 250 and 260 nits, which is about what you'd typeset it at in an office environs, and I left-handed audio on with earbuds plugged in.

The Alienware 13 lasted about four hours in this benchmark, which falls into that expanse betwixt "terrible" and "awesome" from a real-world position. However, it's what we look from a stamp battery of this size, in a machine with this floor of hardware. Information technology's certainly long plenty for a pic or two on a flight. You won't always have to string yourself to an wall plug, like you would with much radical-powerful gambling notebooks.

End

The Alienware 13 is one honeyed little machine. For its size, it's a bit heavy, but in exchange you get an extremely well-rounded laptop that excels in all way possible.

From its slick design to its performance, battery life, and OLED display, it's exceptional in every metric we usually examine. I'd read the only real "issue" I had with the Alienware 13 is that it arse puzzle a bit hot when gaming—adequate heat billows out of the bod that you can smel it along the keyboard. It's non too bad, since most of the heat generates at the top of the laptop, near the display's flexible joint, and the palm rest never gets warm. But you can feel some warmth on the keys after about 30 minutes of functional it under lading.

Also, just for sport, I ran few tests at the panel's 2560×1440 endemic resolution. If you thought the GTX 1060 was strictly made for 1080p play, think again. The 13 ran Rise of the Tomb Raider on the highest setting at 42fps, and Shadow of Mordor at 60fps on Ultra.

That's amazing for a 5-pound notebook, and though you'll wishing a set of headphones to obturate the fan noise, this notebook is an extremely competent motorized combat station. At $2,099, it's expensive, just we'd rather experience this than 1 of the monstrosities that usually populate this merchandise category. We have zero against ultimate firepower, obviously, but we really like the 13's Libra the Balance of top executive, gaming prowess, and portability. That's a difficult balance wheel to achieve, but Alienware has bang the nail on the head this metre just about.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/410833/alienware-13-2016-review-the-first-oled-gaming-laptop-has-landed.html

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