Dell Alienware M17 R2 vs R3: Would You Need Upgrade to New One?

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This is the comparison of Dell Alienware M17 R2 and Alienware M17 R3 gaming laptops. Both the laptops perform really well but which one is great overall in all the things is what we see in this comparison review.

BUY NOW	BUY NOW
Dell Alienware M17 R2	Dell Alienware M17 R3
PROS	PROS
Solid performance. Above-average battery life. Stunning design.	Beautiful design and great build quality. Solid performance across the board. Nice features and components.
CONS	CONS
Expensive.	Tragic battery life. Gaming power can’t keep up with the 4K display.

SPECIFICATIONS:

INTRODUCTION:

Dell Alienware M17 R2

Alienware is the hard-core performance gaming laptop from the Dell but there are some issues like thermal control and fan noise in these laptops. So, that all also in this Alienware M17 R2 model. You get great performance in all the games.

Dell Alienware M17 R3

This Alienware M17 R3 is the gaming laptop with some useful changes which may change the people’s mind that the Dell’s Alienware not only focuses on performance but also on thermal issues and fan sound of the laptop.

DESIGN:

Dell Alienware M17 R2

Design-wise, it is very nice. The Alienware logo on the back is RGB backlit. The Alienware logo, the lighting around the venting, and the keyboard, all individually customizable within the software.

It has a very similar styling to the Alienware M15 from the previous gen and you’ll notice is available in the same colors as well. It has that really cool honeycomb venting on the rear. It has RGB lighting on the Alienware logo and on the back as well as around the edges. It has perky illumination on the keyboard and obviously, it has that larger screen.

It is a thin portable laptop and is to be expected there wouldn’t be quite as good as a desktop machine. So, it does well enough I think, and it is also good in terms of the visuals and a smooth experience and have any particular problems with it in that regard.

The benefit of the M17 over the M15 is you have a larger keyboard setup, it’s less compact, you’ve got access to more keys, it’s comfortable to use. One downside I did find is that sometimes it doesn’t register all the key presses. So, if you’re doing a multitude of key presses at once, it struggles a little bit.

Dell Alienware M17 R3

The Alienware M15 R3 looks pretty much like the M15 R2. Even though they stuck with the same M17 nomenclature, they switched designs between gen 1 and gen 2. The keyboard travel is now increased and it really feels good, it’s back to those Alienware keyboards that actually are really pleasant if you like to type on. They’re great for gaming too, with 1.7 millimeters of key travel. You have your option of getting either zone or RGB per-key backlit keyboards, probably most people are going to offer that per key and you get the lighting effects. You can do some customizations on the logo and the keyboard itself but not the trackpad anymore.

DISPLAY:

Dell Alienware M17 R2

It is worth noting that the M17 is only available with 1080p variants on the screen and this one is a 1080p 60 Hertz refresh rate screen which is fairly disappointing. The M17 is certainly a nice machine, especially with that 17.3-inch display that gives you a bit more real estate to play around with whether you’re staring at a tiny screen.

Dell Alienware M17 R3

For the displays, it gets almost confusing and some of this is tied into the chassis color that you pick. So, we have the lunar light model which by the way now has a clear coat on it, so it feels a little bit less soft touch. So, you got the lunar light and you have the dark side of the moon which is a deep charcoal gray which I like but it seems to have fewer configurations available.

There are three display options here, there’s a Full HD base model, IPS, 144-hertz display with a 9 millisecond response time, that’s not bad for a base display that supports both G-sync and Optimus, you hit the fn and f7 keys to switch between those. So, for those who are looking for some battery life though, I still think that the 17-inch Alienware is getting big enough and heavy enough. We have the next step up which is a 300-hertz display which makes sense actually even if you’re never going to reach those frame rates in the game because it offers you more sync points where you can actually get nice smooth frame rates. In this, games look really smooth at a variety of multipliers and frame rates on this without enabling G-sync or the V-sync on it. This one is a 3 millisecond response time display, a little bit faster for e-sports people and first-person shooter types, and has a little bit better color gamut. Subjectively, this is a very nice looking display, it may not be your super wide gamut kind of display for creative types but it looks good and they claim for both of the Full HD models that is 300 nits.

There is a 4K display option, this is more for creative types because it’s a 25 millisecond response time 60-hertz display, so you’re not going to get those high frame rates if you’re first-person shooter type but that one’s Full Adobe RGB that’s not OLED, that is an IPS class display but it should be very nice to look at and they claim 500 nits nice.

FEATURES:

Dell Alienware M17 R2

This is the sort of mid-range model. It’ll cost around 2500 dollars and it comes with an intel core i7 9750H CPU, sixteen gigabytes of 2666 megahertz Ram and NVIDIA RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU, and a 256 PCIe NVMe SSD.

It has multiple USB ports on the left and right-hand sides. You also have an Ethernet port for plugging in, go for a wired connection. It has a very nice design to it. The venting and cooling system on it is really well designed. The vents at the rears where the hot air gets blown out, so it doesn’t blow onto your lap and it doesn’t get overly hot and it doesn’t get overly noisy which is a definite benefit to this system. I often find that these thin gaming laptops get very loud during gaming sessions, especially when it’s under a lot of pressure. In some laptops playing games on high visuals, it’s getting too noisy and too hot. This one doesn’t suffer from that issue, the keyboard doesn’t get too hot or certainly doesn’t get too loud.

The speakers are pretty decent as well. They could do a good job in terms of audio. The fans and cooling system is also very good. I didn’t found a problem with the fans being too obnoxious and overly loud and the speakers did a good job of blocking them out. With some other gaming laptops that I’ve tested have found that the fans on them too loud when they were under pressure like playing the modern game on high visual settings. I found the M17 didn’t have that problem, it ran well, it performed well. It counterbalances the need for performance and obviously cooling and it did a good job of it. The fact is that you can do so many things on it at once by recording, streaming, just gaming gloriously, and obviously has Ethernet and multiple ports on it as well. It also has DisplayPort mini, HDMI output, so you can output to multiple screens.

In the Alienware command centers software, there are various customization options. Here, you can change things like settings, power, performance, audio, self themes for various games. Within the command center software, you can adjust the keys and a perky basis. You can also select lighting in a section like options for WASD, the num pads, the function keys, and all sorts, you can customize them individually. Also, you can adjust the lighting on the Alienware logo and the lighting around the rear venting system.

Dell Alienware M17 R3

Pricing for this starts around 1600 list price, and that gets you a Core i7 which is the intel 10th gen refresh for CPUs, and it gets you an AMD Radeon 5500M, so kind of a low-end GPU but for about $50 more, you can you move up to a GTX 1660 Ti. With the new RTX 2070 Super, you can get that for around $2000 if you offer the base full HD 144 hertz display, 16 GB of Ram, and the 256 GB SSD, you can upgrade the SSD yourself. Unlike other thin and light gaming laptops where they’re using Max-Q graphics, the lower-powered version we’re using Max-p or the full mobile versions of graphics in here. So, with the 17-inch line, all of your options right up to the RTX 2080 Super are full of Max-P models.

On our review unit RTX 2070 Super that we’re using, it’s using 120 watts of power when gaming, so that’s full power. Ram is still soldered onboard. The Wi-Fi card is a Killer 6 card and that’s actually an Intel card, it’s the killer 1650 card, and that is soldered on board too.

Internally, we’ve got our SSDs, there is the boot SSD which came with that copper heatsink. We have a one terabyte drive and has reasonably good performance, not the very fastest but cool temperatures. The second one, you can actually order it with raid 0 if you want with those two but there’s more there’s actually a short SSD slot if you want to add a third drive. There’s the 86 watt-hour battery. The fans are big enough to exhaust. Also, they’ve increased the number of Vrams using six Vrams on the core i7. So, Vram issues are not a problem anymore and they’re all heatsinked down.

Cooling is significantly improved, we have a vapor chamber cooler over the CPU and not the GPU but the CPU is the one that really needed it. There’s a huge heat sink, they say they’re using like 35% more copper which is what the heatsinks are made of, and the fan tubes and also about 40% more diameter or pipe size. The drawback is still the motherboard is inverted on this just like the previous generation and just like the MSI GS Stealth series of laptops. When you open it up and you take off the bottom cover, you can’t actually remove the fans and the heat sink if you want to re-paste it. So, you’re going to have to take out the motherboard and it’s an annoyance that’s for sure. Also, they have fancier fans now with more fan blades and some kevlar-like material for the fans, and a fire-resistant CPU fan.

Ports on this other than the addition of the micro SD card slot are about the same as last generation. You have three USB-A ports, Thunderbolt 3 out the rear and you have an Alienware graphics amplifier port as well and it’s still a nice affordable alternative for an external graphics solution if you plan on sticking with Alienware since it’s proprietary to them. You also have HDMI 2.0b, mini Displayport 1.4, and of course, you got a headphone jack and gigabit killer ethernet as well.

In terms of speakers, R2 is nothing special. A lot of gaming laptops these days surprisingly are not anything special since you can actually hear these speakers over the fan noise. They’ve improved the sound and the biggest thing in it is the spatial separation and the sense of volume and a little bit more bass coming through simply because they added front base ports. It still has the down-firing ports on this which are your main ones but you’ve got the two little slits on the front now. So, it makes sound pretty good, the volume is good. As a gaming laptop speaker, they’re decent.

PERFORMANCE:

Dell Alienware M17 R2

In the games, I get around a maximum of 90-100 fps and a minimum of 60 or lower than that, not terribly lower. It is a bit odd that you only have a 60hz refresh rate on 4K screen. If you want to buy higher than this, then you have an option of 144hz but there you just have the FHD. Also, all in all, you just have the option of 144hz which is odd, especially when the M15 goes with 240 Hertz as a potential option. So, this screen is only 1080p and not as potentially responsive as the one on the Alienware M15, and considering there are other laptops out at the moment with as much as 300 Hertz refresh rate, it is a bit of a strange one. However, I did enjoy using it.

If you want a laptop that can do VR and this is certainly well worth considering, it’s a good option. Here, some games are found as a bit hit miss doing performed really well in terms of fps and the performance of it. 

Dell Alienware M17 R3

In terms of performance and gaming, the benchmarks are all good. Dell tries to get the performance from the CPU as much as possible, tries to run the thermal max to get the higher performance. But, some companies like Razer limits the power level to the CPU and other things to keep things from getting too hot anymore. That said, it runs a lot cooler than the last generation like five degrees centigrade which is a pretty significant drop.
In some games, this is a bit more than that and in some games not as much, it really depends a lot on how CPU dependent. So, for games like the Witcher 3 which looks a kind of CPU dependent which gets hot but not unbearable.

Everything we ran from a 1080p ultra testing, Vsync is turned off, no frame rate limiting on these laptops in Directx 11. Frame rates in the games were excellent on this and temperatures are lower. You can undervolt this too, some people are wondering because there have been some bios mitigations in some laptops for the plunder volt but anyway this one lets you under vaulted. Now, 10th gen CPUs can’t take as much under vaulting without crashing versus previous gens but I was running at a -90 for the undervolt and the CPU core cache undervolt at about -50 and it dropped temperatures about depending on the game like the Witcher, 3 it dropped about 8 to 9 degrees centigrade and some other games like borderlands 3 didn’t make as much of a difference. So, you can undervolt this too to mitigate those temperatures.

Alienware sounded like a vacuum cleaner with 99-degree temperatures and throttle a lot in most games but now the temperatures were around 92 to 95 and with undervolting you can drop that too. So, for Alienware, that’s an improvement and that puts it in line with pretty much every other thin and light gaming laptop. In the Alienware command center, you can set the fan’s profiles like you can set it to cool if you want to be a little bit quieter.

For overclocking, if you want you can get the core i9 which is the overclockable CPU option. So, you’ve got the 6-core i7 and also the core i9 8-core option for you. Now, if you put the core i9 with an RTX 2080 Super GPU, you’re probably looking at more heat.

BATTERY:

Dell Alienware M17 R2

The battery life is a bit lackluster on this machine. I only managed to get around 2 hours of battery life out of it and that’s with the RGB light turned off and the screen brightness down as well and gaming performances wouldn’t even really run particularly with the battery.

Dell Alienware M17 R3

For battery life, this won’t be a good part in this laptop, at least with the 300-hertz display model because this doesn’t have Optimus, no switchable graphics, no hardware key, no fn and f7 to switch your GPUs, it’s running on dedicated graphics all the time and you have a high refresh display. So, on average you get about three hours. They have actually increased battery capacity with the R2, they dropped it and everybody complained. So now, it’s back up to 86 watt-hour battery which is a pretty good capacity. Ours comes with a 240-watt charger and when gaming with AAA titles, it will use right up to almost 240 watts, so appropriate size charger for it. Now, if you get the Full HD 144hz display that does support Optimus, your battery life will be better. If you get the 4K model, you’re certainly not going to see great battery life.

WHICH TO BUY?

If you ask that, Is anything usefully changed from the R2 to R3. Then, yes it is. You can’t see the changes physically but internally they tried a lot to control thermal heat and sound with the possible performance. So, I think it will be better to buy Alienware M17 R3 with some extra money. You can also update your laptop from R2 to R3 if you feel the thermal level is so high on the M17 R2.

Expert reviews of Dell Alienware M17 R2:

By Notebookcheck
Users always expect second generation models to be better than first generation models in every way. In the case of the Alienware m17 R2, however, it’s more of a sideways step over the Alienware m17 R1. This latest iteration both adds and removes…

By Hitechcentury
While the Alienware M17 is relatively man-portable as gaming notebooks go, it alas doesn’t quite resolve the age-old conundrum of middling battery life as all that high-end hardware tends to drain juice fast. If you’re gaming away from the mains, you’ll…

By Hardwareheaven
In conclusion, the Alienware m17 is a high-quality laptop in almost every department. The RTX 2080 Max-Q delivers huge gaming power, the rest of the components are very fast, and the m17’s cooling copes well. The Alienware has a great keyboard and…

Expert reviews of Dell Alienware M17 R3:

By Techadvisor
The Alienware m17 R3 is very quick, with a top-notch 300Hz screen, a great keyboard and typically impressive design, but it’s middling in some areas, it’s expensive and the high-end hardware will be overkill for lots of users.

By Maxigeek
Given its price, it is a heavy investment, but with the fact that it can be a true desktop replacement, it is easy to look at the benefits of the M17 R3, the question comes down to how often you will take it away from the desk, if that answer is often, you might need to look elsewhere, if the answer is hardly ever, then you are looking at your next laptop, without question.

By Tom’shardware
The Alienware m17 R3 is about as powerful as a gaming laptop can get while keeping under 1 inch of thickness, and has a great screen and striking design.

Arya

Hello! I'm Surendar Arya, a passionate tech writer from Uttar Pradesh, India. I'm a freelance contributor to the tech blog - The World's Best And Worst. My enthusiasm for technology drives me to explore the latest trends and innovations in the field. I take immense pleasure in guiding individuals on how to leverage technology for their benefit, making their lives easier and more efficient.