Alienware’s M15 R2 Gives You Otherworldly Gaming Performance

My first Alienware laptop was roughly the size of an industrial airliner. OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But it was almost 2 inches thick and had bezels so wide the screen looked like it was in a picture frame. It was not a particularly attractive machine. What it lacked in style it made up for in power, at the time anyway. These days, my smartphone probably has more graphical horsepower than my old machine.

Alienware has always been synonymous with killer gaming performance, over-the-top design, and—let’s be honest—over-the-top pricing. But the previous M15 laptop ushered in a new design language for the Dell-owned company, and it was a welcome change. Gone were the ultrathick slabs of plastic. Alienware’s newer products are slimmer, lighter, and more understated. These are gaming laptops you won't mind taking out of the house. The M15 R2 is the second iteration, and it improves on the original in a few key ways.

The M15 R2's exterior design is almost indistinguishable from the original M15, and that’s a good thing. It looks great! It’s slimmer and more stylish than most gaming laptops, not to mention comparatively more subtle. There are “gamer” aesthetics, but they’re not overbearing. Just some LED lighting around the rear grille, under the keyboard, and the small alien logo on the lid. It’s nice to see a gaming laptop clad in colors other than red and black.

The chassis itself is coated in a white soft-touch material, with some elements of glossy or matte black plastic. It’s a slick design that reminds me a bit of the glossy stormtrooper armor in the new Star Wars films (shame they only made two, isn’t it?). It’s hard not to like. Laptops are almost universally boring. They’re either black and gray rectangles or bedazzled black-on-red behemoths clad in so much extraneous plastic it’s like they’re cosplaying a mech suit from a '90s anime.

The M15 R2 is none of the above. It’s a gaming laptop that’s actually stylish, an elevation of a classic aesthetic that’s still fun and playful.

I tested the fully kitted-out M15 R2, with an Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics card, 16 gigabytes of RAM, an Intel Core i7-9750H processor, and a 1080p display with a 240-Hz refresh rate. It’s one of few gaming laptops with the power to actually get games to the 240 frames per second you need to get the most out of this kind of display.