Sure, it’s a nice solution. But what was the problem?
Gaming and laptops have never been best mates. This is a simple fact. The problem is that the confines of a laptop chassis aren’t well-suited to a hot, angry graphics chip. They consume so much power. They produce hideous amounts of heat.
So, the traditional choice has been between gaming laptops that were good at portability but not actually that great for gaming, and barn-sized lappies that had decent gaming chops but had to be trailered from one location to another. Almost. You just can’t have it both ways.
Or can you? What if you could take the gaming grunt out of the laptop’s chassis, to allow the laptop to be properly portable but still have gaming goodness? Now you can with the Alienware 15. Actually, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a gaming laptop with an external box for graphics. MSI’s GS30 offers precisely the same trick.
Both depend upon a proprietary connection to the external box using PCI Express signalling. But there are differences. For starters, the Alienware 15 sports surprisingly capable graphics in its laptop chassis. There’s a mobile Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M GPU. That’s important because it means you retain reasonable gaming grunt when you leave the breakout graphics box behind.
As reviewed here, the ‘Graphics Amplifier’ box sports an AMD Radeon R9 290X, which was until recently the fastest desktop GPU offered by AMD. It remains a serious bit of kit. It also brings us to our first glitch. This laptop is running both Nvidia and AMD graphics with drivers for both installed in parallel. Okay, we didn’t have any problems during testing. But it makes us uncomfortable about longterm stability.
Still, we’re also happy to report that with the break-out box hooked up, the video output works just fine on both external displays and the 15’s own 15-inch panel. The only obvious downside in operation is that the external box with its own PSU is bloody noisy.
As for actual gaming performance, well, it’s much as you’d expect, whether you’re using it like a laptop with the internal GPU or as a desktop with the graphics box, in both scenarios backed-up by a nice Intel quad-core Haswell processor. Which is to say, it genuinely works.
And what of the Alienware 15 as a laptop in its own right? Well, it’s certainly a nicely engineered lump with a particularly solid and pleasing keyboard. Depending on usage, you’re looking at a good three hours or so of battery life. If there are negatives, they involve the 15-inch 1080p LCD panel, which is merely adequate, and the stingy 128GB SSD. Yes, there’s a 1TB magnetic drive, but we’d want more storage of the solid-state variety.
If at this point you’re sensing positive vibes about the Alienware 15, you’d be both right and wrong. On the one hand, this thing definitely works. However, what completely blows it out of the water as a proposition is the lofty pricing. It’s so expensive as an overall package that it simply makes no sense. You’d be far better off just running a proper desktop.
That’s especially true these days with everything being up in the cloud, in software terms. Simply run Steam and a synced web browser on both boxes, and you’ve reduced the advantages of having a single box to do it all pretty much to nil.
SPECIFICATIONS
Screen 15-inch
Resolution 1920 x 1080
CPU Intel Core i7-4710
Memory 8GB DDR3
Internal graphics Intel HD 400, Nvidia GTX 970M
External graphics AMD Radeon R9 290X
Storage 128GB Samsung M.2 SSD, 1TB WD magnetic drive
Warranty One year