One of the things I love about Alienware is their constant confidence in their new products. Whether it's boasting that their desktops are "Benchmark Bruisers" (opens in new tab) or releasing the sleekest OLED gaming monitors (opens in new tab). So, given the opportunity to check out the new Alienware m17 R5, billed as "the most powerful 17-inch AMD Advantage gaming laptop," how could we pass it up?

And does it live up to the hype? The Alienware m17 R5 is powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX and Radeon RX 6850M XT combo that, on paper, looks like a slam dunk for Team Red. Also, since this is the first gaming laptop with the RX 6850M XT, we wanted to see how it compares to laptops with the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti mobile GPUs.

Alienware also sent us a particularly upgraded configuration of the Alienware m17 R5. It has a 4K panel with a 120Hz refresh rate; 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD. It is priced at approximately $2,800. It is expected to be higher if memory and storage are maxed out with 64GB RAM and a 4TB SSD; the lowest price for AMD configurations starts at $1,911. This includes inexpensive 1080p display options at 165 Hz or 360 Hz.

If you're feeling jolly, Alienware even has a ridiculous 1080p display at 480Hz. However, I've never personally seen a 480Hz screen in person, so I don't know if it's worth it.

The surprisingly bright 500 cd/m² 4K display was used a lot for streaming video; I appreciated seeing the fine stress lines on Guenther Steiner's face during the final season of F1: "Drive to Survive" on Netflix's 4K I watched "Drive to Survive" in 4K on Netflix. This display is geared toward professionals and creators, but the game looks pretty good. So if you don't fall into that category, you may want to stick with a 240Hz 1080p display to save money and get the extra battery life you need. [The laptop also makes use of AMD's gaming-boosting technologies, such as SmartAccess Graphics, which automatically switches output from Ryzen APUs and Radeon GPUs, and Smartshift Max, which automatically shifts power based on the app or game you're using ( Open in new tab) suite is also utilized. The nice thing about these features is that they work without you having to fiddle with them. They're especially nice for those of you who are trying to pull off the extra horsepower by going back and forth between gaming and video editing.

This is the "AMD Advantage," the feature set that comes from having both a Radeon GPU and a Ryzen CPU in the same machine.

As can be seen from the benchmarks below, the multi-core performance of the mobile Ryzen 9 6900HX is inferior to the similarly priced Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (open in new tab) and MSI GS66 Stealth (2022) with the Intel Core i9 12900H ( Ryzen's 8-core, 16-thread design is being outpaced by Alder Lake's 14-core, 20-thread core layout.

Alienware is also behind the Core i7 12800H in the Razer Blade 17 (open in new tab), which we reviewed a while back; the Razer Blade 17 is an absolute beast of a machine, even by high-end laptop standards. It is extremely expensive ($4000). But still, if you're looking for serious performance, it's clear that the new Alienware is not the pinnacle.

Thankfully, in terms of GPU, the Alienware m17 R5 AMD Advantage model excelled in nearly all gaming benchmarks at 1080p, at nearly maximum settings. It recorded triple-digit frame rates in nearly every game I played, averaging just over 200 fps in Hitman 3.

It struggled with Metro Exodus and Cyberpunk 2077, which is not surprising since these focus on ray-tracing performance, something AMD's GPUs have struggled with. Unfortunately, there is nothing inside this new mobile GPU that really changes that. [The Radeon RX 6850M XT performed great in 4K, often beating the MSI GS66 (another powerful 4K laptop we recently reviewed). Except, however, when ray tracing is involved. In those cases, the GS66's RTX 3070 Ti ran away with it; the frame rate at 4K was okay, but still not anything that set the world on fire.

For example, when running Cyberpunk 2077 with the ray tracing effect turned on, Alienware hit frame rates as low as 17 fps with the graphics settings on Ultra, often running slowly. with RT turned off, the game ran at 22 fps at 4K and ran at a slower speed of 22 fps at 4K. Just for fun, I turned on FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution), AMD's answer to DLSS, to see how much it would improve. At the Ultra setting, I was able to play at 35 fps at 4K. This is better, but not by much.

If frame rate is more important than resolution, the m17 R5 can easily get over 100 fps in most games at 1080p. Even Cyberpunk recorded about 128 fps (with FSR turned on). Screen tearing is virtually non-existent due to the display's high 120 Hz refresh rate. Because of the dramatically higher frame rates, more games were played at 1080p than at 4K; if you play shooters like Apex Legends or Fortnite, you should probably use a 4K display.

Gaming Performance

System Performance

As a note, all benchmarks were run without Alienware's One Button High Performance mode. Nevertheless, we were able to see how some games performed with it on; the first thing you notice when you press the F1 key to turn on high-performance mode is that the fans start spinning aggressively almost immediately. It's as if Alienware's engines are getting ready for takeoff.

The reason for this is that in this mode the fans are spinning up to 100%. This lowers the average temperature of the GPU and CPU considerably. If you are expecting this to be a magical "frame rate increase" button, it is not.

It is all about heat. However, as with all Alienware gaming laptops and desktop PCs, the fans can get noisy at full speed. Just get some wireless headphones and you'll be fine.

This is, indeed, a desktop replacement. Yes, it is a laptop, so you can play games on the go, but it won't last long. In our gaming battery test, the battery life was an abysmal 49 minutes. With so much going on with high-end hardware and a 4K panel, it's certainly not battery-friendly.

The ultra-expensive Razer Blade 17 was equally bad. I expected the battery to not be great, but part of me was hoping it would last at least an hour or so.

The Alienware m17 R5 may not be the most powerful gaming laptop ever, but that's not for lack of trying. even if the CPU performance lags behind rival products, the m17 R5 makes up for it with impressive gaming results. 4K displays are is great for those who watch movies or work, but if you scale back some of the more expensive components, you can save a few hundred dollars and get a really solid 1080p gaming laptop.