Alienware 13 R3 Review: OLED, GeForce 10 Pop And Performance
Alienware 14 R3 Software And Experience
This software side of the Alienware 13 R3 is a straight-forward affair completely sans bloat. There isn't even a trial copy of Norton Security suite or some other useless anti-virus product that you likely won't pay for anyway, installed on the machine. Ours was configured with Windows 10 Home editing and with the exception of Alienware's AlienFX lighting and AlienAdrenaline system config and monitoring tools, it's a completely virgin setup, thankfully.
Alienware's AlienFX lighting software is still here and has been reconfigured to cover the trackpad area, though it still has 8 zones of lighting you can set individually to any hue of the rainbow dialed in on its color wheel. You can also set color profiles to kick off with a specific app or use case, to amp up visibility in gaming or tame things down to theater lighting for movie watch, for example.
AlienFusion lets you setup custom power plans, while AlienAdrenaline let's you dial in performance monitoring and configure external Alienware Graphics Amplifier support, if you feel the need to bolster gaming performance even further than this potent config puts out. Interestingly, unlike other gaming notebooks in its class, the Alienware 13 R3 doesn't come with overclocking and performance tuning functions. This may be an omission for some but then again, when this much fire power is strapped inside a chassis as compact as the AW13, there's likely only so much headroom available. We're not sure you're going to miss a few MHz either, to be honest.
Benchmarks are next. Buckle up...
Benchmarks are next. Buckle up...
