Alienware 13 R3 Review: OLED, GeForce 10 Pop And Performance

Futuremark’s PCMark 8 runs a system through typical home and work activities and provides individual scores for certain task categories, rather than specific hardware. The Home test is just as it sounds: a collection of everyday tasks, including web browsing and video chatting. The Work test is more demanding and has business-oriented tests, while the laptop’s SSD gets a workout in the Storage test.

PCMark 8 Benchmarks Productivity And System-Level Benchmarking

We selected three tests from the PCMark 8 benchmark suite: Home, Storage, and Work. Futuremark recently improved all three tests with PCMark 8 version 2. We selected the Open CL "Accelerated" options for both the Home and Work benchmark tests.


Once again, the Alienware 13 R3 drops in near the top of the field, bested only by the Cybertron and MSI gaming laptops by a hair. These tests are trace-based and are IO response time sensitive, so storage performance generally affects results quite a bit, along with CPU and GPU performance. 

3DMark Time Spy, SkyDiver, Fire Strike Extreme And SteamVR Testing Synthetic DirectX Gaming And Graphics Testing

Futuremark designed 3DMark Fire Strike for desktop PCs, but today’s heavy-duty gaming laptops have the chops to take on the high-resolution texture, tessellation and other components of the test as well. SkyDiver is a lighter-duty tested targeted for notebook platforms and Time Spy looks specifically at DX12 performance.


Here we've boiled our test subjects down to only gaming notebooks with discrete graphics processors, though we've dropped in the ASUS ROG G752 as well, which is a beefy 17-inch, 10 pound machine with a GeForce GTX 1070 GPU. We offer that data point as a relative reference, but it's obviously a different class of machine at almost twice the weight and with a much larger footprint. Surprisingly, however, the Alienware 13 R3 edged out the MSI Apache Pro 15-inch notebook in a couple of tests, suggesting even though it has a much smaller footprint, the AW13 R3 isn't throttling its GPU in its tighter confines.