Alienware 17 R4 2017 Gaming Laptop Review: Powerful And Refined

by Tuan Huynh — Thursday, June 29, 2017, 12:15 PM EDT

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Alienware 17 R4 2017: PCMark And 3DMark Performance

Futuremark benchmarks have been staples of system benchmarking since the late ‘90s. Here we use PC Mark 8 v2, which is a cross-platform testing suite to gauge the notebook’s performance in everyday use scenarios, while 3DMark tests its graphics chops.

PCMark 8 Benchmarks

Productivity And System-Level Benchmarking

We tested the Alienware 17 in PC Mark’s storage, work, and home tests. The work and home tests were run with OpenCL acceleration enabled for optimal performance.

Here the Alienware 17 continues to be the fastest notebook we’ve tested. The accelerated home and work benchmarks sees respectable gains with the latest Kaby Lake CPU. PC Mark’s storage benchmark reveals the Alienware 17 is neck and neck with other NVME SSD-equipped notebooks.

3DMark Fire Strike Extreme And Sky Diver

Synthetic DirectX Gaming And Graphics Testing

3DMark was designed to tax the performance of desktops, but the latest lineup of gaming laptops sport similar GPUs to their desktop counterparts, that can handle the benchmark’s extreme preset.

The Alienware 17 benefits greatly from its NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 GPU, which is the fastest notebook GPU to come across our test bench. Both the 3DMark “Fire Strike” and “Time Spy” benchmarks show a 28-percent advantage over the GeForce GTX 1070.