Alienware m15 Review: Thin, Light, Dense, Deadly
Alienware M15 Review: Storage And Content Creation
We benchmark our systems using the latest Windows updates and hardware drivers from system OEMs like Dell Alienware. Other than that, except where noted, we keep all settings unchanged from the factory. First, let's take a look at the storage devices inside of the Alienware m15. Our test unit came with two identical Toshiba XG5 512GB NVMe SSDs that are rated to read data at up to 2,700MB/s and write data at a less impress 1,050MB/s. Both drives are also covered by a copper heat spreader to wick thermals away a touch.
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Both SSDs perform exceptionally well in our test even manage to exceed their factory rated maximum speed at times. Though we would have liked to see SSDs with a faster write speed in such a high-end notebook, these drives should satisfy the use case of virtually any gamer. As you'll notice, our C: drive volume performed worse in spots than our D: drive during the test, which is indicative of OS background tasks likely consuming some bandwidth. People that desire even more performance can also configure these drives in a RAID 0 array if they so choose, or those concerned about data loss and desire redundancy can set them up in a RAID 1.
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Our Cinebench runs test the CPU and GPU independently and provides a glimpse of raw performance. The test is based on Maxon’s Cinema 4D modeling software that’s used in movie productions.
Testing with the newest version of Cinebench we got some rather strange results. We ran this test a half dozen times to ensure that our results were accurate, but for some reason the OpenGL score achieved by the Alienware M15's GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q was relatively low and close to a GeForce GTX 1060. This is likely due to driver version variation and not much to be concerned with, however. CPU performance was excellent, on the other hand, and the Alienware M15 successfully beat out the competition to claim the #1 spot in our chart.
