Alienware m15 Review: Thin, Light, Dense, Deadly

Name: Alienware m15
Brand: Alienware

by Michael J. A. Sexton, Dave Altavilla — Friday, January 04, 2019, 12:10 PM EDT

Alienware M15 Review: Rise Of The Tomb Raider And Shadow Of Mordor

As this is a gaming laptop, probably the biggest question on everyone's mind is how well does it perform in real game titles. Equipped with a high-end 6-core mobile processor and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q GPU, are you might expect, this system performed rather well in the games we tested.

Middle Earth: Shadow Of Mordor And Shadow Of War Gaming Performance

Glorious Orc-Slaying Vengeance

Middle Earth: Shadow Of Mordor is a fun and great looking game title. We tested the Alienware m15 with the High image quality preset and various moderate resolutions.

Alienware M15 shadow of mordor

While running Middle Earth: Shadow Of Mordor with a 1080p resolution, Alienware's m15 managed a solid 23% performance gain over our overclocked Acer Predator Helios 300 scores.

Next we took both resolution and workload up a notch, bringing in a quick run with the newer Middle Earth: Shadow of War up to 1440p resolution, again on high image quality settings.

Alienware m15 Middle Earth Shadow Of War 4K Benchmarks

Here, Alienware's new m15 holds up well to this new release of the game, with High image quality settings and totally playable frame rates up to 1440p and north of 60 fps. In fact, on slightly lower image quality settings, 4K gaming can be possible, depending on your frame rate threshold of tolerance.

Rise Of The Tomb Raider

DirectX 12 Performance

Rise of the Tomb Raider started as a console port, but the developer updated it with a DirectX 12 code path. It also supports visual effects, like Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, Dynamic Foliage, Bloom shaders, Tessellation and more.

The performance lead that the Alienware m15 holds over the Acer Predator Helios 300 drops to 19.6% when running Rise Of The Tomb Raider at 1080p but it's still a strong showing for Alienware here. In fact, as you might imagine, Dell's new gaming laptop with the GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q configuration should be able to power any current gen game title up to 1440p at High image quality settings.