Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 Review: Zen 3 Laptop Invasion

It's time to dig into the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 and see what makes it tick. Before we open it up, notice there's a honeycomb pattern of vents, which draws cool air in from under the notebook into the fans, which then gets exhausted out the back and a bit out the sides. We can also see the speaker grilles towards the front, which fire downward and bounce sound off the desk or table up towards our ears. Rather than individual feet, the m15 R5 uses a pair of long rubber strips that grip the table, preventing the system from moving, and elevate the bottom a bit to let in air. 

Before digging in, we're always sure it's been shut down properly and detached from AC power. When we flip the system over, we can see a series of screws holding the bottom of the chassis to the body. All of these are captive screws, which we appreciate since it's easy to misplace tiny, loose screws if we're not careful. Back those out and pry gently at the front lip, and the bottom pops right off. 


Once we're in, we can see the cooling system dominate the top half of the notebook. When we lift the black plastic cover, we can see three heat pipes if we squint, but the plastic is glued to the cooler to make sure it doesn't shift around. The AMD Ryzen 5000 CPU and GeForce RTX 3060 seem to share a cooling system, which allows one to pull more power if the other is not fully utilized. Two blower-style fans push air towards the back of the notebook and out the rear vents. At the bottom of the notebook we can see the six-cell 86 Wh battery that led to such wonderful battery life, and it's flanked by the stereo speakers on either side. It's not a glamorous audio setup, but it does the job well enough. 


Below that we see one SO-DIMM slot, which holds an 8 GB DDR4-3200 module with Samsung branding. Under that plastic sheet, however, we can see the second easily accessible slot as well. We have given Alienware grief in the past about soldered memory in a gaming notebook, so we want to stop for a second and applaud this change. Hopefully it will stay this way in future models, as a gaming notebook should be user-serviceable.

The upgradeability doesn't stop there, either, as the SSD can be accessed easily as well. Notice, it's a tiny M.2 2230 Kioxia BG4. The highest-capacity M.2 2230 drives we've seen on the market so far are just 1 TB in size. But still, it can be replaced in case of failure or a desire to upgrade -- remember the base model has just 256 GB, so it's still not too bad. It's got a nice metal shield that helps spread heat away from the controller and NAND, too. 

Alienware m15 Thermal Performance

To give the thermal system a workout, we relied on the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark. As we discovered in our article related to CPU core count scaling in games, Tomb Raider does a good job of putting the whole processor to work along with the GPU. As a result, it should generate about as much heat as possible as it goes through its demo. The demo also takes a couple minutes to complete, so it gave us time to measure without allowing the system to take much of a break. Before measuring anything, we allowed the benchmark to complete twice and started it a third time, to make sure everything was warmed up. 


By the time we get to our third run-through of the Tomb Raider benchmark, the fans have been spun up for close to 10 minutes. However, the m15 Ryzen Edition R5 is not super loud. We measured between 48 and 50 dBA at all times from the system from around 24" from the screen. While not all that loud, fan noise is completely obfuscated by a headset, since as we mentioned the speakers in the m15 leave something to be desired when it comes to gaming. However, gamers that use external speakers with this notebook will be pleased to know it doesn't intrude too much when playing games at reasonable sound levels. 


When it was time to break out the thermometer, we started hunting for a hot spot, and found one towards the middle of the honeycomb pattern vents above the keyboard. What a hot spot it was, though. We measured a bit north of 128 degrees Fahrenheit, which works out to a rather warm 53.5 degrees Celsius. That in and of itself isn't that big of a deal since it's out of the way. However, that heat does radiate a bit, and the center of the keyboard still measures 100 degrees F (37.8 C). While that's far from too hot to touch, it's not ideal. Since the graphics processor has a 125 W thermal budget and the CPU is rated for 45 Watts, the heat has to go somewhere. 

Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition Conclusions

The Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 is a speedy AMD-powered notebook. Alienware and AMD haven't been used in the same sentence for a long time, but the red team's processors have made their way back into the UFO-shaped notebook brand's lineup this year. While being featured in parent company Dell's G5 15 SE since 2020, none of the AMD-powered gaming notebooks that came to retail previously had high-end GPUs. The GeForce RTX 3060 in our review unit isn't exactly top of the line, but the RTX 3070 which is available as an upgrade is a big step up. Those high-powered GPUs lend some legitimacy to AMD's gaming notebook aspirations, so beyond just being in an Alienware notebook, this is a welcome development. 

We already knew from previous reviews that AMD's Zen 3 notebook processors were awfully fast, and this Alienware notebook is no different. Of the shipping notebooks we've tested, this has some of the best lightly-threaded CPU performance we've ever seen. The same is true for its eight-core, 16 thread processor in heavily multi-threaded workloads as well. The Ryzen 7 5800H is not a processor to be taken lightly, so it's the right choice for a fancy gaming notebook. It's a little early to try to compare with Intel's newest Tiger Lake-H processors, but those look pretty promising as well. 


This is the first time we've gotten our hands on a GeForce RTX 3060 in a notebook, and it acquitted itself nicely, at least for 1080p gaming. Just about every game we tested performed well north of the baseline 60 fps we require to feel superior to console peasants and provide a good gaming experience. While these titles at the settings we chose didn't push the 165 Hz of the m15 R5's display panel, it certainly cranked out the frames. We do have concerns that 6 GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 192-bit memory bus might eventually feel pretty limiting, since the latest generation of consoles have 16 GB of shared memory that can be used for graphics tasks. However, that's probably a couple of years away from rearing its ugly head, at least as long as developers are still making games for the PS4 and Xbox One series. 

There is s lot to love about the seamy underbelly of this notebook, too. Going all the way back to the m15 R2 (at least), soldered RAM has been the order of the day. But this time around, we get two honest-to-goodness DDR4 SO-DIMM slots so that we can upgrade the notebook ourselves. The miniature M.2 2230 format of the SSD is a little less exciting, but it's also  upgradeable. Getting 16 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage today -- as our review unit has -- and upgrading later is a legitimate path to making the notebook last longer, and if a component dies after the warranty expires it can be easily swapped out. Lest we get too caught up in it, though, other gaming brands already supported that sort of thing. For instance, the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 we recently reviewed has SO-DIMMs and a much more common M.2 2280 SSD. 


As configured, our Ryzen Edition m15 R5 has a Ryzen 7 5800H, 16 GB of DDR4 memory, a 512 GB SSD, and the GeForce RTX 3060 with 6 GB of VRAM. Don't forget a 165 Hz 1080p display, four-zone RGB backlit keyboard, and 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet as well. Configured that way, our review unit rings up at $1,649 on Alienware's website. As far as Alienware laptops go, that's pretty reasonable. Stepping up to a 125 Watt GeForce RTX 3070 is another $250, which is a steal when thinking about how much a desktop GeForce RTX 3070 sells for on eBay these days. We'd think awfully hard about upgrading, even if we stuck with the 1080p display, so we can get more frames into that 165 Hz panel. 

Tougher decisions come when comparing this machine's pricing to other brands. For example, the ROG Zephyrus G15 we mentioned earlier has twice the storage, a 165 Hz 1440p display and a GeForce RTX 3070 for $1,499. The CPU is a Ryzen 9 5900HS, which has a higher boost clock but a smaller 35 W TDP, so that's kind of a wash even though it's technically a better CPU. There's also no integrated webcam on the ASUS machine, which is an odd quirk. It's true that the ASUS' GeForce option only gets an 80 Watt thermal budget, but that didn't stop it from beating the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition in our tests more often than not. In that context, it might make the m15 R5 a tougher sell. Even Dell's own G15 Ryzen Edition packs better specs for less money, but without the Alienware branding, unique Alienware software, and premium aesthetic. 

In the end, it boils down to what a buyer values more: the overall package and premium aesthetic vs. raw specs and performance. There are some design choices here that contribute to a higher bottom line for the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5, including the higher 125 Watt thermal budget and the cooling system required to keep everything healthy and humming along at full speed. There is also plenty of flashy RGB-lit bling on hand, a high quality keyboard and premium materials, if these sort of trimmings are important to you. Buyers that hold raw performance-per-dollar as king might want to consider other options, but gamers that want to stand out in a crowd of boring black notebooks and still have plenty of high-powered gaming performance would do well to consider the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5.