Alienware m18 R1 Laptop Review: Brawny Beauty, Untapped Potential
Alienware m18 R1 Gaming Laptop Battery Life, Thermals And Acoustics
We run a custom 1080p HD video loop test developed in-house to prove out battery life with our test group of machines. In all tests, Windows Quiet Hours / Focus Assist has been enabled and the displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. For the average laptop this is somewhere between a 40-60 percent brightness setting; for this machine, it was right at 50%. Note, however, you can't adjust the screen brightness while the GeForce GPU is active, but switching back to Optimus mode lets you set a brightness setting that is kept when changing over to the discrete GPU.
Considering the size and power of this machine, the result in "Battery" mode is not unreasonable, but we'd be remiss if we didn't note that the IPS-like LCD screen only has decent contrast to begin with. Reducing the brightness down to the 115-lux level we use for testing considerably worsens the contrast ratio in comparison to the 321 cd/m² (measured) at peak brightness.
With the discrete GPU enabled and the system in Performance mode, this machine doesn't even last an hour and a half. This truly is a "desktop replacement" laptop, while the above result shows that you can eke decent battery life out of it if you really have to, it's probably best to leave it plugged in most of the time.
It should probably be no shock to anyone that this relatively large 18" laptop, with its 175W GPU and 157W CPU, burns through its 97-WHr battery incredibly quickly. We left our workspace for a bit while this test ran, and the machine had already shut off by the time we got back. If you want to play games on a battery, you're going to have to dial this machine way back.
Alienware m18 R1 Thermal And Acoustic Performance
When it comes to thermal performance, we level-set our expectations accordingly. Desktop Intel Raptor Lake processors are notorious for being both thermally-dense and power-thirsty, and this CPU employs the exact same silicon, just with lower power limits. As such, we weren't surprised when, on very first boot, the m18's fans started to audibly ramp up simply from starting the operating system.
Even at 97°C, it won't ramp the two smaller fans to 100%.
What we didn't expect was just how easy it is to get the system to hit its thermal limits. Even a single-threaded load like Cinebench R23's single-core benchmark is enough to make the CPU hit and even exceed its thermal limits. In fact, that's the test we're running in the above screenshot; even with two fans running at 100% speed, it can't keep the CPU temperature below 95°C, and that's a single-core test. The max core temperature peaked at 105°C during this test.
This CPU temperature was reached during Shadow of the Tomb Raider's benchmark.
In multi-core tests, it's easy to make the CPU hit its thermal limits and begin throttling, though that is partly by design for some of the recent crop of high-end gaming laptop CPUs. In Cinebench R23 multi-thread, the processor's average P-core frequency falls straight down past the 2.2 GHz base clock to hover around 2.1 GHz. That's while drawing some 125 watts, a far cry from the rated 157W max turbo power, yet more than double the 55-watt base power rating.
Thankfully, the same isn't true of the GPU, which is cooled very well. In no realistic test were we able to make the GPU exceed 83°C, which is far enough under its 87° thermal limit. Sure, we can force the GPU to throttle by using FurMark, but that's not a realistic workload.
This is sort-of a good thing, because ideally, most games will be GPU-limited and thus the CPU won't have to work as hard. Unfortunately, because this machine can throttle on a single-threaded workload, it means that the CPU does indeed throttle while playing many games, including both Middle-earth: Shadow of War and Shadow of the Tomb Raider from our test suite.
That's what results in benchmark outcomes like this, where the machine averaged 180 FPS over the course of the benchmark yet had a minimum FPS of just 32 in parts. CPU limitations aren't fun because, rather than smoothly reducing the frame rate (like a GPU limitation), they result in inconsistent performance, with unpredictable hitching and stuttering.
In games that lightly use the CPU like F1 21, or games that are heavily GPU-limited like Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing enabled, this machine sails along, but anything that hits the CPU even remotely hard can run into trouble. This is another mark in favor of a 4K display option for this system; a higher-resolution display would cause the machine to be GPU-limited more often.
The fans in this large laptop are significantly noisy when cranked up all the way. Ignore the 62.9 maximum value here, as that's from handling the recording device to capture this screenshot. The 54.7 average value is accurate after the machine's cooling solution was thermally saturated.
As the Decibel app helpfully notes, that's approximately the sound level of normal conversation at 3 feet. It can get pretty loud, though the sound character isn't whiny or annoying in the least; it's soft and "woosh"-y. You won't hear it with headphones on, and you can drown it out if you turn the laptop's speakers up.
Thankfully, outside of gaming or other heavy workloads, the Alienware m18 R1 is essentially silent. In fact, if you set the system to "Quiet" mode, the fans will completely shut off in low-load situations, making it actually silent.
Alienware m18 R1 (2023) With RTX 4090: The Review Verdict
This is one of the nicest gaming laptops we've laid hands on yet. The screen is huge, bright, and sharp, its keyboard is nothing short of amazing, the system's aesthetics are the perfect balance of understated-yet-stylish, and the high performance of the GeForce RTX 4090 mobile GPU can't be ignored. There are a lot of frustrations with this machine, though, and we have to start with its CPU cooling. Simply put, it's just insufficient, at least the way it's setup currently.
We commiserate with Alienware's engineers, because the Intel Core i9-13980HX is clearly very challenging to keep cool. It's also overkill for gaming, as those 16 E-cores will likely go unused in most titles. You'd probably do better to stick with a lower-end Core processor, but Alienware doesn't offer this system with its GeForce RTX 4090 and any CPU lower than a Core i9; the marketing types would hit the ceiling, anyway.
The lack of memory options above DDR5-4800 is also a notable omission. Intel specifically supports DDR5-5600 on these CPUs without overclocking, which is really what the system should ship with. We won't publish any of the benchmarks because the system won't ship this way, but comparing against our initial tests with the 5800 MT/s memory that came inside our m18 R1 sample, dropping to 4800 MT/s lost as much as 12% off the final performance.
There are smaller annoyances, too. The system sports four M.2 sockets, and that's fantastic, but two of them are tiny M.2-2230 bays. Having for sockets is great, but the options available for M.2-2230 slots are limited. We do think that Alienware probably could have fit four M.2-2280 slots in the machine, but it likely would require a significant redesign.
Likewise, we weren't expecting great battery life from a huge 18-inch gaming laptop, but the battery life on this system is lackluster, relatively speaking. The battery is basically an uninterruptible power supply, as you are very unlikely to be using this machine on battery for any real length of time. Which brings us to our conclusion.
When you're deciding whether to recommend a product, you have to ask the question, "who is this for?" Because of the size, heft, and battery life, this really isn't a very portable machine. If you're planning to play games whereever you end up, you're going to have to bring the power brick anywhere you go, and that's another several pounds on top of the nearly nine-pound laptop itself.
In that regard, the Alienware m18 is really is a true desktop replacement solution and not a system to use on the go, though it is at least easier to setup and tear down. The use case for this machine is that of someone who wants top-shelf gaming performance in a pseudo-portable package. Perhaps this machine is for someone who travels and can support its heft, but also doesn't have a lot of room on their desktop or workspace such that they can appreciate its relatively small footprint versus a full-sized desktop.
Unfortunately for the Alienware m18 R1, it doesn't quite have top-shelf gaming performance as it stands currently. It's not slow, not by any means. It's just that other laptops we've tested with GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs can offer superior gaming performance in many scenarios. Because of that, we struggle to recommend the Alienware m18 R1, which is a shame because it definitely has a fair degree of untapped potential it seems, along with good looks and some great features.
EDIT: As it happens, Alienware will in fact be offering this machine with DDR5-5600 memory, and even the DDR5-5800 that we were sent initially. Dell reached out to us and offered a new unit for us to re-test, as the machine we were originally sent was technically a pre-production model, which explains some of the problems we had with it early on. We'll see how the final version performs when we receive it soon enough, and report back with an update.
