Items tagged with Dell
Alienware is fast approaching its 25th birthday, and in celebration of the special occasion, Dell is gifting the iconic brand a visual and functional makeover for the new Alienware Aurora desktop. Yes, when you reach adulthood, it's typically a good time to consider a new look. The revamped desktop still maintains its trademark design language, mind you, but in a different mold aimed at vastly improving airflow while reducing noise output at the same time. Dell says it designed (or re-designed, really) the Alienware Aurora from the inside-out, with an aim towards harmonizing performance, easy upgrades, and optimized acoustics. What it came up with is another uniquely shaped chassis with 1.5x...
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The best deals don't always come during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there are enticing bargains to be found all throughout the year. That includes right now. We've rounded up a handful of hardware being offered at delightful discounts, including some audio gear, a smart TV stick, a laptop, and a mesh Wi-Fi router system. Pictured above is a set of Bose QuietComfort earbuds with noise cancellation, on sale at Amazon for $199.99 (save 29%, $80 off). These Bluetooth buds are lauded for their noise cancelling abilities, as well their ability to deliver high-fidelity audio with volume-optimized Active EQ for a balanced sound profile. They're also comfortable. As for battery life, they're rated...
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Thin and light gaming laptops are a bit of an enigma. They essentially aim to defy the laws of physics, eschewing size and thermal dissipation area in an effort to strike a more portable, stylish design while still maintaining respectable gaming chops. Let's face it, no one really likes the bulk and chunky demeanor of most high-end gaming laptops that are designed for all-out performance. It's a difficult, fine line to walk, but a worthy, noble one to develop a compelling, quality thin and light gaming laptop, and that's exactly what Dell went all-out for with the new Alienware X15. The new Alienware X15 laptop we're looking at here today is only 15.9mm thick and weighs just 5.2 pounds,...
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One often-posted work-around for enthusiasts' inability to locate new graphics cards is to purchase a pre-built gaming PC or a gaming laptop. In the past, hardcore system-building enthusiasts have sneered at gaming laptops, as their perceived gaming performance value was widely regarded to be inferior for in-place gaming. Given the exorbitant prices placed on performance graphics cards lately, they've become downright desirable. One perfect example of just such a machine is this Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED YD. Packing a Core i7-11800H CPU, 16GB of memory, and a GeForce RTX 3080 (mobile; 8GB GDDR6), this portable powerhouse should have no problem driving its 4K UHD AMOLED display to playable framerates....
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The latest version of Dell's XPS 15 (9510) is not a drastic departure from last year's model (9500). In terms of the physical design it is actually no different at all, which is not a bad thing. Last year saw Dell tweak the XPS 15's composition with a handful of subtle refinements, like slimming down the bezels on the InfinityEdge display and endowing it with a much bigger touchpad. The culmination of those and other small changes was a polished laptop inside and out, and the same can be said for this year's revision -- except it's faster. That is to say, Dell retained everything we liked about last year's model and injected it with upgraded hardware for this year's refresh. It also added a gorgeous...
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The humble webcam has seen a surge to prominence fueled by the rise of web conferencing and remote work, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Only a few short years ago, a webcam could be buried away below the display of a laptop and few users would complain or even notice. With those days behind us, consumers and professionals alike have been scrambling to improve their on-screen presence to the point of creating a shortage of the now critical device. That same demand has drawn more players into the discrete webcam space, including Dell. Dell's recently released 4K-capable UltraSharp Webcam aims to bring exceptional image quality and ease of use, but does it stand up to the hype? Let's take a look......
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It has been a while since our last amazing gaming PC giveaway, so we figured it's time to get things rolling again and offer you all something truly awesome. Our friends at Asetek and Alienware have come through in a big way want to give one of you a powerful Alienware Aurora R12 gaming PC, liquid cooled by an Asetek-powered closed-loop AIO CPU cooler! If you recall, Asetek pioneered the All-In-One liquid cooler design approximately 20-years ago, and currently enjoys over 90% market share in the space. Up for grabs this time around is an awesome, fully decked-out Alienware Aurora R12 gaming PC in “Lunar Light” trim, powered by an Intel Core i9-11900F 8-core processor, NVIDIA...
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Laptops are complicated beasts. There's a whole PC jammed into the base of a foldable computer and as such thermal management is a huge challenge. To get the best performance out of a CPU or GPU requires giving it as much power as possible without overheating the innards or making the outside of the system too hot to handle. Sometimes things go awry within the power management routines of a notebook, however, and performance tanks for no apparent reason. Such is the case with the Dell XPS 15 9510, but the good news is that a fix is just a BIOS update away. Dell's XPS notebooks are some of our favorites around here, and one of the reasons is that the company stands behind its products and...
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The running joke about Valve Corporation is that the company cannot count to three, in that there is no [traditional] follow-up to Half-Life 2, Portal 2, or Left 4 Dead 2. However, some of the developers of Left 4 Dead left Valve to create their own game, Back 4 Blood, whose release is just on the horizon. As such, the open beta to test the game out is also quite close, and you can pick up a key for free today. Back 4 Blood is a “thrilling cooperative first-person shooter” from the Left 4 Dead franchise developers. Players will find themselves at war against the Ridden: terrifying parasite-ridden corpses that once were normal people before the infections began and humanity collapsed....
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17-inch laptops are becoming somewhat of a rarity these days. Every manufacturer has a couple of models in their line-up, but they don't get a ton of attention because they're typically quite bulky and harder to tote around than sleeker, smaller machines. However, the system we'll be showing you today isn't just any run-of-the-mill 17" notebook. Dell's XPS 17 series has been cramming as much display real estate into as small of a frame as possible for a while now, and this year's model doesn't make any concessions in that regard. The newest XPS 17's footprint is just barely big enough to hold that panel. That's not to say that the XPS 17 is all pizzazz and no performance, or places form...
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You probably thought you were done with brain-jarring algebra and trigonometry from your school days but that may not be the case, thanks to some legal lunacy out of California. New energy efficiency regulations, which went into effect on July 1st and may be adopted by five other US states, limit the amount of power desktop computers can draw in a year, based on their components and expandability. Due to this, PC manufacturers are scrambling, gamers are up in arms, and everyone is confused by the math at hand, but it is not as cut and dry as you would think. On July 26th, writer and content creator Marie Oakes spotted a new warning on Dell’s website under Alienware PCs, stating that “This...
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In our latest 2.5 Geeks livestream, we talk about Sapphire’s excellent Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800 XT, a super-fast Intel NVMe data center SSD, Dell’s top-of-the-line, new UltraSharp 4K webcam and a bunch of other tech news. We hope you enjoy it -- and don't forget to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel! Show Notes: 01:49 - Dell Latitude 7320 Detachable Revisited: Refined And Ready 05:22 - TCL 20 Pro 5G Review: Premium Features, Midrange Pricing 08:58 - Samsung Confirms August 11 Galaxy Unpacked Event For Galaxy Z Fold 3 And Z Flip 3 12:47 - Intel Core i9-12900K Alder Lake CPU Reportedly Crushes Ryzen 9 5950X In Rendering Benchmark 17:20 - Dell UltraSharp 4K Webcam Sneak Peek 23:22...
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A lot can happen as a system is under development, especially with a relatively new family of hardware. Maybe the drivers and BIOS aren't quite tuned for the best possible performance or power efficiency, and sometimes early reviews aren't completely indicative of what a user will experience when they first purchase a laptop, even a new one that's just hitting the market. That's the case with Dell's Latitude 7320 Detachable PC, a speedy tablet hybrid that makes the current lineup of Surface Pro 7s look seriously outdated. When we first published our review of the Latitude 7320 Detachable, Dell had just announced the system and told us early on that they didn't think the battery life would necessarily...
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Happy Fourth of July weekend, folks! Enjoy the hotdogs and hamburgers, and whatever else is on tap for the holiday celebration, and take caution not to lose a limb blasting fireworks. Then when you have some downtime, check out this collection of holiday weekend deals spanning smart TVs, gaming hardware, and more. This is a good time to be in the market for a TV. Shown up top is Vizio's 65-inch OLED TV, on sale for $1,799.99 at Best Buy (save $100). It does not rank as the biggest discount in the world, but bear in mind that Vizio made a splash in the OLED market with aggressively priced models, this being one of them. So a $100 savings here is actually pretty good. It features all kinds of modern...
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When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe in early 2020, millions of people that were used to working in an office setting in close proximity with coworkers were forced to work from home. With that switch to a home-based work environment – and daily Zoom/Google Meet video calls -- it quickly proved how horrible most built-in webcams are that come with today's laptops. Before COVID-19, most manufacturers treated integrated webcams as an afterthought and are just now starting to boost image quality. However, Dell is going one step further by introducing the UltraSharp Webcam, a standalone camera that you can use with any laptop or desktop PC. Unlike the 720p or 1080p shooters that...
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Security researchers have sounded the alarm on four BIOS vulnerabilities affecting 129 different Dell models, including various laptop and desktop systems, as well as some tablets. In total, it is estimated that around 30 million Dell systems are susceptible to the vulnerabilities and should be patched right away. Fortunately, Dell has issued updates for all affected models. If left unpatched, an attacker could execute malicious code without having physical access to a system, and it would run in the pre-boot environment. This is how rootkits normally operate—they corrupt the BIOS, so if a user wipes their system clean with a fresh OS install, or even swaps out the physical drive (SSD or...
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Just a few months ago, we reviewed the Alienware m15 R4, a seriously powerful 15.6-inch form factor laptop that, at the time, posted the best gaming performance benchmark results we had ever seen from a notebook. Not that we were particularly surprised—armed with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 GPU based on Ampere and a 10th Generation Intel Core i7-10870H CPU (Comet Lake) CPU, it packs some serious artillery. Well, we've now tested an even faster gaming laptop, and it just so happens to be the 17-inch Alienware m17 R4. Call it sibling rivalry, if you wish, but the bigger 17.3-inch brother to the m15 flexes a bit more muscle as it arrived to us. Specifically, it touts an even burlier GeForce...
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Dell first announced the Alienware m15 R5 gaming laptop back in April, and we got a chance to review the "Ryzen Edition" late last month. What makes these Alienware m15 R5 so compelling is that you can pair AMD's most potent Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 APUs with NVIDIA's powerful GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs. Our review unit, for example, came loaded up with a Ryzen 9 5800H processor and a GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile GPU. Although we didn't encounter any issues during our testing, some new owners of the m15 R5 report some disturbing findings regarding the GPU inside their gaming laptop. Several users configured their rigs with a GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, which is just one step down from the current flagship...
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A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Dell over its Alienware Area-51m laptop and the limited upgrade path available to consumers. According to the lawsuit, Dell "intentionally misled and deceived" customers into thinking there would be more robust upgrade options for what had been its flagship gaming laptop at the time of its release. It is a somewhat unique case, and definitely an interesting one. For the most part, laptops at best only allow for relatively minor do-it-yourself upgrades, like adding more RAM or storage, or swapping out the wireless card. But even those parts are sometimes off limits, let alone core components like the CPU and GPU, which can rarely be upgraded (there...
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Early last month, Dell gave us just a tiny taste of its thin and light Alienware X-Series gaming laptops powered by 11th generation Intel Tiger Lake-H processors and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Ampere Mobile GPUs. The laptops are official today with the launch of the X15 and X17, so we're getting the full rundown on specs and available features. The X15 is perhaps the most impressive of the two, as it is billed as the world's most powerful sub-16mm gaming laptop and the thinnest ever produced by Alienware. As we previously reported, the X-Series uses an Element 31 thermal interface material (Gallium-Silicon-based) to improve cooling performance. There's also a Quad Fan arrangement that improves...
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Over the last eight months or so, segment by segment, AMD's various Zen 3-based processors have taken the world by storm. High performance servers, desktops, and notebooks all feature AMD's flagship silicon, thanks in no small part to its excellent perf-per-watt and strong overall value proposition. That dynamic really started in 2020, but we could sense a bit of hesitancy on the part of manufacturers with last year's Ryzen 4000 series gaming notebooks, since those topped out with midrange graphics. This year, though, the kid gloves have come off and higher-end graphics options have been made available. That's especially true with Dell's Alienware gaming brand. Last year, there wasn't a...
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Dell is looking to expand its Alienware gaming laptop family and is teasing the introduction of its new X-Series. With the new X-Series, a significant emphasis is being placed on improving overall performance and keeping the system cool at the same time. To this end, Dell says that the X-Series will feature an industry-first gallium-silicone thermal interface material for wicking heat away from the processor, which it calls Element 31. The new laptops will also bring another industry-first: a patent-pending, "Quad-Fan" cooling setup with extensive copper piping. Dell says that this design "Produces dedicated airflow using evacuative fans and dual opposite outlet fans," while "moving extensive...
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