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Behold: the all-important top-down keyboard view. [credit: Dell ]
This time last year, we covered one of the first Ryzen 9 gaming laptops—Asus’ ROG Zephyrus G14. A year later, Dell is joining the Ryzen-powered gaming laptop party with its new Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition.
Last year, the Achilles heel of Ryzen-powered gaming laptops was mediocre GPU selection—for whatever reason, most manufacturers didn’t spec RTX 3000-series GPUs along with Ryzen processors. That’s thankfully no longer the case in 2021—the new Alienware m15 pairs Ryzen 7 5800H or Ryzen 9 4900HX with up to 32GiB RAM and a choice of RTX 3060 or RTX 3070 graphics. (Asus is also offering high-end GPUs this year—we’re in the process of hands-on testing a ROG Zephyrus G15 with Ryzen 9 5900HS and RTX 3070 this week.)
The new m15 offers three display choices—1080 p at 165 Hz or 360 Hz, or 1440 p at 240 Hz—and an optional keyboard upgrade to Cherry MX. There’s a standard 2.5Gbps wired Ethernet adapter to go with the Killer AX1650 Wi-Fi 6—and unlike the ROG Zephyrus gaming laptops, the Alienware m15 has an integrated 720 p webcam.