Last year, as 16-inch gaming laptops came into their own, we were impressed by the stylish and speedy Alienware m16. This year's redesigned m16 R2 (starts at $1,649.99; $1,849.99 as tested) keeps the sleek look and quality build but trims off the rear thermal block for a smaller footprint and more portability. The available GPU choices now stop at Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 instead of the mighty RTX 4080 and 4090, but with help from Intel's new Core Ultra 7 processor the Alienware still delivers a steady gaming experience. Best of all, the m16 R2's premium feel, comfortable keyboard, ample connectivity and battery life, and 240Hz QHD+ display come at a reasonable price. The Alienware doesn't replace the smaller, less expensive Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 as our midrange gaming Editors' Choice honoree, but is the best big-screen alternative.
Design: A Trimmer Chassis Touches Down
I got my first look at the m16 R2 at Dell's CES 2024 preview event, so the production unit seen here wasn't my introduction to the machine. What I liked then, however, hasn't changed: a more compact take on the original m16, keeping the high-end performance of a game-worthy desktop-replacement laptop in a package almost a pound lighter.
The redesign shifts the m16's exact place in the company's lineup: While the x16 R2 (also announced at CES 2024) pushes the performance envelope for enthusiasts with big budgets, the m16 R2 is more of a one-stop-shopping solution for serious gamers—still well above budget or entry-level, but a reasonable value that keeps mobility in mind despite its 16-inch screen.
![CES 2024 Hands On: Alienware's 16-Inch m16 R2 Gaming Laptop Goes Compact With Intel Core Ultra CPUs](https://zmgvideos.mashable.com/cms/2024/1/049dR0pj9fMq82IqdOhMPBr-1704505418/thumb/00001.png)
I think the ideal Alienware m16 R2 shopper would be someone who mostly uses it to play games at home or in a dorm, but also needs to carry the machine to the office or classroom. That leaves the x16 R2 (we reviewed the R1 in July 2023) as a higher-powered offshoot, the bulky m18 R2 as the cost-no-object screamer, and the x14 R2 as the grab-and-go compact. Hopefully this rundown makes sifting through these laptops—and evaluating the m16 R2's value—a bit easier.
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With that said, you probably won't notice much of a difference between the m16 R2 and the original at a glance (especially from the front). The styling is largely unchanged, including the industrial look and most of the RGB chassis lighting. The key change is the removal of the rear thermal block, which formerly held the cooling hardware; moving those parts inside the chassis reduces the system's overall footprint by 15%, from 1 by 14.5 by 11.4 inches to 0.93 by 14.3 by 9.8 inches (HWD). Not only is the R2 thinner and noticeably less deep, but its weight drops from 6.67 to 5.75 pounds.
To accomplish this, naturally the interior and cooling system had to be remodeled. The m16 R2 makes use of four copper heat pipes and two 94-blade fans. The latter pull in cool air from the top and bottom vents, with hot air exiting via the sides and rear. As mentioned, the change also reduces the m16's upper power ceiling so the GeForce RTX 4070 is the fastest GPU available.
The good news is that the RTX 4070 in the m16 R2 is not hobbled compared to the same GPU in last year's model—it runs at up to the same 175 watts TDP. That doesn't mean the two will perform identically, due to different cooling systems and the newer CPU, but since wattage is the biggest factor, frame rates should be very close. Unfortunately, we don't have a direct comparison since the original m16 we reviewed was configured with a GeForce RTX 4080, but you can see how the new rig fares in the benchmarks below.
Feature Set: A Fancy Display, Nvidia Optimus, and Other Extras
So the laptop has shrunk a bit, but how's the rest of the build? The chassis has the same excellent quality, feeling both sturdy and premium thanks to the metal lid and soft-touch keyboard deck. The touchpad isn't huge, but big enough for comfort and ringed with some RGB lighting for a bit of flair.
The touchpad, the alien-head logo on the lid, and the ditto-shaped power button now join the RGB keyboard backlighting as available bling. (The rear ringed lighting of the earlier model is gone with the thermal block.) The keys deliver a great typing experience, with lots of travel and good feedback. The keyboard isn't as satisfyingly clicky as the low-profile Cherry MX mechanical keyboards offered on some other Alienware notebooks, but is still one of the better non-mechanical keyboards I've used on a gaming laptop.
The display isn't extraordinary for the high-end gaming market but still looks good both on paper and in practice. The 16-inch panel combines QHD+ (2,560-by-1,600-pixel) resolution with a 240Hz refresh rate and Nvidia G-Sync support with Advanced Optimus. The last is a feature that automatically swaps between the processor's integrated graphics and the discrete GPU as needed, sticking to the more battery-friendly integrated graphics for everyday apps and firing up the GeForce silicon when you launch a game. (The system hangs for just a few seconds when making the switch.)
The laptop also has a physical MUX switch that lets you shut off the integrated graphics manually when you feel performance trumps battery life. You can toggle the feature in the Alienware Command Center software, which is also useful for monitoring performance, settings, and temperatures. You can choose among several power-consumption modes (balanced, battery, quiet, performance, or overdrive), as well as tuning the GPU settings in custom mode. It's a nice, clean readout that's superior to most gaming rigs' included software toolkits.
Tying into that, the function-key row includes both stealth- and performance-mode keys for when you want your laptop to be, say, as quiet as possible in a library or as fast and loud as possible at a LAN party. It's a small thing, but a nice alternative to pulling up software and clicking settings.
Connectivity is another strong point. The m16 R1 put most of its ports on the rear block, while the R2 distributes them a bit more evenly: The left flank holds Ethernet and audio jacks, while the right side houses two USB Type-A ports and a microSD card slot. Around back are the power connector, an HDMI port, and two USB Type-C ports with DisplayPort functionality, one adding Thunderbolt 4 and power delivery.
The feature set also includes a 1080p webcam, which delivers impressive image quality (especially compared to the lowball 720p cameras we still see far too often), and Wi-Fi 7. The AC adapter is also pleasantly compact compared to the chunky bricks that accompany most high-end gaming laptops, further enhancing the redesign's portability.
Testing the Alienware m16 R2: Intel Core Ultra Delivers
In addition to the trimmed-down design, the Alienware m16 R2's calling card is its use of Intel's new Core Ultra processors. Code-named "Meteor Lake," these are the first generation of the Core Ultra line, which exists alongside the Core i processors we're all familiar with. These have their own 5, 7, and 9 performance tiers but flaunt an onboard neural processing unit (NPU) dedicated to crunching through AI tasks rather than burdening the CPU with them. Such applications aren't as widespread yet as they surely will be in future, but there are use cases already in audio and video enhancements, some Adobe apps, and Windows' Copilot platform.
The m16 R2 isn't offered in nearly as many configurations as other Alienware laptops—just two, to be exact. The $1,649.99 base model comes with a Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, 16GB of memory, a 1TB solid-state drive, and Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060. The other model, our $1,849.99 tester, upgrades the GPU to the GeForce RTX 4070.
When you consider the core components, build quality, customizable lighting, 1080p webcam, and speedy QHD+ display with G-Sync, either model is quite a good deal. While the Alienware brand was once a guarantee of ultra-expensive hardware (and the company still offers such systems), we've seen the M series lead on value in the midrange, under-$2,000 sector.
Before drawing any concrete conclusions, though, we need to see the performance numbers. For our benchmark charts, we matched the m16 R2 against not only the original m16 (a higher-end $2,299.99 configuration as tested) but another 16-inch RTX 4070 gamer, the AMD Ryzen-powered Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 ($1,767.99 as tested). The MSI Katana 15 ($1,599 as tested) sits below the m16 R2 in both price and size, while the 14.5-inch Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 ($1,479.99 as tested) is, as mentioned, our midrange Editors' Choice award winner.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.
Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
For the record, I tested the Alienware in Command Center's performance mode, which kicks up the power (and cooling fans) to the degree most users would probably choose when gaming or editing media. I repeated a few tests in the even louder overdrive mode, but it wasn't worth the difference (only a couple of hundred points in Cinebench, for example).
Between initial tests and our first wave of reviews, we're getting a sense of what to expect from Intel's Core Ultra. The Core Ultra 7 155H is close but narrowly superior to the 13th Generation Core i7 in the MSI Katana, hangs close to AMD's Ryzen 7 H series, and can't keep up with Ryzen 9's. The bottom line is that the headline-grabbing AI readiness of Core Ultra makes the CPUs no less fast and efficient at everyday productivity and media workloads. The Alienware m16 R2 can easily serve as your sole work and play machine.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
For gaming laptops and other mobile gaming hardware, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks. The former include two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Additionally, we use the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which gauges OpenGL performance. Two tests are rendered offscreen to accommodate different native display resolutions; more frames per second (fps) means higher performance.
Our real-world game testing comes from the built-in 1080p benchmarks of the racing simulation F1 2021 and open-world adventure Assassin's Creed Valhalla. (Our third benchmark title, Rainbow Six Siege, has been glitching and failing to report results on recent PCs, so is skipped here). We run Valhalla twice at the Medium and Ultra quality presets and F1 2021 at Ultra quality with and without AMD and Nvidia's performance-boosting FSR and DLSS features enabled.
The m16 R2 performed well here, matching or beating the other GeForce RTX 4070 gaming rigs and comfortably topping 100fps in both real-world games. When I reran the games at the system's native 2,560-by-1,600 resolution, the Alienware dropped to 108fps (Medium) and 78fps (Ultra) in Valhalla and 107fps in F1 with DLSS on. QHD+ resolution is much more demanding, so the drop is not surprising, though DLSS is a good fix for the most strenuous titles. Only the most cutting-edge games should oblige you to dial down image-quality settings.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptop and tablet battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The m16 R2 scored a big win in terms of battery life, cruising past the competition. This is a major plus for a laptop that aims to do more than stay tethered to your desk—you won't be desperately searching for an AC outlet if you take the Alienware on a trip. Gaming will of course drain the battery far faster than video playback, but this is an excellent result for a desktop replacement system. By contrast, the display's color coverage left something to be desired, though it proved fine for games and video viewing if not media editing. Similarly, a bit more brightness would be welcome, but the m16 R2 looks fine in normal use.
Verdict: Good-Value Gaming Power to Go
In the competitive world of gaming laptops, the Alienware m16 R2 carves out a niche and executes its concept well. Stopping well shy of the $2,000 price barrier, it spends your money in the right places, offering imprssive performance with a premium build and feature set. A few systems will get you similar frame rates for less money but lack some of the high-end finishes and features that make the m16 R2 such an attractive package.
We think the 14.5-inch Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 is a bit more appealing to a wider swath of on-the-go gamers, but the Alienware is easily the go-to alternative for more power or a larger screen. Though we didn't get the opportunity to test it, the RTX 4060 base model may be an even better buy.
A more compact redesign rules out Nvidia's top-of-the-line RTX 4080 and 4090, but Alienware's m16 R2 delivers rock-solid gaming with a premium feel at a good price.
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