I dont like it because of its performance, even if its fairly good for its mid-range price point.
Its not the 240 Hz display, which is also nice-looking but not spectacular.
Its the palm rest.
The Alienware m16 R2 is now just small enough to fit inside your backpack’s laptop sleeve.Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
The palm rest is my favorite part of the Alienware m16 R2.
Its comfy without being plush and matte without feeling slippery.
Alienware has long been a looks-forward kind of brand.
See at Dell
See at Best Buy
And you know what, why not?
The m16 R2 can indeed be your daily driver.
I dig the redesign for the most part.
The screen can also turn back 90 degrees if thats something that matters to you.
Despite being 15% smaller than earlier versions, its by no means a small laptop.
It weighs 5.62 pounds, so you cant go frisbeeing it across the room without strong forearms.
The m16 R2 is also just a little bit longer and wider than Razers top-of-the-line 16-inch gaming machine.
I dont like the look of the massive 16 on the back panel.
In my mind, it would look much better without it.
That material on the back of the screen also feels relatively thin and plastic-y.
Its a very comfortable material thats not too slippery.
Still, I prefer a bit of extra flair compared to the usual staid laptop designs.
The only brand Id say did better recently is Asus with itsROG Zephyrus G14, but only just.
Alienware had to redesign its heat dissipation with the R2 redesign completely.
The company claims its cooling is on par with the older design and the thermal shelf.
The area around my desk was feeling extra hot as well.
I also noticed that the heat had the possibility of impacting game performance.
An average of 90 FPS would dip to 60 or lower FPS under this extreme stress.
Its something to remember when trying to push the RTX 4070 to its limits.
The 16-inch IPS LCD display sits at the QHD+, 2560 by 1600 resolution.
The display has a 3 ms GtG response time and Nvidia G-Sync support.
This also isnt the brightest screen out there.
Alienware says it has a peak brightness of 300 nits.
The brightness sat around 315 nits in our tests, so Alienware might have slightly lowballed.
However, we should note its really not the brightest screen out there.
I kept the brightness as high as possible, which also doesnt do great things for battery life.
Without DLSS, youll struggle to meet playable frame rates in all the highest options.
Thats all with DLSS on by default.
You should expect to play your favorite games on high parameters with few caveats.
We should also mention that the system comes with WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 for fair connectivity.
It also comes with a wired ethernet port for those who need as much low latency as possible.
In Stealth Mode, I went from 100 to about 54% after about three hours.
That continued until I was in the red at about hour six.
Its worse when youre not trying to save power.
I went about two hours before I saw it drop down to about 60% after two hours.
This was with the screen brightness turned up, so lowering that might save you some extra juice.
Its not overly heavy, and its not overly large.
It does the job and still maintains a few of the aesthetic characteristics typical of Alienware.
What Alienware does better than anybody else is make a machine thats actually nice to use.
In many ways, thats the best recommendation I can make.
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