Slashdot Mirror
Alienware Launches Laptop With QHD OLED Display After 20 Years of Business (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes from a report via HotHardware: Dell's Alienware 13 gaming notebook has been popular among gamers and power users that want a little more horsepower in a relatively light 4.5 pound 13-inch machine. However, over the past couple of years, Alienware hasn't changed-up the design much -- until today that is. [In celebration of its 20th anniversary], the company is officially making the OLED display equipped Alienware 13 available today, which they debuted back in January at CES. Initial testing and review impressions show that, as expected, the OLED display sure is gorgeous. The OLED display of the Alienware 13 is also representative of a full revamp (except for the skins), including a 6th generation Intel Skylake Core series processor and an NVMe Solid State Drive. The real kicker, however, is that Alienware's 13.3-inch QHD (2560X1440) OLED display offers great saturation and contrast with an extremely crisp 1ms pixel response time that delivers beautiful image quality, whether working in content creation, or in fast-moving action while gaming. Viewing angles with the display are also superior to high-end IPS panels including Dell's own XPS 15 with its near bezel-less Infinity Edge panel. At E3 2016, AMD announced the Radeon RX 470 and RX 460, which will join the RX 480 in the company's Polaris family.
Fuck the touchpads already
Usually when you guys post advertisements, you try to pretend it's news, but it seems like you've dropped all pretense on this one.
13.3".
Gaming.
Yeah, right.
At this point we've solved pretty much every problem with OLED displays bar one as far as I am aware. I wonder what the burn-in is like? After 2 years of using a phone with a pretty standard phone use case (an hour or two per day screen on time) my Galaxy is showing signs of burn-in.
I wonder if this is somehow solved as it is quite worrying on a display with potentially a much larger use case (thinking 5+ hours per day of display on time) and a device life greater than 2 years.
This display may have double the pixel density, but it is still the same size as that found on the usual 720p garbage. It may be okay for TV, but a 13" 16:9 screen does not have sufficient vertical space for typical computing tasks. Browsing web pages on such a display is extremely painful, especially after task bar, tab/location/status bars, menus, banners, ads, etc. are taken into account.
Now, a 13" OLED display at 3:2 (2400x1600) or 14:10 (2400x1700) would be wonderful.
The display in TFA looks fairly nice. A bit on the small side for a gaming screen, but still, that's pretty decent quality and it's interesting to see OLED spreading in the laptop market.
That said, I'd have serious reservations about buying Alienware. I used to be a fan; in fact, I continued to be a fan some way into the Dell-ownership era. Even as the mark-ups started to rise, the build quality of their desktops remained extremely good; sufficiently so to justify me going for their machines rather than a self-build.
That changed a few years ago and they started to cut corners, while continuing to send the mark-ups soaring even higher. In particular:
- Their customisation options became more limited, generally restricting choices to just CPU, graphics card, RAM and storage. That wouldn't be so bad per se, but at the same time, they started to massively cheap-out on the components you couldn't customise. The motherboards they started using were pretty awful, the power-supplies didn't leave much headroom and were hard to upgrade (more on this in a minute) and while you could choose how much RAM you wanted, that was as far as it went - the RAM they used tended to be cheap and nasty.
- They started using components with non-standard dimensions. In particular, the PSUs in their desktop cases did not conform to any standard set of dimensions, so if you had a wonky PSU (and Alienware PSUs do not have fantastic reliability), then you were either scouring eBay for a replacement and hoping you weren't getting one that had already failed for somebody else, or making use of Alienware's own support. This all felt like an attempt to push the (very expensive) warranty services, by making self-repair of systems harder.
- Oddly for a premium supplier, the latest and greatest kit often wasn't available from them. There was a period of around 6 months where it was widely acknowledged that the Nvidia 980ti was in the sweet-spot of power and cost at the top end of the graphics card market... but Alienware wouldn't sell you a PC with one. Their default configuration had a bizarre 3x Nvidia 960 configuration; fine for games which have well-optimised multi-GPU support, but those are pretty rare (and still capped at 4GB of VRAM, which isn't really enough). They'd sell you a Titan X for a huge mark-up, but it was widely know that the Titan X was only a tiny bit faster than the 980ti, despite being hugely more expensive.
- While Alienware's systems remained blessedly free of the commercial bloatware that a lot of OEMs ship with (including "regular" Dells), their Command Centre software (which manages the case-lighting and cooling) bloated over time and had some stability issues. Moreover, they shipped quite a few PCs, both laptop and desktop, with wonky BIOS versions that caused very odd behaviour, despite their bugs being known at the time (and more stable BIOS versions being available). You could flash the BIOS, sure, but that isn't really an operation you should be expecting the end-user to undertake unless there's a desperate need (and their BIOS flash tool, which runs within Windows, is frankly terrifying to use).
- Oh, and the mark-ups eventually went beyond the "premium" range into the "you must think I'm stupid" range.
So yeah, while the laptop in TFA looks quite nice, I would treat it with great suspicion for the time being.
* WQHD
I thought battery units were Wh (Watt-hours).
Just ordered mine. I've been looking for a new portable to play solitaire and mahjong, and some games on Facebook.
This should fit the bill nicely and look impressive, to boot! It's great beng not-poor.
...And here we see an example native advertising, ladies and gentlemen. You'll notice marketing hype-style language being employed in the text, as well as the overly-repeated use of the "Alienware" brand name. To some readers, this might seem to be a legitimate news article. It sits among other articles, formatted in the same way, with very little to tell them apart at first glance. Alas, this is not a piece of journalism. Slashdot too appears to have succumbed to the native advertising bandwagon. Too few people pay attention to the banner ads, and too many people block them entirely; so they have taken the predictable step of hiding the advertising among the news.
Sorry, I seem to have missed something, perhaps I read the summary too quickly. What sort of display is on this machine, exactly?
Enquiring minds want to know
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Are the Radeon RX 470 and RX460 cards actually relevant in any way? Are they somehow going to be offered as an aftermarket option for the laptops or something? I don't see any other reason they'd be tacked on like they were.
That looks like a cheapo acer.
about 20 years ago that sold for >$10k.
This is MUCH better!
...to replace the IPS LCD in my current machine. Given the availability of both larger (TV) and smaller (phone) displays it should be technically possible to deliver a 15" screen and even with a premium price there should be a group of users willing to pay.
Don't get me wrong - better LCD panels can be reasonably low power with good color reproduction and wide viewing angles. But OLED enables very good colors* in combination with very wide viewing angles and a superb non-glare surface. With some good color selection of the user interface one can also lower power consumption while keeping the screen readable (as only lit pixels consume power) while for LCDs one have** to decrease the backlight for the entire display instead.
(* not necessarily better than LCDs optimized for colors)
(** with the current generation of screens at least, theoretically the backlight could be segmented into areas with per-area brightness control)
Who cares what 13'' display is like, it is too small and you won't even be able to see anything at max resolution.
But that's one chunky monkey of a 13" laptop. If I want something that small it's because I want a small laptop. If I get a 17" laptop, it can be as chunky as it wants but a 13" model needs to be slim and light.
Way back when the original Mac Portable came out. Oh, wait, that was 9.8".
Used them for hardware qualifications among other brands and they all have needed warranty repairs and replacements.
They may look pretty and have attractive specs, but something about how they are made and work is pure shit.
I've been doing a bit of GL coding lately, and actually something like this would be nice.
This seems not too big, but (presumably) has enough power for both running a lot of recent extensions as well enough CPU/RAM coupled with an SSD to make quick work of compile jobs. If I were doing the dev as my main job (and not as a side-hobby) then I'd probably be shopping for something with a GPU that supports Vulkan etc, as my existing "big" laptop does decent with GL but the GPU is a bit old for Vulkan. Having a good screen resolution is also *very* nice for coding as you tend to use up a lot of space with IDE, debugger, reference materials, and rendering window all competing for real estate. I'd guess that the Thunderbolt is nice at running external monitors as well.
Most of my code-on-the-road is actually done with a smaller system which has a piddly GPU but manages to compile so I can test stuff that doesn't use the newer extensions.
Sadly, a new laptop isn't currently in my budget but this seems to strike a nice balance. I'm not sure about Alienware post-Dell though, as I'm fairly partial to Asus laptops myself, and the Zenbooks have balanced size with some nice QHD+ resolutions for awhile now.
OLED screens HATE heat - something Alienware is notorious for.
Unless they're venting the heat well away from the screen, expect your screens to have degraded colors in short order.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.