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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.
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.