I’ve owned a grand total of two gaming laptops. It was depressing how quickly they aged. But the new Alienware 13 won’t suffer the same fate. It’s the first gaming laptop that lets you connect a external desktop graphics card for freaking awesome, truly unheard-of speed.
a Razer Blade. While the Blade could very nearly manage to play intensive games on its crazy 3200 x 1800 screen with its quad-core processor and faster 870M graphics, my pumped up $US1,800 Alienware 13 config struggled to run some of my favs at 2560 x 1440. Tomb Raider and Borderlands 2 were playable at that resolution with a lot of the eye candy turned off, but we’re still not talking buttery framerates. More intensive games like Titanfall, Crysis 3 and The Witcher 2 only thrive at 1080p. And because 1080p content blown up to 1440p looks a little jagged, you’ll have to spend extra horsepower on anti-aliasing.
But unlike the Razer Blade, you have two wonderful solutions to this conundrum. First, I’d recommend you simply buy a Alienware 13 with a 1080p screen, where all your games will look gorgeous even if you can’t max out their settings. Easy.
Or, you could spend upwards of $US300 on the laptop’s most exciting feature: the Alienware Graphics Amplifier.
It’s a black vented box roughly the size of a small toaster oven. It’s about as barebones as can be. Cheap plastic latches (I already broke a few of them) let you flip open its hinged plastic shell to reveal a 460W PC power supply next to a tiny circuit board with a PCI-Express x16 slot. I ripped my GeForce GTX 660 Ti out of my desktop computer, clicked it into place, fastened two screws and connected the two GPU power connectors. I plugged in the power cord. Ready. I stuck one end of Alienware’s proprietary cable into the back of the GFX Amp, and one into the back of the laptop — which prompted me to restart the computer.
But once I rebooted, there was no configuration, no drivers to change, nothing of the sort. As far as the Alienware 13 was concerned, I had a GTX 660 Ti inside the laptop. The difference was substantial. In Tomb Raider, I was able to jump up from 1440p and barely playable to 1440p and buttery smooth at high levels of detail.
So I decided to go for broke. I stuck Nvidia’s latest GeForce GTX 980 graphics card inside the Amp, and hooked up a 4K monitor while I was at it. The result was heaven.
With the most powerful gaming graphics card virtually inside my laptop, Titanfall, Crysis 3, Tomb Raider, and Borderlands 2 were all playable at 4K resolution and respectable levels of detail. I could practically max out every game at 2560 x 1440. (The Witcher 2 ran at 2560 x 1440 on High, in case you’re wondering.)
Sure, you’d probably expect that from $US900 of additional hardware, not counting the price of a 4K monitor, but this kind of upgrade has simply never been possible before. The only external graphics options for laptops have been crazy bandwidth-limited hacks or one-off solutions that didn’t allow upgrades like the
With a solid state drive, this PC screams. Everything is speedy. Everything.
Love the extreme stereo separation and virtual surround sound from Sound Blaster’s Xi3 sound processing. I used to make fun of software audio processing, but it’s gotten so much better over the years. This version is tuned wonderfully for the Alienware 13’s speakers. Shame they’re still a bit tinny. (Insert “All About That Bass” joke here.)
Don’t Like
Despite using a nice low-voltage Intel Haswell processor, the Alienware 13’s battery life is pretty shitty. I haven’t managed to get more than 3 hours and 10 minutes of work done on the machine. The Razer Blade manages 4 hours with a quad-core standard voltage processor, a higher-res screen AND a way thinner chassis. What gives, Alienware?
The Graphics Amplifier works like a dream, but it feels pretty janky for a $US300 product. I’d love to see it included in the price of the machine.
You have to reset the computer every time you plug in or remove the Graphics Amplifier. It’s not a big deal if you bought a solid state drive, because reboots take like 10 seconds.
That soft-touch material picks up finger oil like nobody’s business.
Speaking of business, Alienware has none outfitting this machine with a 1366 x 768 screen or a 5400RPM hard drive. Don’t buy them.
Should I Buy It?
Alienware 13
Price: $TBA
Like
Amazing keyboard.
Not too loud.
The external graphics card is a cool idea.
Don’t Like
Poor battery life.
Graphics Amplifier shouldn’t cost extra.
Picks up fingerprints.
I’m not entirely sure. The idea of taking all my games on the go, then coming home and plugging them into a desktop graphics card, monitor, mouse, and keyboard sounds pretty damn fantastic.
But the Alienware 13 is still pretty chunky and still lacks the battery life to make it as quite as portable as it should be. Right now, it’s less powerful AND less portable than the Razer Blade.
Personally, I’d rather buy a Dell XPS laptop without discrete graphics that gives me the battery life I need for work, but also has the Alienware Graphics Amplifier port so I can take it home and play. But that doesn’t exist. (Yet.)
For now, the Alienware 13 is a pretty damn capable computer that can play pretty much all your PC games at high settings, and can be upgraded to levels of potency of which other laptops can only dream.