Advice for potential Alienware 15 R2 buyer

Hi guys, I'm looking to take advantage of the current deal on the AW15 R2 with a 970M, 1080p screen and I'm wondering what some of the current owners think about it. I know the R1 release got a lot of hate and I'm a littlr apprehensive when it comes to the newer model as well. Other than the 1080p screen's brightness being terrible, are most people pleased with this laptop's build/performance/cooling?

 

I have a R2 with 980 and UHD and I'm very pleased with mine. I've had some long gaming sessions and have had 0 thermal throttling. It's impressive how cool these Skylake procs are. The chassis feels very solid too. The plastics have a good feel to them. When you see it in real life it looks like a quality made unit. It's one of the best looking laptops out there IMHO.

 

my advice? dont buy the fhd version. The new fhd screen is pretty crappy but the uhd screen is top notch.

 

I have a 17r2 and it's my favorite laptop. I really enjoy using it and the graphics amp gives it long legs.

 

That's what I heard... Although UHD would give the graphics amplifier purpose in the future, isn't the scaling pretty atrocious in Windows 10?

 

I consider it pretty good if you put scaling on 200% 250% makes it fuzzy for some legacy apps.

 

Coming from an XPS 15 with a brilliant 1080p screen (RGBLED backlit), I have the following to say about my current UHD:

• The first thing that I noticed was that the anti-glare coating works really well. On my XPS I was used to living with the glare, which is now gone.
• The higher resolution is good for when I am working (PS, Illustrator, MS Office etc) as everything is so crisp and clear. Especially in photo editing the level of detail that I can now see without zooming in is amazing.
• Normal browsing on Chrome also looks more impressive than before due to the crispness of fonts, and its interface. Even reddit looks so good now!
• Youtube vids on 720p and 1080p look much worse than they did on my XPS. Now they look slightly blurry. Maybe due to my 250% scaling which means the number of actual pixels used to get one pixel in the video is not an integer multiple.
• Some windows system dialog boxes (not all) look fuzzy due to scaling issues. But some other windows look downright beautiful.
• Gaming on 4K is very taxing on the GPU, I wouldn't recommend it. But gaming on 1080p is much smoother and better than I had ever hoped for.
• Battery life is much better than I expected. I expected to get something like 4 hours with this screen but it's closer to 6-7 hours for Excel/Word kind of work.

In a nutshell this is the best screen I have ever used: its sharpness, color temperature and gamut are perfect for my design work as well as general use. If Windows fixes its scaling issues, the experience would be totally flawless.

 

You won't have any scaling issues with applications or games if you adjust the resolution and then restart* your PC, so that it acts like a native 1080p screen. Then load your games and they should go fullscreen without issue. If you just play at 1080p in the game settings, it'll be all screwed up.

Tedious process but it's better than dealing with the FHD screen's ghosting and poor quality.

*I actually think you only need to relog.

 

How do you mean? This is what I do and it works great.

 

I have the same laptop and feel the same way about mine. No thermal issues at all, the UHD screen is awesome, keyboard, and build quality have been great.

 

Thanks guys, seems like people are mostly satisfied with the R2 iteration. Also, can you install 42mm and 60mm M.2 drives or just 80mm?

To be honest, I will want to do a repaste on it and the teardown process on this laptop seems very complicated compared to a Clevo P650RE for example. It will be my first repaste attempt so that makes me a bit apprehensive...

 

As a first time ever alienware user since the aw15 r1 I wasn't able to really understand all the hate towards it in this forum. I really love mine, have the A06 bios in it and the laptop is cold all the time, the fan only kicks when really needed, while gaming the fan noise is huge but I have a logitech 2.1 system around my desk so I couldn't care less. Only thing that looks nice to me about the r2 is probably the new processor (which allows for ddr4) and well, maybe that usb c port because it could work as another way to connect a display. PCI express drives are too expensive right now and I can open anything almost instantaneously with my ssd already, maybe for video editors the feature is a must-have but I'm fine.

No hate but I found a UHD display in that size to be too problematic and not worth the issues. The scaling has to be massive in such small diagonal size and the system is really for gaming, if I wanted a powerhouse for work mostly I'd go for the UHD XPS 15 with infinity display. UHD on the desktop makes sense for me at around 27-34 inches, IMO anyways.

 

Once a Dell technician came to my house to replace the speakers of my alienware, even for him the process took him around 1 hour and from what I've seen it gets really complicated, I wouldn't attempt it on mine unless you have extreme patience.

I couldn't avoid noticing that on your current laptop (signature) you have corsair vengeance ram, I just ordered it on amazon, is it really that good?

 

It's been solid on my soon to be retired MSI laptop. I've owned Kingston HyperX modules as well, haven't had any issues with either brand.


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