I bought a fully-upgraded AW13 - Subjective Analysis

( NOTE: I have this posted in the Alienware Arena forums. Thought I'd copy that into this forum as well. )

So I recently tried out the Alienware 15 and I was very much impressed with the performance it output. Unfortunately that was short-lived as I was experiencing frequent WiFi disconnects and was forced to RMA it. Normally, I would open it up and replace the WiFi adapter. That was the first thing that came to mind, but alas it wasn't the WiFi adapter at all -- It was the two cable/antennas that connect to the adapter that were stripped and exposed.

My RMA'd AW15 came back and once again I was enjoying its full out performance... until I started to experience major artifacts and random crashes. A system recovery did NOT do the job unfortunately and I ruled out that my unit that arrived back into my hands had another issue with the GPU. Disappointed in my luck with the machine ( I still loved it ) and contemplating other notebooks after realizing that it is just a TOUCH too heavy for travelling, I decided to refund ( which could use a little work because it wasn't hassle-free as advertised ) and purchase myself a fully equipped AW13 thanks to a particular sales rep and heavy discounts. Below are my notebook's specifications:

Core i7-5500U, GTX960m 2 GB, 16GB of RAM, 1 TB HDD, 2560 x 1440 IPS Touch Screen.

There are some pros and cons that I took into consideration when I purchased this notebook: The biggest con is the performance I sacrificed. While I was spoiled by the AW15's gaming performance, the AW13 still has plenty of gaming grunt even for all the FPS games I play such as BF: Hardline, Titanfall ( people still play this! ), CS:GO. All games are completely playable at 60 FPS on mostly high settings @ 1080p with no AA.

Which brings me to my next con, albeit not very critical in my opinion, so lets put it between a con/pro: Games at 1080p look expanded on a 1440p screen for obvious reasons. This means much more jaggies to deal with and the GTX 960m ( OC'd 860m ) just doesn't have enough grunt to pump AA with high visual fidelity. I'm more of a frame-rate person than graphics, so jaggies don't bother me in the very least.

On the pro side of the screen: It's freaking beautiful and the touch functionality is really useful as I find myself raging at the touchpad sometimes. So having a 2nd point of interaction via the screen is a MAJOR plus for me. Content consumption via YouTube has been an amazing experience and videos that DO support the 1440p, I was in for a treat. NetFlix and movie content were just as satisfying to watch on this screen as well.

The 1 TB hard drive bundled with this machine is 5400 RPM. I didn't hesitate on replacing it with a 500 GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD. It made the machine that much happier. If you're sticking with the HDD for any reason, it's fairly decent if you need the space. Otherwise, ditch it and configure with an M.2 SSD, the machine will come with 2 M.2 slots and if you go for the HDD config, you'll be limited to one 2.5'' SATA connection ( which I was fine with. )

Build quality is quite nice with the machine. It really does feel like a premium system when you hold it -- Light to carry with, enough heft to feel very sturdy. I had no issues with taking this machine and tossing it into my backpack, going back and forth from work, to friends and even carrying it under my arm.

The speaker system is impressive for a 13 inch notebook, although it isn't as powerful as the AW15. The X-Fi software is also much lighter compared to the AW15's software suite. This is mostly due to the fact that the AW13 has a different sound chip ( Integrated Realtek vs AW15's Creative chip ). Nonetheless, the audio that this little notebook outputs is balanced with enough bass for anything from music, movies to gaming and you can actually rave in a small room. Good job, AW.

Battery life is the main reason behind why I also considered the AW13. The AW15 already had an impressive 92-whr battery and I was skeptical of the much lower 52-whr battery with the AW13... until I remembered that the i7-5500u is a ULV chip. So this balanced in the end. On the balanced power profile with AlienFX lighting disabled, I was able to maintain a respectable 7.5 hours of consistent work. This was already an instant win in my books. Setting it to Power Saver settings and everything disabled with AlienFX, it nabbed me another 2 hours ( although I think that's an artificial reading ), so it squeezed out even more juice to keep me occupied in my conference meetings. Good job once again, AW, I can imagine the i5-5200u/4210u variants are getting even better battery life.

All in all, I am very much impressed with this notebook. It's extremely light, so moving around with it has been much easier than it was with the AW15 and it still retains enough power to play the latest games on the market with good visual fidelity and frame-rates, provided that you're playing at 1080p resolution. Native 1440p res, you'll probably find yourself tuning down the graphics settings although I haven't played any at that particular resolution, yet. The i7-5500u processor was the biggest worry for me as I was coming from an i7-4710HQ Quad Core CPU from the AW15, but I've been extremely impressed by its performance and it hasn't let me down for multi-tasking by any means. Even when I was streaming to twitch, I experienced no hiccups, so this is a potent little chip. That's not to say that it can match the mobile quad cores by any stretch of imagination. Content creation and heavier gaming tasks, that's what my desktop is for.

So my personal opinion: The AW 13 is a great little gaming notebook balanced with portability,,performance and battery life. I have no issues recommending the i7 model as long as you can haggle a deal for it. You would probably find yourself saving A LOT more money by skipping the 1440p screen and settling with a 1080p screen. Use that extra cash for an SSD.

Any questions, feel free to ask!

** UPDATE #1 - Apr. 12th 2015 **

So I failed to mention temperatures. My fault. So idling with nothing minimized and simple start-up programs running, the CPU floats around 34-38 degrees C with the 960M sitting around 44-50 degrees.

The following games/apps I've played report the following temperatures ( in Degrees C ):

TITANFALL ( High, 1080p, no AA ) - CPU: 62-65 - GPU: 56-59
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 ( Extra Textures, 1440p, no AA, DoF Off ) - CPU: 57 - 61 - GPU: 62
Heroes of The Storm ( High, 900p, no AA ) - CPU: 62 - 64 - GPU: 60 - 62
BattleField: Hardline ( Medium, 1440p, no AA ) - CPU: 66 - 68 - GPU: 59 - 63
Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes ( High, 900p, no AA ) CPU: 62 - 66 - GPU: 64 - 69

Valley Benchmark ( Extreme ) - CPU: 55 - 60 - GPU: 72-74
Prime 95 ( Small FFT, 4 hours ) - CPU: 75 - GPU: N/A

These were reported in a room with an ambient temperature of 22 degrees C. Extremely comfortable temps with these hardware specs. It's actually the first notebook I've owned where I'm able to play games with the machine on my lap without fear of burning my nads off.

 

How's scaling when you change the resolution to 1080p to play games on the 1440p screen? Any issues? Do you have to logout and log back in like on the AW 15 with the 4k display for Windows to properly adjust?

Thanks, nice review.

 

I haven't had any issues, although I did experience driver crashing/recovery whenever I exited a game. That was fixed up with a driver update, though.

 

It looks like the 1080p and 1440p screens are both getting good comments. Hopefully no more issues for you

 

I was definitely taken by surprise with this notebook's screen and performance! It's been treating me very well these last couple of days.

 

I love how they both look. It all depends on the budget and personal needs.

 

I have been uniformly singing the praises of the 1440p on the AW 13 since I got mine in December. No way would I personally go back to IPS now, not because its bad but the TrueLife just looks that much better to my eyes. When I can finally pull the trigger on an AW 15 to replace my travel/work laptop (AW 13 stays at the house), I will only get the TrueLife even if I run it at 1080p. but with the 980m I suspect even at 2560x1440 it will look and run well at 15". Only my old M17x-R2 with the RGB LED screen gets close the fidelity of the TrueLife IPS panels.

 

Yes, the truelife is awesome. Every laptop I use or look at now, I'm like Wowwww that sucks compared to mine Mine came calibrated very well, extremely Very nice balance and colours.

 

Something about reading this gives me the bad notion that there is something wrong with my battery.
While my battery life can be okay, it usually just hangs around 4-5 hours on idle or doing light work when on my power savings plan.
I pretty much similar specs (read my signature for comparison), so it shouldn't be the case that my battery life, well, mediocre. Should I contact support for a battery replacement (calling in @Alienware-L_Porras for additional assistance on this)?

 

Well then it's a good thing the 4980HQ isn't an extreme CPU then isn't it? Or is this still a very difficult concept for you "enthusiasts" to understand

Intels product line:

i3 -> i5 -> i7 (THIS IS WHAT THE 4980HQ IS) -> i7 Extreme Edition

An i7 and an i7 extreme edition are two different products, and two different product lines, stop comparing the two.

Seriously, how childish are you? Asking someone to change their avatar because it offends you? Not to mention you've already been told several times by mods, STOP BRINGING UP BGA IN TOPICS THAT AREN'T RELATED TO BGA.

Jesus **** you guys need to grow up and mature.

 

@TomJGX please don't make personal attacks, PM me or any other moderator if you are confused about the forum rules. Thanks!

 

Check to see if your gpu is being activated by a program by mistake.

 

I had it disabled for a test.
Left in Idle (well... sort of. Task Manager and HWMonitor were up to see usage data), and was reported 5 hours. on my power savings battery plan. To make it worse, on idle, the CPU only used up to 2 watts, but usually 1. To make it worse, 5 % of the battery was drained when I was away for 20 to 25 minutes. 7 hours on idle? That doesn't make sense to me.

 

What was your screen brightness?

 

Absolute minimum. AlienFx , touchscreen function, and touchpad were off as well.
Granted, my test was in Windows 8.1. I'll see if this weekend Windows 7 fares much better.

 

It doesn't hurt to get a check up -- Bear in mind that this is my experience and other AW13 users may have different battery readings. I don't do a lot on battery and I did remember to switch from Express Charge to Standard Charge in the BIOs on first boot to prevent any battery wear ( which already has 3%, nothing to worry about ).