Alienware m15 R5 Ryzen Edition Laptop Review - More performance for less money

The chassis of the m15 R5 is completely new, but Alienware still keeps the familiar design language. The Ryzen Edition is only available in a dark gray color (Dark Side of the Moon) and you get the familiar lighting elements at the rear. There is a new darker strip at the front and the sides, which is supposed to make the design more appealing. All in all, the notebook now looks a bit more filigree than its predecessor. The semi-matt surfaces are nice to touch and fingerprints are not a huge problem.

The quality of the chassis does not quite meet our expectations. The build quality itself is very good and the base unit in particular is very sturdy, but you hear loud creaking noises when you open and close the lid. The lid itself is also more flexible and pressure on the back results in picture distortions, but this should not be a major issue in practice. The hinges are well-adjusted; you can open the lid with one hand and there is hardly any bouncing.

This new chassis is also used for the new Alienware m15 R6, which is equipped with modern Tiger Lake-H processors from Intel.

Thanks to the special hinge design, which is not located at the rear of the device, the Alienware m15 R5 is by far the deepest device in the comparison group. Width and height on the other hand are pretty comparable, but the m15 is also the heaviest device at almost 2.5 kg. You also have to consider 780 grams for the 240W power adapter when you travel.

The port selection is worse compared to the old model. There are no more USB ports at the left side and both the microSD reader as well as the Graphics Amplifier port are gone. Gamers at least still get a fast Ethernet connector (2.5 Gbps). Thunderbolt is not supported; the USB-C port on the rear supports DisplayPort output but cannot be used to charge the device. The m15 R6 with Intel CPUs has Thunderbolt support, but the ports are otherwise identical.

The Wi-Fi module Killer AX1650x supports the fast Wi-Fi 6 standard and manages high transfer rates in our standardized Wi-Fi test with the router Netgear Nighthawk RAX120, even though the previous m15 R4 was even a bit faster. You can also use the fast Ethernet connection (2.5 Gbps) for more reliability when you play games.

Alienware only implements a very simple 720p webcam, which does not have good picture quality.

The Alienware m15 R5 is only shipped with a one-year warranty by default, which also includes an on-site service. You can extend the duration all the way up to 4 years for an additional ~500 Euros.

The display selection has changed a bit compared to the old m15 R4. You get a 1080p screen with fast response times and 165 Hz refresh rate by default, but you can also upgrade to a QHD panel with 240 Hz and G-Sync support. The Intel model m15 R6 even gets an option for a 1080p panel with 360 Hz.

The panel in our review unit is provided by AU Optronics and manages decent results. It is not one of the brightest models, but the subjective picture quality of the matte screen is very good and it convinces with very fast response times and high refresh rates, which are very important for a gaming laptop. Very good: Our test unit did not suffer from any backlight bleeding.

Alienware’s Command Center offer multiple settings for the performance, power consumption, and overclocking. We used the default settings (Overclocking: Off, Power: Balanced, Thermal: Balanced) for our measurements and benchmarks.

Our test unit is equipped with the modern Ryzen 7 5800H processor with 8 cores (16 threads) with a maximum clock of up to 4.4 GHz. More technical information about the processor is available here. The Alienware m15 R5 allows a consumption of 65W for a couple of seconds before it stabilizes at 54W, which results in 8x 3.6 GHz. The m15 R5 is also available with the Ryzen 9 5900HX (also 8 cores, up to 4.6 GHz) if you need a faster CPU.

The performance of the processor is very good and much better than the old Core i9-10980HK in the Alienware m15 R4 and it is pretty much identical to the brand-new Tiger Lake-H i7-11800H in the Asus TUF Gaming F15, even though it requires much more power (>70W) in this laptop. The performance is not reduced on battery power.

The system performance is excellent thanks to the powerful components, which is supported by our subjective performance impression as well as the good results in the synthetic benchmarks.

The small M.2-2242 SSD in our review unit is provided by Toshiba and has a storage capacity of 512 GB. The NVMe-SSD is attached via PCIe 3.0-x4, but does not manage great results in the benchmarks. However, you will hardly notice the difference to a faster drive when you play games and PCIe 4.0 is not supported, either. More SSD benchmarks are available in our tech section.

The GeForce RTX 3060 is a very good choice for the default FHD panel, and even demanding titles like Cyberpunk 2077 run smoothly at maximum details. The gaming performance of the Ryzen 7 5800H is pretty much on par with the new Tiger Lake-H Core i7-11800H and it is also stable in longer workloads, which is shown by the Witcher 3 loop. There is a significant performance drop on battery power; the fps in Witcher 3 (Ultra), for example, drops by more than 70% (76 vs. 22 fps). More gaming benchmarks with the GeForce RTX 3060 are available in our tech section.