Alienware m16 R2 review: This gaming laptop can be your daily driver

The Alienware m16 R2 isn’t exactly the type of PC I’d expect from Alienware. This 16-inch laptop delivers solid gaming performance, but it’s also focused on being compact and offering long battery life. It doesn’t even offer the highest-end GPUs as an upgrade option. It actually caps out at an RTX 4070, and you’ll have to get another laptop if you want an RTX 4080 or RTX 4090.

The trademark glowing alien head logos are still here, but Alienware told me its target audience for this laptop was gamers who want a PC for more than just gaming — one that can go to school or to the office as well. Alienware delivered, but there’s just one thing I wish was different. Read on to learn more.

Looking for more options? Check out PCWorld’s roundup of the best gaming laptops available right now.

The Alienware m16 R2 is available in a variety of different hardware configurations. The machine we reviewed is priced at $1,849 and had an Intel Core Ultra 7 155 CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD.

You can also get a model with Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics for $200 less. Alienware told us that you’ll soon be able to buy models with Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics and that these will be even less expensive.

Additionally, Alienware says it will offer models with the option of an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor, up to 64 GB of RAM, and up to 8 TB of storage. On top of that, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 will be available as an option — the base machine comes with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 radios.

CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 155H

Memory: 16GB DDR5 5600MHz

Graphics/GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070

Display: 2560×1600 IPS 240Hz (300 nits)

Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD

Webcam: 1080p webcam with HDR

Connectivity: 1x Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C 4 Gen 2 with 15W Power Delivery and DisplayPort 1.4, 1x USB-C / USB 3.2 Gen 2 with DisplayPort 1.4, 2x USB-A 3.2, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x Ethernet, 1x headphone jack, 1x microSD card reader

Networking: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3

Biometrics: Windows Hello facial recognition

Battery capacity: 90 Watt-hour

Dimensions: 14.33 inches x 9.82 inches x 0.93 inches

Weight: 5.62 pounds

MSRP: $1,849 as tested ($1,649 base)

Alienware m16 R2: Design and build quality

Alienware was proud to tell me that the m16 R2 is now 15 percent more compact than the previous m16 laptop thanks to the removal of the “thermal shelf” at the back of the laptop.

The Alienware m16 R2’s cooling still works well. The keyboard stayed a very reasonable temperature in long gaming sessions and most of the hot air seemed like it was being expelled from the back of the laptop rather than blowing directly out the right vent and onto my mouse hand — a problem with some gaming laptops.

The aesthetics feel sleek: It’s very Alienware, but it’s also fairly restrained. You’ve got a metal lid (anodized aluminum) with more of a gray color, featuring as a centered Alienware logo that glows while the laptop is on.

Inside, a glowing Alienware logo that functions as a power button sits above the keyboard, in the middle of some vents. The keyboard supports RGB backlighting, and the touchpad is surrounded by a nice LED light bar. The keyboard deck has a nice, rubbery-feeling “soft-touch” surface — not hard, cold metal or cheap, creaky plastic.

The build quality is solid. You probably shouldn’t be picking up this laptop from the corner and holding it regularly — it’s a little heavy for that — but I did a few times, and it was solid without any strange flexing. The hinge feels good to open and close, and it opens to 180 degrees if you want to lie the laptop flat. There’s nothing bad to report here — the build quality is basically as good as I could hope to see.

Alienware told me that they want the m16 R2 to be a laptop that can be comfortably used outside of gaming environments like coffee shops and meeting rooms, too. The laptop has a “Stealth Mode” that quiets the fans and turns off the glowing Alienware logo on the back. You can tone down the gamer aesthetic when necessary.

Of course, this is still an Alienware laptop — even if you turn off that glowing alien head logo, it’ll still be sitting there on the back of your laptop. That’s not necessarily bad, but anyone who gives this machine a second glance will know that it isn’t just a typical business laptop.

Even the charger is nice: Our review model came with a small form factor GaN charger, further boosting the laptop’s portability.

The laptop has a few useful utilities, like the Alienware Command Center for configuring the LED colors and accessing other settings like those, but the included applications are very streamlined. It isn’t packed with junk software, and that’s always good to see.

Alienware m16 R2: Keyboard and trackpad

The keyboard feels great to type on, too. There’s plenty of travel, and whether I had my fingers glued to the WASD keys for movement in a game or I was actually typing, I was very happy with the keyboard.

If you’re a mechanical keyboard fan and that’s a must-have feature for you, be aware that this isn’t a mechanical keyboard. But you can have a great typing experience with any type of keyboard, and this is a good keyboard.

The touchpad is very nice to use, too. (These days, we PC users are spoiled for good touchpads.) It’s responsive and feels good to slide your finger over. It’s plenty big, and I do love the look of the LED light bar. I’ve had slightly better experience with glass touchpads — the rubbery-feeling coating here isn’t quite as nice as some of those glass touchpads I’ve used — but this is good. For gaming, you’ll probably be using a mouse or a gamepad, anyway.

Alienware m16 R2: Display and speakers

This is a very reasonable display for the price point. You’re getting a 16-inch QHD+ (2560×1600 resolution) display with a speedy 240Hz refresh rate. It supports NVIDIA G-Sync, AMD FreeSync, and Dolby Vision HDR.

That’s all pretty great on paper, and it looks good. But this is an IPS panel, not an OLED panel. That’s not a surprise — this is much more in the “affordable” range as far as gaming laptops go. But more gaming laptops are coming with OLED displays, so it’s worth noting. Some people will want to seek out a laptop with an OLED display instead, and that’s understandable — but you’ll probably spend more money for a laptop with that feature.

Personally, I use a laptop with an IPS display every day and I’m totally fine with it. Still, there’s no denying some of those OLEDs I’ve been looking at lately are incredibly beautiful. (But they’re also more expensive!) In summary: This is a perfectly good display, but it is an IPS display.

The main concern I have is the brightness of the m16 R2’s display — it’s pretty dim. Alienware says it has 300 nits of brightness, and I had to crank it up high for PCWorld’s standard battery test. I gamed at 100 percent brightness in a dark room at night, and even at 100 percent brightness, it didn’t feel overly bright — I didn’t want to turn it down.

The display isn’t bad, but it’s not the best you can buy — which is no surprise at this reasonable price point! Just be aware of that.

The speakers seem plenty loud, and you can get some gaming done without the fans drowning out the audio too much. They’re not going to compare with a good pair of headphones or external speakers, though.

Alienware m16 R2: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

The Alienware m16 R2 includes a 1080p webcam with HDR, dual-array microphones, and an IR camera for Windows Hello support — biometric logins with your face.

The 1080p webcam looks fine. For a gaming laptop, it’s more than fine. I’ve seen gaming laptops with much worse webcams — I’ve even seen gaming laptops with no webcams at all! And, because this has an Intel Meteor Lake chip with a neural processing unit (NPU), you get access to Windows Studio Effects. That package of effects delivers tricks that can make it look like you’re always making eye contact with the camera, for example.

The built-in microphone is certainly usable. I’ve been in online meetings where professionals used much worse microphones. I wouldn’t say the microphone is amazing: I decided to plug in an external USB microphone for my gaming session and my co-op partner thought the audio quality was much improved. But if you’re reading this, I’m sure you already expect that you’ll want to plug in a headset — or separate headphones and a microphone — for the best audio experience.

This is a pretty standard Windows Hello webcam that worked just fine in my experience, too. It’s good to have biometric login support.

Alienware m16 R2: Connectivity

On the back of the Alienware m16 R2, there’s the trusty power port, and an HDMI 2.1 port. There are also two USB-C ports with different logos: One is a Thunderbolt 4 port (USB 4 Gen 2, 15W Power Delivery, and DisplayPort 1.4), and the other is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port with DisplayPort 1.4.

The HDMI port and that USB 3.2 Gen 2 port are connected directly to the discrete GPU (the Nvidia GeForce GPU) and not the integrated GPU. If you’re going to be gaming on an external display, you can connect it to either of these ports, skipping the integrated GPU for improved performance.

On the right side of the laptop, you’ll see two traditional USB-A ports (USB 3.2 Gen 1) and a microSD card slot. On the left side of the laptop, you’ve got an RJ-45 for wired Ethernet networking and a headset jack.

Overall, the connectivity options are reasonably extensive. There’s a good chance you can go without a dongle or a port-packed laptop dock.

The laptop supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, so it’s got the standard modern wireless radios you’ll be looking for. This is Intel Killer Wi-Fi hardware — specifically, Intel Killer AX1675 hardware. Intel talks up its Killer Wi-Fi technology, claiming it has “powerful gaming network technology to minimize lag, latency, and packet loss.” I’m not sure Killer Wi-Fi is a must-have feature, but it’s here.

Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 hardware is available as an optional upgrade, but it’s not available in the base version of the laptop. Wi-Fi 7 isn’t very widespread yet — you almost certainly don’t have a Wi-Fi 7 router yet — so this isn’t a big deal.

Alienware m16 R2: Performance

Now let’s get down to brass tacks. Sure, Alienware m16 R2 has good build quality, a smart design, and a competitive selection of ports. But when I’m looking at a gaming laptop, I’m always thinking about the price to performance ratio.

The Alienware m16 R2 we reviewed packed one of Intel’s new Meteor Lake chips — the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. It’s more focused on power efficiency than performance than the previous Raptor Lake hardware. It’s also got an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 — not the highest-end GeForce chip for a laptop, but not the lowest one either. But we can talk on-paper specs all day — how well does it actually perform in our standard benchmarks?

Before we even look at benchmark results, we know from the specs that we’re looking at a more mid-range, portable gaming laptop. This doesn’t have the highest-end CPU or the beefiest GPU. It’s on the compact side, so it doesn’t have the craziest cooling setup. That’s fine: Laptops with more extreme performance may be significantly more expensive and significantly larger, with more weight and worse battery life.

Our first test, PCMark 10 is designed to measure the system’s overall performance — not just gaming performance. It’s an all-around benchmark, but it’s much more focused on the CPU than the GPU.

The results were about what we’d expect to see. The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU helps the system pull ahead of a laptop with a Intel Core i5 processor from the Raptor Lake generation. Unsurprisingly, laptops with the higher-end Intel Core i9 Raptor Lake chips deliver higher performance numbers.

Next, we run Cinebench R20, a heavily multithreaded benchmark that looks at CPU performance. Cinebench R20 is a quick benchmark, so cooling isn’t much of a factor.

Again, CPU performance pulled ahead of the average previous-generation chips. The Alienware m16 R2’s CPU couldn’t deliver the performance of the high-end gaming laptops with Intel Core i9-14900HX chips, however.

That’s no surprise, either: The Core Ultra 7 155H chip in this laptop is a 16-core chip, while the Core i9-14900HX is a 24-core chip. In a multi-threaded CPU benchmark like this one, more cores mean more performance. And a heavily optimized multithreaded benchmark doesn’t tell you how the laptop will perform in actual games.

We also encode a video file with Handbrake. This benchmark is also a heavily multithreaded CPU benchmark, but it takes much longer to run. It demands the laptop’s cooling does some serious work. If a laptop’s cooling system isn’t up to snuff and the CPU performance goes down over time under heavy CPU loads, this benchmark reveals that.

Again, the Alienware delivered a solid result, behind only the high-end Core i9 chips with extra cores.

Now let’s get to the graphics benchmarks. The Alienware m16 R2 delivers solid performance in 3DMark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that’s very GPU focused. Here, it’s in spitting distance of the Razer Blade 16, both of which have Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs. This illustrates how the GPU is much more important than the CPU in most games.

The m16 R2 is crushed by the MSI Raider GE78 — that system has a high-end, power-hungry, expensive RTX 4090 GPU. But that MSI machine is a $5400 laptop that weighs almost eight pounds! The Alienware model we’re benchmarking here is less than $2,000 and weighs about five and a half pounds.

Now, let’s get to some game benchmarks. We run the benchmark in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It’s an older title, but an excellent way to compare performance across different PCs. The Alienware m16 R2 averages 144 frames per second in the benchmark, right in line with other RTX 4070-powered laptops.

It’s only four frames per second slower than that Razer Blade 16 that was pulling ahead of it in the CPU benchmarks, once again showing just how important the GPU alone is to many games. And that Razer Blade starts at $3,000.

As always, that MSI with the RTX 4090 takes the crown. At 203 frames per second, it’s 41 percent faster than this Alienware laptop. But it’s also nearly three times the price.

Finally, we finish up with the benchmark in Metro Exodus, a more demanding game where we run the benchmark at 1080p resolution at the Extreme detail setting. The Alienware m16 R2 was once again right in line with the other RTX 4070 laptops at 50 frames per second, showing much-improved performance over an RTX 4050-powered laptop. That MSI delivered 80 percent more frames per second here — but again, it did so at nearly three times the price.

This is a solid Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070-powered laptop. The cooling is doing its job very well, and the GPU doesn’t seem to be held back. Obviously, this laptop can’t keep up with a no-expense-spared, heavier, and more power-hungry RTX 4090-powered system, but we knew that going in.

The CPU performs well, and it’s only beaten in multi-threaded CPU performance by more power-hungry chips that have additional cores. But those extra cores don’t necessarily translate to significant performance gains in most games.

Alienware m16 R2: Battery life

Gaming laptops usually don’t have great battery life. The top concern is often maximum performance while plugged in. But this Alienware aspires to be not just a gaming laptop, but also a “daily driver.” It’s also helped by Intel’s new, more power-efficient Meteor Lake chips here.

The Alienware m16 R2 packs a 90-Watt-hour battery. That’s among the highest you’ll find — the U.S. Transportation Security Administration requires batteries be 100 Watt hours or less if you want to take them on an airplane.

To test the battery life, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on repeat in the Movies & TV app on Windows 11 with airplane mode enabled and keyboard backlighting disabled until the laptop suspends itself. This is a best-case scenario for the laptop — local video playback is very efficient, and battery life in the real world will be less as you open browser tabs and use applications.

We always set the screen to 250 nits of brightness for this, and with the dim display, that meant really cranking up the laptop’s brightness.

The Alienware m16 R2 delivered very impressive results, playing the video for 435 minutes on average — that’s seven hours and fifteen minutes. It’s very respectable and for a gaming laptop, it’s pretty impressive.

Here, the Alienware m16 R2 crushed those power-hungry Core i9 laptops. Those laptops aren’t better at everything — they’re better at raw power, but they only lasted about four hours and eighteen minutes — and that’s in an ideal situation.

The Alienware delivers on its promise here, providing longer battery life that maximum-performance-at-all-costs gaming laptops don’t match.

Alienware m16 R2: Conclusion

The Alienware m16 R2 is a great laptop. It delivers strong graphics performance thanks to its Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 along with decent CPU performance. And it delivers all that while offering long battery life away from an outlet — long battery life for a gaming laptop, anyway. However, the display is a good IPS display, but it’s on the dim side, and I can see that being an issue for some people.

This Alienware machine is a great value for its specs, its retail price beats similar systems like the Asus ROG Zephyrus M16 and the HP Victus 16 (2023). If you find an RTX 4070 laptop with an even cheaper retail price, it may make some sacrifices. For example, it may have a lower-resolution screen with a lower refresh rate. If you’re shopping for a laptop in this price range and you want a machine that can do more than just be tethered to a desk and play games, it’s a great fit. I just wish its display could be a bit brighter – but that’s not a deal-breaker considering everything else this laptop gets right.

Author: Chris Hoffman