Alienware M15 vs Dell XPS 15: Which to Get?

This is the comparison between the Alienware M15 vs Dell XPS 15

ALIENWARE M15	DELL XPS 15
BUY NOW	BUY NOW
PROS	PROS
Strong performance. Long battery life. Incredibly light for a gaming laptop. Gorgeous 4K display. High quality, premium metal chassis. Best chiclet-style gaming laptop keyboard yet.	Doubles as a capable gaming PC. Good value despite high pricing. 1080p and 4K display options. Up to 32GB RAM.
CONS	CONS
Lackluster speakers. Big bezels. Top-tier model is very expensive. Can get warm in spots while gaming. Not as light as the competition.	Can get pricey with Core i9 and 2TB SSD.

SPECIFICATIONS

Expert Reviews for Alienware M15:

By mensxp.com
Alienware took its time to come up with a ‘thin and light’ gaming laptop, but I’d say that it has hit the sweet spot. The m15 is equal parts flashy and powerful. Despite being different from the other Alienware laptops, the m15 has managed to retain…

By Digit
The Alienware m15 performs precisely in line with our expectations, that is, excellent frame rates while gaming and short render times in both Lightroom and Premiere Pro. Where it falters is in poor thermals, with the WASD keys getting as hot as 46…

By Stuff 
Alienware has long had a tradition of unique laptop designs, and the M15 carries on this tradition admirably. It brings an edgy, sci-fi vibe to your portable gaming, and even though the M15 is probably the safest looking piece of Alienware hardware, it…

By hardwarezone.com.sg 
This laptop is ridiculously expensiveTaken alone, the Alienware m15 isn’t a bad laptop. It’s fast and well-built, and it’ll serve you pretty well as a gaming laptop. But when you look at what the competition has to offer, it’s difficult to ignore the…

By Engadget 
Overall, the Alienware m15 is a better value than the competition. It’s not as light as MSI’s, and it’s not as sleek as the Blade, but it’s powerful and attractive enough for any gamer who wants a more portable gaming rig. Best of all, the Alienware m15…

Experts Reviews for Dell XPS 15:

By IndiaToday
If you are willing to invest Rs 2.2 lakhs in a laptop, you expect to have little to no compromises on most fronts, whether it be the display, battery life or performance. The XPS 15 manages to keep the compromises to a bare minimum like its predecessors…

By  91mobiles.com
During my 10-day stint with Dell’s XPS 15 9570, I loved using the laptop so much that it’s tough sending it back. Yet, the laptop isn’t for meant for everyone. If you’re looking for a machine for casual purposes, then the XPS 15 is surely overkill. On…

By beebom.com 
In 2018, Dell added the hexa-core Intel Core i9 processor to the XPS 15 to take things to a whole new level. This variant with a stunning 4K screen, 32 gigs of DDR4 RAM and Nvidia GTX 1050Ti graphics is overkill in the name of a computer. Is this the…

By Neowin 
I’ve always loved Dell’s XPS 15 lineup, as I’m always willing to sacrifice battery life for more power. I’m never that far from a power outlet anyway. If that sounds like you, then the XPS 15 is your dream machine.The biggest downside is that you’re not…

By HotHardware 
Sure, the latest XPS 15 starts at $999, but the one you probably want will fall in the $2,000 range. Our opinion is that the hexa-core processor, speedy memory, 4K touchscreen, capacious and speedy SSD, and gaming-ready GeForce graphics are all worth it to match the capabilities that the premium chassis exudes. Dell keeps the quality and the performance going in the XPS 15 line with the new 9570 model, making it easy to recommend and worthy of our Editor’s Choice award once again as well. The new Dell XPS 15 is simply one of, if not the best, premium 15-inch laptops on the market.

DESIGN

Alienware M15:

I mean, the build quality of the design and the chassis itself is exceptional. But there are still a lot of little issues that irk me. But when you buy such an expensive laptop you shouldn’t have these little software issues when you power it on. It ruins the excitement and the experience of buying a high end gaming laptop. The second thing, even though this laptop is doing a pretty good job of thermal throttling and keeping the cpu temps between 80-85 degrees, the surface temperatures are much too hot. 60 degrees celsius is unacceptable, i can’t even imagine how much hotter the 1070 runs.

Dell XPS 15:

For the new design from Dell I mean this is on its fourth iteration after all but if you’re in the market right now if you’re looking for a laptop that you can use for content creation the XPS 15, really is the best option you can get hey thanks for checking out this review leave us a comment below about what you think about the XPS 15. If you have any questions I’d be happy to answer some and also make sure to check out this video review of the MacBook Pro from earlier this year if you want to see how these laptops compare a little bit more.

WEIGHT & DIMENSIONS

Alienware M15:

The weight is nearly 4.8 pounds, 14.3 x 10.8 x 0.7-0.8-inches, the m15 is the slimmest laptop you will ever see.

Dell XPS 15:

Measuring 14.1 x 9.3 x 0.5-0.7 inches, the 4.2-pound XPS 15 is one of the slimmer notebooks in its class.

KEYBOARD AND TOUCHPAD

Alienware M15:

Keyboard, I got mixed feelings about this. I like the fact that it is full sized so you have that numeric keypad, i do love the way the keys feel considering how shallow the travel distance is, in fact, out of all the thinner gaming laptops that are currently on the market, dell did the best job with such a short travel distance. In fact, Id rather game on this keyboard than on the razer blade 15 or the MSI GS65. now you are probably wondering, matt where is the 9 key? Now during my live stream when i was taking off the plastic on the top grill, I guess my hand or my watch or something hit the 9 key and it completely came off.

Dell XPS 15:

For the keyboard deck not only does the carbon fiber look great it also keeps things really clean at least compared to like a glossy plastic or even like the soft touch matte black of the razor blade which honestly you get fingerprints on it within minutes of taking it out of the box so even though it’s getting a little familiar at this point I still like this design a lot.

PORT SELECTION

Alienware M15:

Here the mini Display port, usb type c thunderbolt 3 so you could hook up an external gpu or you can buy Alienwares graphic amplifier and use that instead using this port and of course you have your dc in jack which uses a 180 watt brick. On the other side you have two more usb 3.0 ports, so plenty of ports to connect all of your devices.

Dell XPS 15:

Ports and fortunately the XPS 15 still has a lot of them so you have the option of two USB a ports an HDMI port a USB C Thunderbolt 3 port and most importantly a full size SD card slot which is going to be really helpful again if you’re in that field and you need to throw some video or images onto a laptop quickly.

DISPLAY

Alienware M15:

The only thing i don’t like about it are these bezels. These are probably some of the ugliest bezels ive seen on a gaming laptop this year. So thankfully the webcam is placed on the top so you will get a proper view of your face unlike the xps where it places it on the bottom of the display the quality is not that great and this is typical of every gaming laptop on the market. So sound on the M15 is nothing special it is using two speakers and of course it isnt going to be as good as the bigger and thicker alienwares.

Dell XPS 15:

For the display that’s all taken care of this time without growing the bezel much at all on the top and that’s really cool a couple small things to mention about the design of the XPS 15 versus the new XPS 13 is that you don’t get the new color options so you don’t get that frost white that they use on the XPS 13. I wish they had brought that over to the 15 inch model and then also the hinge it’s still really difficult to open that was something they fixed on the XPS 13 but this is something that requires two hands unfortunately so while that keeps the screen from wobbling it does make it kind of in convenient but in 2019 it’s really all about the screen on the XPS 15.

BATTERY

Alienware M15:

Battery size, this one is 60 watts, but you can also buy with 90 watts which will net you better battery life. But you will have to forgo the 2.5 inch drive. Now the 60 watt battery inside of here is giving about 4-5 hours of use and thats just doing regular everyday tasks. If you are going to game on this thing on battery its really not going to last that long.

Dell XPS 15:

Over,there are two battery options a 3-cell 56 watt hour battery or the upgraded option which my review unit has a 6l 97 watt hour battery it has killer wireless and Bluetooth 5.0 you’re looking at 4 pounds for the standard version and 4 and a half pounds for the OLED version it has a starting price of 10 79 us prices tested is 25 49 but that’s enough with the specs let’s find out what you get inside the box.

PERFORMANCE

Alienware M15:

Now before we talk about performance i had two issues with this laptop. The first one, it came unactivated. I couldn’t activate windows at all. The second one was i couldn’t access the internet. Sometimes i would be able to connect to a web page, and if i got on to the web page i wouldn’t be able to download something.

It just wasn’t working. Someone in the comments of my live stream said it’s a known issue. If you buy this laptop or even a lot of alienware laptops you have to kill the killer driver in the background in order for things to work. Well he was right, i killed the killer driver under the task manager and all of a sudden i could activate windows and i could start downloading all the drivers that i needed to update this laptop.

Dell XPS 15:

As it is because there’s been some confusion out there about what exactly the XPS 15 is trying to be and what it is not and let me just say this very clearly this is not a gaming laptop and you should not go into the purchase of the XPS 15 thinking that it is I mean the 4k screen locked at 60 Hertz should tell you that alone it does have a decent discrete graphics card option.

The GTX 1650 which is better than the previous generations but honestly in games you’re still gonna be needing to reduce settings down to medium and that’s at 1080p of course just to get some decent frame rates and that’s because of how this laptop was built the size of it and because of how the system throttles performance so sure do some gaming on the side with this that’ll totally work for this laptop but if you go into buying this thing as a dedicated gaming machine you’re gonna be pretty disappointed what it is good at in fact what it’s really really good at is video editing.

CONCLUSION

Alienware M15:

Overall viewing angles are fantastic in this laptop. In fact, the sound was quite tidy, so if you are gaming on this for long periods of time, you are definitely going to want to hook up headphones.

Unfortunately i can not put it back on, its not your typical key where you just press it down and it pops back on. So this causes some concern. The only thing i dont like is that some people with ocd might not like it that it is right here instead of in the center and also the deck of this keyboard is using like a rubber texture which feels great to rest your wrists on but my god is this thing going to get dirty.

It attracts fingerprints very easily and grease like crazy. You are going to be wiping this down every single day.

Dell XPS 15:

I like those screens the XPS 15 is really really color accurate because they tone down some of that boldness and saturation it supports the widest color game impossible with a laptop screen with a hundred percent on srgb Adobe RGB and obviously the contrast is just wild because of how deep those blacks are with OLED, it is definitely a little bit warmer than a macbook pro screen but in the end it’s a screen that you can trust with your edits so whether you’re a photographer or a video editor that’s a really important consideration to make when you’re going out and buying a laptop another really important consideration for people in those fields.