Alienware m16 AMD 2023 honest review

[@vlone_slatt3504]

If you buy this one which I have apply a tcc offset of 7 when gaming to keep thermals in check and if you need max power remove the offset .

[@draco2xx]

i just want to enjoy games at 60fps, resolution is not a big issue for me but its something i appreciate especially at native 4k which is why i wont crank up the gpu to its max to further its life expectancy once i get the m18 next week. btw good review, im just looking around at different laptops by alienware to see how good their laptops are before i make my final decision

[@suka8]

I know it been a year but how was your experience overall

[@boost91]

As for the thermals there's a couple different... Well.. technically there's an infinite number of variables but the key things to focus on are on the bottom side of the laptop there's like a foam ring that creates a seal and significantly limits air flow (can only assume this is to keep out dust certainly a noble pursuit) however I'll take a little dust and some extra cleaning versus running my hardware needlessly warm and nerfing performance not to mention accelerating degradation of hardware so cooling pad can help but if you don't have a cooling pad just make sure to lift the back end of the laptop up quarter and a half an inch or so so as to let fresh air in... Also check for any large variance intense on your CPU from core to core.. for instance if you see one core running at 77 c and others running at like 97c could have a dry or basically uneven thermal interface material situation on either the CPU or GPU... This can be very common on just about all laptops from the factory and can also happen over time depending on the thermal interface material used... So if you're comfortable follow tutorials open up the laptop and check the thermal paste application if you are not comfortable take it to a professional or a friend who's a professional you can destroy your hardware if you're not careful... Other things to do are to make sure you keeping your fans clear of dust your vents clear of dust and that your system hardware is in good order basically...(Your ambient temperature can play a big role in this as well) Next things you can do is look online for your specific laptop and specific hardware config and follow others instructions regarding undervolting/overclocking of both the CPU and GPU.. on this specific laptop you can do both I believe because the AMD HX chip is unlocked and basically all in video gpus can be undervolted and or overclocked.. also dell/alienware (definitely applies to this exact laptop m16r1amd as well)...Dell/AW are notoriously bad for bloatware and inefficient software.. a lot of people seem to hate Alienware control center and say it hogs a lot of resources causing your laptop to run slower hotter and kill battery life all at the same time.. so do your own research online some options include a fresh Windows install or uninstalling dell/aw bloatware including control center (look into overclocking undervolting your CPU and GPU first because if you dial that in apparently and then uninstall command center your settings will stick…obviously if you uninstall it though and need it back you can reinstall…. Not 100% on this exact laptop but throttle stop is a well-known highly respected CPU management program for undervolting overclocking the CPU, or disabling turbo features and or parking cores (these laptop CPUs are ridiculously overpowered in 95% of use cases including games) so some people Park their ecors to boost performance while cutting thermals and increasing battery life on the Intel versions but do your own homework of course... If you do all that and still having problem with thermals might have to drop $100 on a top-of-the-line cooling pad as some of those can drop temps anywhere from eight degrees Celsius all the way up to 20 to 25° Celsius. The gt-600 line has many different options and is regarded as basically the best or maybe tied for the best cooling pad... Search on Amazon runs around $100 many different models by according to your need. Ideally you want one that can plug into the wall so it doesn't suck wattage from one ear USB ports unless you have extra power to spare that is (but if the cooler is pulling 15 watts that has to come from somewhere if it's plugged into a USB port) If you've done all this and you still have thermal problems may the good Lord help you because nobody else can 😂

[@devolving]

Thank you I just orded an m16 with an AMD CPU like this one and its honestly the cheapest one I could find with a 4080 12gbs at a decent price. Everything else has 8gbs of vram or even 6.. I'll be using this for my game development classes which might be overkill but I'm gonna do side projects on my own and those Cuda cores and 4gbs of extra vram are essential for me. I just hope the laptop doesn't blow up but I tried man, there's no other laptop at this point atleast with the specs I got. Ryzen 9, 32gbs, 2×1 tb SSDs, 4080 12gbs. I think the cpu definitely helped with the price because, amd doesn't gouge you like you nvidia (same with intel) does but nivida is more supported sadly. Anyway my fault to rant 😭 I just hope it doesn't overheat cause I can't do anything with an inverted motherboard

[@nff_1950]

@@devolving hi sorry to bother you, but hows the laptop so far for u? i planning to get this one too because this also the cheapest 4080 i can find haha..

[@devolving]

@@nff_1950 yeah it works great! Thanks for the reply. Yeah I highly recommend it. I had to take out a credit from Dell for 2,500 and the laptop was 2,400ish. There's 3 things you need to know when you get your laptop however. The first two things are, you need to change your "offset TCC to 85 (basically put 15, because it's 1-15)" then you need to make a custom profile in the alienware command center and keep everything default except for the CPU temperature and also change it to 85. If you're worried about temps like me, then with these 2 settings active with max graphics, the highest temperature I've seen on the CPU is 87 which is tolerable for me. The third thing is more of am issue with windows and not the laptop but it still affected me, use sleep mode sparingly. I don't know why but sometimes windows won't boot correctly and one time it changed storage boot up, I have RAID on just because that was default for me and it changed it to one of the NVMe drives and it wouldn't boot. It also reset my BIOS clock. But I swapped those back and it worked fine, thank god. A work around for this is to go into your BIOS and disable the option when you close your laptop that will make go into sleep mode. Also turn off the options where it goes into sleep mode when it's plugged in. This way you can have it inactive (technically still awake) but your laptop won't crash on the boot screen. It's not a common issue but it's common enough that it annoys me. Again, this is a windows issue, not the laptops fault. But apart from those 3 things, it's perfect. I love it and the 12gbs of VRAM is absolutely amazing. So much better than the 8gbs. I recommend getting it now if you can because they're already sold out in my country and being replaced by the m16 r2 which only has 8gbs of vram!! 😭

[@nycekix]

Plug it IN to the wall outlet and all the lag goes away

[@boost91]

This goes for any gaming laptop you're not plugged in you're getting anywhere from 25 to 50% of the necessary power to run your components at their full capacity this is for every single gaming laptop can't possibly pull close to 300 watts from the battery... It would be dead in 20 minutes that is if it didn't blow up before then.. by the way I'm not making fun of you, we all had to learn this at some point myself included. Another nice thing with these are TX cards is frame generation you can in some instances nearly double your frames for free essentially by using dlss 3.5 frame generation ,(I'm not an expert but that's going to be on single player games that support it with very demanding graphics) so like cyberpunk 2077 Max settings 1440p with Ray tracing without frame gin if you're at 60 and you turn on frame gen you might get upwards of 100 to 110 frames with frame generation... People call them fake frames but if it looks pretty who cares what you call it... And if you know what you're doing and follow instructions to the letter you don't even have to have an RTX 40 series card to do this anymore (although generally speaking the 40 series cards will be the best at it) but the modern community has basically hacked frame generation into RTX 30 series and RTX 20 series both desktop and laptop cards as well.. free fake frames for all!!

[@jeredphillips3424]

You got a link for that cooling pad?

[@The_Donn]

Here you go a.co/d/czHZOEW

[@harshdeepsingh4601]

Dude, I just got this laptop 3 days back on Best Buy. It is throttling and lagging for Hogwarts Legacy and the game keeps crashing. Could you please recommend something? Also the xbox controller with Bluetooth has bad input lag. I would appreciate some advice.

[@The_Donn]

Yea i noticed the same thing even on a more simple game like back 4 blood, crazy throttling after 30-45 minutes. The solution was to get a cooling pad for the laptop, the one i got is a Klim and it seriously does keep my temps at good instead of just okay. Best $30 ive ever spent

[@harshdeepsingh4601]

@@The_Donn Thanks for telling us about the cooling pad. I use a 6000 rpm vacuum cooler nonetheless lagging occurs. Could you make a video on Hogwarts Legacy’s performance? I have used such a highly end laptop for this first time am afraid the motherboard don’t get burned.

[@The_Donn]

@@harshdeepsingh4601 hmm if youre using the cooling pad and its still throttling it could be something going on with bios or perhaps the pc is using the wrong gpu at times. I was looking for a good reason to buy hogwarts and i wanted to make another video that showed performance for different games so ill probably upload that tomorrow. I forgot to mention your xbox controller pairing with bluetooth, i have a series 2 elite and it actually works pretty well, no disconnects or latency at all. Which controller are you using? Perhaps the regular ones arent as compatible but i know microsoft sells the wireless adapter for $25 and that would absolutely solve the issue with latency and disconnects

[@harshdeepsingh4601]

@@The_Donn Thanks again for the input. I would be excited to see the video on gaming performance. Well, I use the regular xbox controller that worked well on my previous laptops. Sounds great, I think I would just order that wireless device.

[@The_Donn]

The video of hogwarts is up :D

[@MookieKong]

“Heating pad” 😂

[@xijnbooth1417]

Actually going to buy this tomorrow at Best Buy. Do you think it's worth the price still?

[@The_Donn]

@@xijnbooth1417 for sure i love this laptop i use it every single day and no issues whatsoever!

[@fanatiquefantastique8516]

I am looking to get this exact config laptop in the next few months. How is the battery life when the screen is at 60hz and you just browse the web? GTA performance would be far better if you played it plugged in; but I think you know that.

[@stiffmeister0hYeah]

It looks like that AMD processor is just as good if not better than Intel's 13th gen.

[@The_Donn]

for sure i think the extra vcache is what really does the trick. around 70MB on this one!

[@kennysponto6568]

are you saying this laptop sucks?

[@gourangjainghost2818]

which cooling pad you are using

[@The_Donn]

KLIM Everest Laptop Cooling Pad

[@harshvardhansingh8883]

Why did you play the game on battery power though? Game was only running at like 45 fps

[@The_Donn]

Sometimes id like to sit somewhere that doesn’t have battery and play :p

[@harshvardhansingh8883]

@@The_Donn that's cool and it's pretty playable too

[@SamGrossmanEG]

32GB will run at 5600 instead of 5200 if you dont need that much RAM you are just slowing yourself down.

[@The_Donn]

I’ll take an extra 32GB ram over a 400mhz speed difference any day of the week

[@AkaruIez]

@@The_Donn Idk i don't think one will need 64 gb of ram in the near future like 10 15 years and that's not coming before laptop dies and one moves to new laptop lol

[@boost91]

So make sure to pay attention to the details... To the poster of the video either you got lucky or paid attention but 5200 MHz is the max for this laptop NOT 5600...the Intel i9 version of this can run ram at 5600 that is an Intel limitation.. the AMD version with the 7845 HX can run up to 5200 NOT 5600 like the Intel chipset... so even if you put 5600 in this AMD M16... it will automatically down clock to 5200..not because it's an Alienware thing because it's an AMD thing and honestly 5200 MHz versus 5600 MHz you're talking maybe one to 2% difference nfps in the 5200 megahertz will have tighter timings so might not even be 1% not to mention the 7845 HX is a much more power efficient chip and generally much higher performing chip than an iodine 13900hx.

[@tordb]

Laptop gaming is still garbage in 2024. But it's getting closer to becoming decent at best.

[@The_Donn]

For sure lol i play a bare bones game like hearthstone on my laptop ad stillget barely an hour onbattery life