Dell Alienware M15 R3 vs Razer Blade 15: Which One is Better in Gaming?

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This is the comparison of the popular two gaming laptops that are Dell Alienware M15 R3 and Razer Blade 15. Both the laptops are great for gaming and it also has an improved thermal system. Here, we will see all the information about these laptops to see which one is better.

BUY NOW	BUY NOW
Dell Alienware M15 R3	Razer Blade 15
PROS	PROS
Attractive design. Comfortable customizable keyboard. All-round performance.	Impressive game performance. Improved battery life. Top-mounted speakers.
CONS	CONS
Very expensive. RAM can’t be upgraded. Trackpad is so small.	Gets noticeably hot. No AMD options.

SPECIFICATIONS:

INTRODUCTION:

Dell Alienware M15 R3

Alienware M15 R3 is one of the best laptops for gaming in this period of time. As Dell covers the clock speed as much as possible, now it also concentrates on thermal a little bit.

Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition

Razer’s Blade line of laptops is undoubtedly popular to an extent. They certainly feel like the Apple of gaming pcs and they definitely look like a black unibody Macbook and certainly feel premium too.

DESIGN:

Dell Alienware M15 R3

The Alienware M15 has a magnesium alloy body that is lighter than aluminium. The device comes in between 2.11 and 2.5 kgs depending on specification.

The keyboard is a chiclet designed with N key rollover and anti-ghosting technology. Alienware’s command center allows you to customize every single key which is awesome. The command center also allows you to overclock as well for those of you who just want more. It has increased key travel compared to the previous generation and feels pretty good to type on. The glass trackpad is also very accurate and a joy to use with all your multi-touch gestures enabled, not quite a MacBook but close enough so you won’t miss it.

Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition

It is an all-metal premium design. It’s a unibody design that is very high-end. At 4.85 pounds or 2.2 kilograms, definitely not the lightest 15-inch laptop but definitely portable enough to take with you on the go. I like its premium metal build, sharp design.

You can open the lid with one finger. Now, the first thing you’ll notice when you open the lid is the improved keyboard layout is that function key in the lower right-hand corner, you now have a more traditional layout in terms of the arrow keys for your cursors and that’s been pretty good. Now, as far as tactile feedback that’s been pretty good and it has pretty decent key travel. It also has that chroma keyboard with individually lit keys lighting it up in different colors, you have all sorts of combinations that you can control in the Razer Synapse app that you do get on this laptop. Now, it does have a pretty nicely sized precision touchpad. It’s a glass touchpad, two fingers scrolling is buttery smooth, all the windows 10 gestures are working as advertised, all good so far on that front.

DISPLAY:

Dell Alienware M15 R3

The screen is no slouch either. This is an OLED, one millisecond, 400 nit panel running at 60hz with DC-IP3 color gamut, and for those of you wondering DC-IP3 is a newer standard that’s color gamut is 25% wider than sRGB and that’s minimum. Other panels are available including 144 and 300-hertz options. This is currently the only laptop with Tobii eye-tracking built-in. My favorite part of this device is the screen the OLED panel is beautiful, it produces perfect blacks and amazing colors. The only problem is it’s 60 hertz. It is good enough for gaming.

Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition

When it comes to the display, you have a few options, you can go with the Full HD 300 hertz option that’s great for the gamer who wants that higher refresh rate. I would recommend that if you are a really hardcore gamer. Now, the content creator should go with the unit that I have, it’s the 15.6 inch OLED display. It’s absolutely gorgeous, it gets bright, sharp, got some really good contrast, and really vibrant colors, and very good in terms of the coverage of the color gamut. So, you can use this for doing things such as video editing, photoshop, and of course Lightroom, and great for the content creator. Having a touch display on this 4K OLED panel is an added bonus, it worked really well and very responsive.

FEATURES:

Dell Alienware M15 R3

It’s available with i5, i7, and i9 processors. Our comparison review unit features an i7 10750 6 core, RAM options start from 8 gigabytes and tops out 32 gigabytes storage comes with a 256 gigabyte M.2 SSD as standard but can be specced up to 4 terabytes via two PCIe is running in Raid 0 and that’s not even a show stopper. This device can be configured with an RTX 2080 Super Max-Q in something this light machine that’s crazy.

On the right side, you have your exhaust vent, two USB 3.1 gen 1 ports, and a micro SD card reader which is new to the 2020 model. On the left side, you have your wedge-shaped lock, another exhaust vent, and an RJ45 Killer E3000 Ethernet port, another USB port, and a 3.5 mm jack. On the rear, you’ll find dual exhaust vents, HDMI out, a mini display port, a Thunderbolt 3 port, Alienware’s proprietary graphics amplifier port which lets you hook up an external GPU and your charging port.

The M15 has dual front-firing speakers which are clear but not all that loud. It also has dual subwoofers but despite that, the bass still feels weak. The sensor built into the bottom of the screen tracks your eye movement, it’s as simple as that. It can keep your screen awake as long as you’re looking at it and then when you move away, it goes off. When you alt-tab, you can also select which window you want just by looking at it. You can also move your mouse pointer by teleporting it to where you’re looking.

Dell allows you to upgrade the system without voiding the warranty which is nice of them. You just need to remove all your third-party parts before claiming. The RAM is integrated, so you need to select the correct size when customizing. There are three M.2 drives that you can run in a raid, most desktops don’t even have space for modern two.

Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition

It’s got the core i7 10875H an 8-core 10th generation processor from Intel, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080, or RTX 2070Super with Max-Q eight gigabytes of video memory. So, you can have some real good horsepower to do content creation, to play games, to do productivity, and it also has a 4K OLED touch display. You could also get it with a 300 hertz matte full HD display. I’m expecting really good performance out of that Intel core i7 10875H an 8-core processor 10th gen from Intel with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super with Max-Q. It’s got 8 gigabytes of video memory. This is going to be good for content creation if you’re doing Photoshop, Lightroom, video editing. It’s going to be good for any kind of office work, Microsoft Office, web browsing, and of course, consuming media especially with that gorgeous 4K OLED display. 

On the left side, we get your proprietary power port, two USB A 3.2 gen 2 ports, a USB-C 3.2 gen 2 port, and a 3.5-millimeter audio jack. Moving over to the right side is a full-size SD card reader, a Thunderbolt 3 port, another USB-A port, an HDMI port, and a Kensington lock board to round out the ports on this laptop.

Now, as far as user upgradability is concerned, it’s easy to get inside this laptop by just removing the T5 Torx screws pop off the bottom plate. Once inside, you’ll notice the dual fans for cooling, also that 80-watt hour battery. It also has one slot for an SSD, there are no two slots that you would get in the basic model and as far as the Ram that’s user-upgradable, there are two Ram slots that run in dual channel mode. This unit has 16 gigabytes of DDR4 Ram, the wi-fi 6 card is socketed in that means, it’s user upgradable and it also has Bluetooth 5.1, it’s all working well so far.

There is a 720p 30 frames per second webcam. It’s an infrared webcam on this model, meaning you can log in with face recognition with Windows Hello. When it comes to the audio, there are two speakers located on either side of the keyboard, they’re top firing speakers which I like. They’re Dolby Atmos speakers and they’re okay, they’re not the best I’ve ever heard certainly not the worst. I would expect a little better for the price, I’m hoping that we’ll see improvements in future generations.

The problem is its ultra-thin design. This thing is no thicker than the USB Type-A ports that are on the side of it and that means there is a very impressive vapor chamber cooling system that has to work overtime to keep the CPU and the extra of the GPU cool. Now, it does manage to do that, the maximum temperatures I saw were around 95 degrees celsius for the CPU and around 75 degrees celsius to the GPU. Certainly within their standard target ranges for those parts but the thing is that the performance you get from those parts that the CPU did actually thermal throttle during testing and the GPU is clearly hamstrung by a limited thermal budget, meaning that it can’t push itself or even have its TDP pre-configured to be high enough to actually match even a full RTX 2070 laptop model. If you are dead set on picking up a Blade 15 with the 300hz display, I would personally go for the 2070 Super variants as you’re likely gonna get similar performance with a better thermal budget available and you’re gonna save some money.

While the cooling solution does keep the CPU and GPU relatively cool at least enough to get some reasonable performance out of them. The whole laptop, especially the under panel gets to burn you within minutes temperatures very quickly, I saw around 50 degrees celsius when testing on a desk and so that’s a very uncomfortable gaming experience if you’re trying to game on your lap. The top plate of the keyboard, especially the top side of the keyboard near the display got it around 45 degrees celsius.

PERFORMANCE:

Dell Alienware M15 R3

I’ve played a few games on the machine and they run great. I couldn’t fully max out the settings but you get playable frame rates on higher most games.

The cooling system is Alienware’s new Cryo-tech version 3.0 with larger fan blades on both the CPU and GPU. This translates into improved airflow over version 2.0 and 20% less obstruction. The cooling system also pulls air from the top vent as well as the bottom intakes and these hexagonal vents aren’t just for looks, they’re actually designed that way to increase structural integrity and airflow at the same time. Combined this should keep turbo speeds higher for longer compared to the previous iteration.

Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition

In the RTX 2080 Super, you actually get more like RTX 2070 performance. Starting off with battlefield 5, this was tested at ultra settings just like the rest of the games, and the average fps is got which is 105 with a pretty good 1% low of 94, so a very nice playing experience. Of course, this doesn’t quite keep up with the 300 hertz or 300 fps but this is all a higher ultra settings, same for COD 108 average with a round-up 82 fps as 1% percent low. All of these were a very nice playing experience but if you did want to make use of that display, you would definitely want to turn these settings down. As for PUBG testing, this was a 106 fps average with a 1% low of 84. Fortnite tends to be a bit better optimized until you do get 134 fps on ultraseconds in DirectX 11 mode and with multi-core rendering enabled and 1% low of 86. For example, the MSI GE65 which had a full RTX 2070 offers the same or better performance than this RTX 2080 Super admittedly the Max-Q version.

I was interested to find out how the 8 core 10875H that’s in this compares to the newer Ryzen 4000 CPUs that are available in some other thinner light laptops like the ROG Zephyrus G14. Taking a look at the BMW render in blender, this was a fairly impressive result obviously more cores and in theory better clock speed means a pretty good performance advantage over the 9750H but still not quite as good as the new Ryzen chips. The same can be said for Cinebench single thread where again you get a very good increase over the 9750H but still not quite catching up to the Ryzen 4800h and 4900HS which isn’t to be surprised, especially considering its turbo boost behaviors, especially in this chassis. For a Cinebench multi-thread where you do get a good performance advantage over the 9750H but still actually a pretty big performance delta compared to the Ryzen chips which are to be expected.

During my testing of the machine, I was given a BIOS and Synapse update that allows for the selection of a booster tab or boost setting in the performance tab in Razer’s Synapse Software which gave me 30% or so performance improvement in CPU bound workloads over the default medium settings for both the CPU and GPU. So, I highly recommend you if you do pick one of these, go into Synapse and hit the performance tab, and set the settings to either high or boost depending on what’s available.

BATTERY:

Dell Alienware M15 R3

The battery is an 86 watt-hour 6 cell and it’s good for about five to six hours of light use. You may expect more battery life than this assumption but as this is a gaming laptop, I think this is good enough battery life.

Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition

In the test of battery life by running video, gaming, web browsing, it offers around 6.5 to 7 hours battery life. In my opinion, this offers a long battery life considering other gaming laptops. 

WHICH TO BUY?

The design, comfort, keyboard, touchpad, and everything are good in the Alienware M15 R3. The Cryotech version 3.0 is definitely working. Thermals are good under load and there was a little to no throttling during gaming. I really like the command center features where you can customize the lights and the keyboard doing the knight rider effect. The fans were a bit loud at max but if you’re buying a thin gaming laptop and you expect it to be quiet, you could never find that type of laptop. It is very thin and light, it’s very portable. So, if you need all the power and you need to game on the go and you travel a lot, that might be a good enough reason to get it. The Razer Blade is also a good gaming laptop with amazing battery life, features, design, and all. You will enjoy gaming on this laptop.

In my opinion, both laptops are a good choice for gaming. Razer Blade is a little pricier than the Alienware M15 R3. It will be your choice that which one is more attractive to you by considering all the features and performance.

Expert reviews of Dell Alienware M15 R3:

By 91mobiles
If there was an award for the best-looking laptop of 2020, you are looking at the top contender with the Alienware M15 R3. Going with the looks is also heavy-duty hardware including best-in-class CPU and GPU options along with one of the best …

By Moneycontrol
It goes without saying that the Alienware m15 R3 is quite an impressive gaming laptop, but it is still far from perfect. With the m15 R2, Alienware addressed most of the issues of the original m15 and the m15 R3 tends to follow…

By Notebookcheck
Externally, the Alienware m15 R3 looks like nothing more than a minor update over last year’s m15 R2. Instead, all the major changes are internal which…

Expert reviews of Razer Blade 15 (Advanced Edition):

By Expert reviews
A lovely laptop and a fine performer but the Razer Blade 15 has its weaknesses…

By Trustedreviews
The Razer Blade 15 2020 Base Model is a great gaming laptop, featuring a speedy Full HD performance, industry leading design and a bright, colourful display. It is pretty expensive when compared to rival systems, but this is still a worthwhile buy for gaming enthusiasts.

By Finder
Razer knows its market very well indeed, and there’s a lot to like about the Razer Blade 15 Base Model notebook, even if your budget can’t quite match up to the even flashier Advanced or Studio Edition Blade Models.

Arya

Hello! I'm Surendar Arya, a passionate tech writer from Uttar Pradesh, India. I'm a freelance contributor to the tech blog - The World's Best And Worst. My enthusiasm for technology drives me to explore the latest trends and innovations in the field. I take immense pleasure in guiding individuals on how to leverage technology for their benefit, making their lives easier and more efficient.