Hey, how's it going guys! This is Dave2D,
and this is the Alienware 13.
It has been updated for the end of 2016,
it's a complete redesign.
21% thinner, GTX 10
series cards, and it's finally
a quad-core CPU.
So, it starts at $1200
The top and bottom panels have the same
color as before; They are now aluminum,
but it still has the iconic alien
head logo. The screen hinge has shifted
forwards a bit. I didn't love the design at first
because it looks so different from most
laptops these days. But it's growing a lot on
me over the past couple of weeks and I like it.
The build quality in this
is top-notch. The display panel and the
chassis are both rigid. Hinge is
well made with good tension. It's
thinner than the previous generation, but it's not
light. So, Alienware focuses more
on long term durability, they even use
steel under the key part to reinforce it;
That's some heavy stuff. So, I would legit
legitimately feel comfortable dropping this thing from like
6-feet up. You can easily
access the internals. The killer WiFi
card is upgradable, but it's running one of the better
one out there. There is two RAM slots,
you can upgrade it to 32 gigs.
And you also have two M.2 drive
bays. The stock drive from Toshiba has
good speeds. The 76 Watt
hour battery is underneath the shroud here,
and you will get around four and a half hours of regular use.
The keyboard is nice,
it feels different from the more common
chiclet keys, but the typing experience
is great. It's got a cushy 2.2
millimeters of travel and it feels really
responsive. The keys use
zone lighting; I kinda wish that they were individually
lit. And the other thing are these Page
Up and Page Down keys. So, it's cool that they
included dedicated keys, but because of
their positioning, you're gonna accidentally hit them
when you're trying to use the arrow keys. You'll get used
to them, but in the beginning, you will make
mistakes. The track pad uses
Synaptic drivers; It's the same style
of track pad as the 15-inch from last year.
Light up surface, which I'll always
love; Millions of colors to choose from in the
software. It's got a great surface texture,
accurate tracking, and it has nice
physical buttons. I'm glad they brought this track pad
to the 13-inch version.
Going around the sides, we have audio jacks,
two USB 3's, two USB
C's, the one on the back even supports thunder-
-bolt 3, and there is also display outputs,
ethernet, and the Alienware
graphics amps port. So, external
GPU options work right out of the box;
You can use thunderbolt 3, like a Razer
core, or you can use the graphics amp, from
Alienware. The webcam up here
looks OK; It's not the best image quality,
but it has infrared capabilities.
So, it works with windows hello to
log in with facial recognition. And you can set up
other stuff, like sleep and security
functions. This unit
has the OLED panel option; It's
2560x1440. It's
bright, it has ridiculously high color
gamut and it looks amazing. Now
I tried to do some visual comparisons, but
you can't really showcase how nice this looks
over a video. Games,
movies, any kind of media consumption,
looks awesome! The image just
looks so rich and vibrant. And blacks
are as black as they're gonna get, imagine
ink. But the one thing to keep in mind,
if you're a content creator, you want to run calibrations
software to tone down the saturation.
As for burn in on laptop
OLED displays, they supposedly have
tech to prevent this, but we'll find out in
time. The speakers fire out
from the side and they sound pretty nice.
They stay clear up to around 80%
volume. Base isn't strong;
There's no subwoofer, but most people will be
happy with this audio system.
The performance is solid. My biggest complaint
about last years Alienware 13
was their CPU choice; They went with a dual-
core ultra book processor.
This year, they went with a quad-core, the
Skylake 6700HQ, and it
also has the GTX 1060. The
combination of these two can easily handle
most of the current generation 3D titles
at 1080p. On a 13-inch
screen, it's pretty tough to see the resolution
benefits of 1440p in games,
so I benchmark everything at 1080p.
Battlefield 1 runs at around
85 fps on ultra graphics
at 1080p, and this has to be one of the
best looking games of 2016.
Shadow Warrior 2 runs at around
60 fps; Same deal for settings,
ultra graphics at 1080p.
And then Witcher 3 is still one of the most
demanding titles out there. And at max graphics
settings, we're looking at around 40
maybe 45 fps at
1080p. Now if you want more details about gaming
performace, stay till the end of the video.
4K video edits
are a breeze and it's fully VR
capable. It's crazy! It's a 13-inch
gaming laptop that crushes VR.
I couldn't detect any CPU throttling in
games and even when running benchmark loops
in 3D mark, this thing kept it's clock speed
up. The fans spin when it's idled,
but it's very quiet, you can't really hear it.
And under load, it's louder but it's still
a very tolerable sound. Heat
output is very comfortable to use, even under
load. The thermal management here is on
point. So, with the new AW
13, you're getting a very well built laptop
in a relatively dense package.
The OLED display option is bright
and vibrant. It's like the best looking laptop
screen I've played games on. The
keyboard is comfortable to use and feels very responsive
when gaming. The track pad lights up
and is also very good. The Skylake
i-7 and the GTX 1060 deliver
great performance and are very well cooled.
The RAM and the drives are easy to
access and upgrade. And the 76
Watt hour battery will last you around four and a half
hours of regular use. Okay, I think
Alienware did a fantastic job with this thing
It probably deserves to win the most improved
laptop of 2016. It still has
it's limitations; It's a 13-inch device,
so you're not gonna get maxed out big screen
gaming, but there is very little I dislike
about this laptop, maybe it's weight.
But if you want to see more gaming performance, check
the video description below, I made something
special. Hope you guys enjoyed this video. Thumbs if you
liked it, subs if you loved it. It's been nice!
I'll see you guys next time.