Alienware – m15 R5 15.6″ FHD 360Hz Gaming Laptop – AMD Ryzen R9 – 16GB Memory – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 – 1TB Solid State Drive – Dark Side of the…

This laptop performs very well if you are capable of performing minor tweaks and want to replace the stock RAM. I got it while it was on sale for $1699 and it is well worth it.
First and foremost, Dell addressed the GPU missing CUDA cores issue awhile ago, it isn’t an issue anymore.
My unit has no build quality issues or creaking lid. Minimal flex on the palm rest / keyboard area. Overall it feels very solidly built.
All Ryzen laptops run hot, it is just how it is and not exclusive to this laptop. You can set a temp offset in the system bios to cap CPU temp. I have mine set to TCC 5 which results in a max temp of 95 C. This is completely fine when under load / gaming. Results in almost no performance hit.
Alienware Control Center isn’t the most useful app out there, that’s putting it mildly. But you can adjust CPU and GPU fan curves to your liking which also helps with noise and temps. When running in balanced mode the fans are completely off and silent while doing office and internet work. I don’t like RGB and have it all turned off except for the keyboard backlighting.
Further, you can use 3rd party utilities to adjust short and long boost TDP which further helps CPU temp.
My system came with slower DDR4 3200 single rank 1Rx16 RAM. Quality RAM can give a nice CPU boost on mobile Ryzen laptops. I swapped in some lower density 32gb 3200 CL20 dual rank 2Rx8 RAM.
The keyboard is surprisingly excellent. Keys have nice travel and feedback while not been very clackity or noisy. The touchpad is small but very nice to use.
I’ve had no issues with the FHD 360hz screen, very crisp and no issues with response time and the like.
The RTX 3070 is the 130w variant. I’ve flashed the 140w 3070 vbios from the M15 R4 and it works perfectly. Performance is absolutely stellar and gives many 3080 laptops a run for their money and bests them as well. While gaming GPU temps rarely exceed 80 C. The 3070 is the perfect GPU for 1080p and should be more than capable for quite some time.
The laptop has a MUX and you can run in dGPU only mode with G-sync. Also there is Advanced Optimus. Killer feature that many laptops don’t have.
To get the most out of the battery you can set refresh rate to 60hz when unplugged. Battery life when doing office and internet / daily work exceeds 7 hours for me which is insane for a gaming laptop like this.
Nice perk to have the IR camera and Windows Hello facial recognition, works perfectly and is very convenient.
The only negative about this laptop is that buying an extended onsite warranty from Dell is obscenely overpriced and highway robbery. But this is not Best Buy’s fault so can’t knock them.
Ignore all the negative “reviews” out there. When tweaked this laptop performs admirably well and beats out almost all other 3070 laptops out there. It has Advanced Optimus, G-sync, can be adjusted to run a true 140w max-p 3070, and has 7+ hour battery life when performing regular office and internet / video consumption / 2D tasks. Can’t ask for much more in this form factor.
Highly recommend!

I bought this laptop for my grandson and when he opened it he was so surprised that he started hugging it and I knew he liked it!! Because if anyone knows about a 15yr old boy you get nothing out of them lol but other then that’s fire lol but knew I did good and when I text him he’s always on it !! Which tells me I did good!! Not including I got him a wireless Alienware mouse and headphone set and a 8 seagate something lol this is a picture with him at a friends house trying to get on his laptop without waiting to get home!!!!

Its not a bad gaming laptop i still need to optimize it and you need to make sure its ventalated or it gets very hot.