Dell Alienware 14 laptop review

Alienware recently introduced its latest and most powerful gaming laptops, the Alienware 14 and Alienware 17. We reviewed the 14-inch screen variant.

Design and Features

Alienware 14 feels incredibly solid thanks to its anodized Aluminum shell and Magnesium alloy body. It features an anti-glare LCD display with wide viewing angles for reflection-free gaming in nearly any lighting condition, including a premium Full HD panel option with IPS. The keyboard is protected by a reinforced plate, the palm rest and the display frame are rubberized. Another major change that we noticed in this new model is that Alienware 14 has three high speed USB 3.0 ports.

The laptop now comes with 2.4-GHz quad-core Intel Haswell Core i7-4700MQ processor, and NVIDIA GeForce 700 series graphics, and supports up to three hard drives. Connectivity options in this laptop are adequate, with the left side of both machines housing two USB 3.0 ports, one HDMI and a Mini Display Port. On the right edge lie a slot-loading optical drive, a multi-format memory card reader, an Ethernet jack and one more USB port. The keyboard and trackpad on these models feel very uniform. The trackpad is large enough to use comfortably, both the keyboard and touchpad are tricked out in LED lights, with an array of color options.

Through the Command Center of the laptop, which includes the exclusive AlienFX lighting control system, users can create their own custom lighting themes and special effects. It has up to 20 colors to choose from across 10 different lighting zones, which total up to over 10 trillion lighting combinations. Alienware has worked closely with game developers to incorporate AlienFX in over 60 game titles for an immersive experience that can only be found on an Alienware.

AlienwareCommand Center also features AlienAdrenaline, a custom configurable game and application automation tool, the new Accelerator dynamic performance optimizer, and a new performance monitoring tool.

Performance

Alienware 14 is a bulky laptop; 42mm thick and weighing 2.8 kg. But, it is a pleasant performer in day-to-day tasks. Thanks to the 256 GB Solid State Drive, boot up times are really impressive with 11 seconds for a reboot. As this is more a gaming laptop, we have to tell you about its graphics and audio quality, thanks to its Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M and its 2GB of video RAM, we were able to play with the graphics set to Ultra at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and see average frame rates of 33 fps. The graphics look gorgeous, with vibrant, crisp colors and wide viewing angels.

Its Klipsch power audio speakers performed well but sometimes fell short with high pitch game sounds. The battery life of Alienware 14 with NVIDIA Optimus graphics switching activated, survived 3 hours with standard battery test which included, web surfing, game play with WiFi, and web streaming.

In our benchmarks, the laptop performed quite well and in the overall rating it positioned itself in the top three gaming laptops. PCMARK7: 6144, 3DMARK11( ENTRY PRESET): 6,529 and Performance Preset: 4,211.