Choosing between a new Alienware laptop or a new Razer laptop.
The thing is, I’ve always thought that they were quite different from each other. These two companies have devices that just look quite different from each other. But I can understand the question because when you look into it, they’re both premium gaming laptop brands. They’re both offering these thin 14, 15, and 17 inch devices. But the big thing is price. These are both super expensive. I think these are the most expensive gaming laptops on the market, so I can understand why people want to just make the right decision when it comes to something like this, right?
Okay, I’m going to start off with this conversation with a more technical discussion, like we’re going to talk about the build and some performance differences, but then we’re going to wrap up with some bigger picture stuff. So let’s start off with, I guess, the aesthetics.
Both Alienware and Razer have a design aesthetic that is shared through the family. It’s like the X14 and 15 and 17, they’re just like bigger versions of each other. Same thing with the Razer, the Blade 14, Blade 15, Blade 17, they just get bigger and bigger. And it’s a cool design aesthetic, but no other gaming laptop does this. Like this is entirely unique to these two companies. Like if you think about MSI, Asus, Acer, Lenovo, like literally no one else does this because I mean, it looks cool, but it does implement some restrictions and limitations as to what you can do with the product when they all have to look like one another.
The Razers have a very simple kind of MacBook-like vibe to it. It’s almost like a black MacBook with the green snake logo up top. It’s a very industrial look. Uh, I’ve always liked it, but it’s a very standard way of building a laptop, right? It’s just, there’s nothing super special going on. And if you look at the thermal system, the fans are just pulling air through the laptop, very traditional way of cooling things. On the Alienwares. So these all have a, it’s almost like a extension on the back of each laptop. It’s like this two or three inch segment at the tail end of the laptop. And they pack a lot of the thermal components back here like the heat pipes the heat sinks. A lot of it is in this back segment, and it gives these devices better thermal performance. It’s just a better way to deal with the heat and you might be wondering why the x14 has a lower GPU wattage than the blade 14, but it’s only because of the chip. This is running an Intel chip a much hotter chip higher wattage chip, so it has to compensate for it but in general having this trunk, this like tail end of the device gives the device better thermal performance.
But the disadvantage is size. These Alienware devices are not normal size laptops. They’re actually quite large in terms of the footprint. So if you look at this Alienware X15, it doesn’t look particularly big until you place the Blade 15 on top of it. Like this is the same screen size and they’re both technically 15-inch laptops, but this is a lot bigger. In fact, most 16-inch devices are actually smaller than this device, and this thing doesn’t even fit into my backpack. Like my regular backpack, X15 doesn’t fit into it. So, you get nice performance gains, it just comes with a lot of size.
The other thing that’s kind of unfortunate about the Alienware design is that even with the larger chassis like this, you don’t get particularly large screens. This is still a standard 16 by 9 aspect ratio screen, which is so strange, right? It’s got like all this real estate to work with, but it still only has room for the small screen. And the other thing, if you look closely at the frame, I don’t even think they could put in one of those larger 16 by 10 aspect visual screens into this panel area, because there’s just physically no more room for display. So if they had to change any of that, they’d have to redesign a lot on this device. Unfortunately, but the good thing that comes with this rear segment is that you get all the ports on the back. It just keeps your workspace clear and like you just plug up all your power USB all in the back. And then you’re just like working in a nice clean environment.
Now if we take a look at the internals both the 14 inch devices have a single stick of storage and RAM. That’s not replaceable. The 15 inch devices both have two slots of storage. The x15 however has its RAM baked on so you can’t ever upgrade or replace that on the blade 15. It’s got two sticks of replaceable RAM so you can swap that out whenever you’d like. Now on the 17-inch devices, you can see the quad fan setup on the Alienware. We also have two sticks of RAM and two slots of storage, which is the same as the Blade 17.
Now in terms of the displays, both companies use great panels, but Razer has more options. They have 1080p, 1440p, 4K in all the devices. Alienware, for whatever reason, on the X17, you can’t get a 1440p panel. On the X15, you can’t get a 4K panel. It’s like the strangest thing. Razer has it all, and they have this new thing.
