Alienware M16 R2 review

It used to be that if you wanted to buy a gaming laptop, you were expected to make a lot of sacrifices. First, was always price. Second, mobility. And third, battery longevity. Nowadays, as gaming laptop manufacturers battle in the competitive space, all three of those are seemingly up for grabs. And while its success on that third metric has disclaimers, the Alienware M16 R2 makes a strong case on those first two pillars. Let’s check out how it fares under the microscope.

At its cheapest, you can buy the Alienware M16 R2 gaming laptop for around $2,500, which has an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or 4070 graphics card, and 16GB of DDR5 RAM that runs at 5600 MT/s. The upgraded version isn’t much more at $2,899.60 RRP, which includes a beefier Intel Core Ultra 9 185H CPU and 32GB of RAM. At that sub-$3,000 price point, there’s Ryzen-powered competition from the Lenovo Legion Slim 5, MSI Cyborg 15, and the Asus ROG Strix G16. Admittedly, those latter two only have an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and 4050, respectively, plus slower CPUs. Bottom line: the M16 R2 has a very competitive price tag for what you get.

While not overly cumbersome by gaming laptop standards, the anodised aluminium case feels like it adds to the heft. But it also feels great while adding to durability expectations. The 2.61kg weight was lighter than I expected, particularly given the 2.35cm closed-lid thickness. Spin the Alienware M16 R2 around, and you’ll notice an abundance of two things: ports and vents.

For the latter, there was some fan noise when I pushed the M16 R2 to its limits, but nothing quite as obnoxious as other gaming laptops (I’m looking at you, Acer Predator Helios 3D 15). You might mistake two of those vents as exhaust ports, but the smaller ones on the sides are the stereo speakers. They provide audio that’s passable but nothing to write home about, certainly not next to the bigger sound and balance of the Asus Zenbook S16.

As with any gaming laptop, the screen is the main attraction. Sure, the price dictates that you’re not getting an OLED screen, but there’s still a lot to like about the M16 R2’s IPS display. It’s a 16-inch 16:10 configuration that runs at a max 2560x1600 resolution with a 240Hz refresh rate and 3ms response rate. It also includes Nvidia G-Sync support to keep you free of gameplay jaggies, alongside ComfortView Plus for reduced blue-light intensity, and Advanced Optimus for max dGPU-over-iGPU performance. It’s not a touchscreen, so learn from my curiosity and save those unnecessary smudges.

The M16 R2 is close to fully featured when it comes to ports. On the left is a 3.5mm audio jack alongside a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, which I appreciate over the persistent trend towards ageing 1Gbps ports. On the right of the laptop are two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, one of which with power share, and a MicroSD slot. The back of the M16 R2 is where you’ll find the charging port and full-sized HDMI 2.1 output port, plus two USB-C ports, both of which can be used for compatible external displays, and one of which offers 15W power delivery.

That just leaves the keyboard, touchpad and webcam. Unlike the Zenbook S16, I didn’t have any facial recognition issues with the M16 R2’s webcam, which is great for convenient logging in, but the 1080p resolution wasn’t overly impressive for video calls. The multitouch trackpad is a practical size without being too small or large, and I didn’t have any issues with inputs, which wasn’t the case with the HP Omnibook Ultra Flip 14’s touchpad. I had no issues with keystroke registry on the keyboard, and specifically appreciated the dedicated buttons for volume control, including one for muting the webcam microphone.

On the specs front, the Alienware M16 R2 has a strong start relative to its comparatively affordable gaming laptop RRP. Dell sent me the top-spec version, which means an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor (up to 5.1GHz Turbo), 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 dGPU. That CPU is a workhorse for whatever you throw at it, and its newfangled enough to include an NPU for dedicated AI tasks. The M16 R2 was very responsive in my Microsoft Copilot tests, which is the current hotness for computer-side AI software, though whether it even uses the NPU is debatable.

Ultimately, it’s a gaming laptop first and foremost, though I found its results underwhelming, most notably in respect to the 240Hz display. To consistently hit that 240Hz max refresh rate, I had to drop Counter-Stike 2 to 1200p and the medium visual preset. Rig-melting games like Black Myth: Wukong had similar concessions: at native res, it pulled in 68fps with the Very High visual preset albeit DLSS AI-upscaling set to 55% render resolution. That’s playable but not impressive.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard was also a mixed bag. While playable with maxed-out visual fidelity at native resolution, pulling in around 40–60fps, there was a painful screen flashing whenever I enabled DLSS 3 frame-gen. That issue wasn’t happening with Veilguard on other PCs, and it’s a shame because frame-gen pushes the performance into 100fps+ territory. Total War: Warhammer 3 couldn’t even hit a consistent 60fps average in a battle benchmark at native resolution, albeit that was with the auto-detected Ultra visual preset.

Then there are the other benchmark tests. Like my desktop reviews for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super and 4070 Super, I put the Alienware M16 R2 through its paces with a range of older and newer games, using the recommended presets, with DLSS set to Balanced and Nvidia Reflex enabled (without boost) for the highest possible frame rates. Note that the first six games in the table below had frame-gen enabled. I tested at 1080p and 1440p for fairer comparisons with 16:9 gaming laptops, so expect lower results if you play these games at 16:10 resolution equivalents.

Outside of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and F1 23, all of those games comfortably hit a 60fps average. That’s very playable, but also only a quarter of the potential of what the screen is able to display. Hitman 3 got the closest to hitting the 240Hz cap, but still tapped out 45-ish frames shy at 1080p resolution. My big concern for the M16 R2 is that AI-upscaling was essential for playable frame rates in some games—Avatar, F1 23 and Returnal, specifically—which is concerning for games that use native-res rasterization and don’t have the benefit of DLSS or FSR upscaling. Admittedly, new release games without some sort of accessible AI upscaling are rare nowadays.

Still, in terms of actual gameplay, the deceptively demanding Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor had very playable frames, and the Zombies mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was a particular highlight at around 100fps. Despite being a shrunk-down version of the full GPU, I was impressed that the laptop’s 4070 boasted an identical average frame rate as the 4070 Super for my Handbrake H.226 NVENC 4K encoding test (130fps), beaten by a mere three seconds in encoding time (12:38 vs 12:41). Not bad for a dGPU.

In terms of everyday computing benchmarks, it was a middle-of-the-road story for the M16 R2 next to 14 recently reviewed laptops. Single-core CPU performance was outside the top five for Geekbench and Cinebench tests, though multicore performance managed a bronze medal in Cinebench. That was the best ranking, though, with fourth place the next highest for the Geekbench GPU tests, though it is nipping at the heels of the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i.

As for battery life, that’s a similarly disappointing affair. When I initially ran our typical 1080p YouTube playback test, the M16 R2 only managed a pitiful 1:35 before the battery hit 0%. I eventually identified the issue as the laptop using the 4070 instead of the Intel iGPU. Given that’s supposed to be an automated switch, it doesn’t bode well for those who just want convenience over tinkering. Still, in round two it managed a better four hours and 44 minutes; that’s not amazing, but it is okay by gaming laptop standards. Thankfully, the M16 R2 recharges at a clip, and I got from 0% to 99% in 35 minutes. That last percentage takes about the same amount of time again, but that’s understandably to preserve battery health with such a fast charge of the 90Wh battery.

The Alienware M16 R2 has a strong start with a competitive RRP (even for the top-spec model), plenty of ports and a solid display. But the more you use it, the more you realise that the lower price is in line with performance concessions, across everyday tasks and AAA gaming. It’s not a terrible gaming laptop by any stretch, but it doesn’t have the power to max out the refresh rate of its screen without fidelity and resolution compromises.