Alienware 14 Review

Alienware 14 Review - Performance Analysis and Conclusion

Performance Analysis
The Alienware impressed in our benchmarks: its Cinebench score of 6.96 was significantly ahead of the XMG’s 6.04 result, and the Alienware rattled through the image editing and video encoding tests to scores of 1,712 and 3,118 – both better than the 1,645 and 2,878 scored by its rival.

The Alienware is a decent distance ahead in application tests, but the two machines are more closely matched in games benchmarks – after all, they share the same GTX 765M GPU. The Alienware’s Battlefield 3 minimum and average scores of 24fps and 31fps are one and two frames ahead of the XMG respectively. In Dishonored, the Dell laptop returned scores of 64fps and 73fps: the former score is two frames ahead of the XMG, and the latter is the equal of the P303 Pro.


This is a gaming laptop, though, so you shouldn’t expect good battery life. The two machines were remarkably close in our video run-down test – the Alienware lasted for 219 minutes, which was exactly one minute less than the XMG. The XMG does have a further small advantage here, in that its battery is external so can be quickly swapped, but frankly we’d not be overly inclined to actually buy a spare battery to lug around with us.

The storage proved impressive, too. The LiteOn SSD returned respectable AS SSD sequential read and write scores of 467MB/sec and 390MB/sec, and the Western Digital hard disk hit 100MB/sec in both of those benchmarks – a decent effort for a platter-based part. The Alienware felt responsive as a result – and it booted in less than ten seconds.


Conclusion
The world of gaming laptops is hugely competitive, so Dell’s designers should be commended for making the Alienware 14 stand out: its matte metal chassis looks and feels fantastic, and the lights across its surfaces look good without becoming garish. It’s also fast, with plenty of potential to be made faster, at least on the CPU and storage front. When it comes to gaming it’ll also put paid to virtually any modern title at 1080p, with its fantastic screen making it a pleasure every step of the way.

However, it’s much thicker and heavier than the XMG P303 and Razer Blade, and vastly more expensive than the former, yet offers essentially the same performance. You do get the optical drive in this model but although advantageous for some we tend to think that Razer and XMG were right to omit it in favour of slimness and lightness. As such, much as there is something likeable about the Alienware 14 it wouldn't be our first pick for a small gaming laptop.