This Alienware gaming laptop sits smack-bang in my PC gaming sweet spot with $600 off and an RTX 4070 under the hood
That's with a 2560 x 1600 screen and Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, no less.
Alienware m16 R2 | RTX 4070 | Intel Core Ultra 7 155H | 16-inch | 1600p | 1 TB SSD | 16 GB DDR5 5600 | $1,899.99 $1,299.99 at Best Buy (save $600)
This Alienware gaming laptop not only offers what we'd expect to see in a $1,200 machine in 2024, but it comes with one somewhat unexpected item. That's the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, a low-power processor from the Meteor Lake generation. With 16 cores total, this chip makes a good pairing with a 140 W RTX 4070 for a smart gaming laptop overall.
Price check: Dell $1,299.99 (with Core Ultra 9/RTX 4060)
If you're in the market for a Black Friday gaming laptop deal, you've come to the right place. I've just spotted a deal over at Best Buy that sees this Alienware m16 R2 gaming laptop going for $1,300 ($600 off). That's a much better price for this machine that you'll find even over in Dell's own Black Friday sale.
It's a pretty nifty machine from the specs sheet. An RTX 4070 is a given at this price, but the choice of processor is a little outside of the norm. It's an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H—that's one of Intel's Meteor Lake processors.
Meteor Lake was devised as a lower-power mobile processor mostly for thin-and-light laptops. Though we've seen more and more of them making the shift to gaming machines, such as the HP Omen Transcend 14. We liked the chip in that machine, it performed well in our own benchmarking, even if it did get a bit toasty in that small shell.
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The Alienware is a 16-inch gaming laptop, which is the form factor I'd go for right now. Moreover this is the resolution and refresh rate I'd want in a laptop if I were buying right now: 2560 x 1600 and 240 Hz.
That's the sweet spot for PC gaming on the go. It's a reasonably high resolution to push in some triple-A games, even for the RTX 4070, though with DLSS and Frame Gen you're sitting pretty. The 16:10 aspect ratio also gives that little more room to work with for any non-gaming activities.
Alongside all that sits 16 GB of DDR5 running at 5,600 MT/s and a 1 TB SSD. However, checking out a positive review from our sister site Tom's Hardware, they note that there's a spare NVMe slot free and the memory isn't soldered for future expansion.
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Just note, you could buy a cheaper RTX 4070 gaming laptop than this. We've highlighted one over in our Black Friday gaming laptops deals page: this MSI Katana 15 is $1,159 right now, but it's only 1200p.
Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you'll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.