- Alienware m16 | 16-inch | RTX 4090 | $2,599.99
- Lenovo Legion Pro 7i | 16-inch | RTX 4080 |
$2,749$1,899
By Alienware's standards, the Alienware m16 with RTX 4090 graphics for $2,599 in their Black Friday sale is a bit of a steal (note that you'll need to hit the "RTX 4090" option to upgrade from the base configuration that's linked here). After all, we're used to seeing their high-end models go for $3,000 to $4,000 or more.
But here's the thing. For just $1,899, you can have our favourite gaming laptop in the Lenovo Lenovo Legion Pro 7i with an RTX 4080 GPU that's so close in terms of gaming performance, you'll never notice the difference.
Yup, that's the weird thing about the RTX 4090 laptop chip. On paper, it monsters the RTX 4080. But constrained by the limited thermal capacity of even a desktop replacement laptop, it turns out both chips put out awfully similar performance, despite the huge price premium Nvidia charges for the RTX 4090.
The one caveat to all this is that the RTX 4090 comes with 16GB of VRAM to the 4080's 12GB. In the long run, as games become ever more memory intensive, there will probably be a few games where 12GB won't quite be enough and the RTX 4080 will end up having to go out to main memory for graphics data, which hammers frames rates pretty badly.
Right now, however, 12GB is enough for all but a few fringe cases, which makes the extra $700 you need to fork out for the Alienware over the Lenovo very hard to swallow.
In other regards, you're looking at a pretty close run contest. Both laptops run 16-inch 16:10 aspect panels with the same 2,560 by 1,600 resolution and 240Hz frame rate. They both also share the same 1TB SSD capacity.
- We'll be keeping an eye on all the latest Black Friday gaming laptop deals right here.
The Alienware runs an AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX CPU, which is a very nice chip. But then the Lenovo not only matches that with the equally grunty Intel Core i9 13900HX but ups the ante from 16GB of RAM in the Alienware to fully 32GB.
In fact, the Lenovo is so good, it's our pick du jour of currently available 16-inch gaming laptops. You can read more about the reasons why in our full review of the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i. But suffice to say, the Lenovo is comfortably where our money would go.
