Dell Alienware m16 R2 (2024) Laptop Review

The Dell m16 R2 is only available in the Dark Metallic Moon color. Like its predecessor, the Dell Alienware m16 R1 (2023), the grills above the keyboard are air vents; the speakers are on the bottom near the front. See the bottom of the laptop here.

The Dell m16 R2's build quality is outstanding. Its metal and plastic construction feels very sturdy, exhibiting only a small amount of flex on the lid and almost none on the keyboard deck. The display twists a little when manipulating it, but it isn't bad enough to be of concern. The finish is fairly scratch-resistant and doesn't pick up many fingerprints despite its dark color. We have no complaints with the feet; they feel solid and stick firmly to the bottom.

The hinge is outstanding. It feels smooth when opening and closing the lid and is very stable, exhibiting almost no wobble when moving the laptop or typing heavily.

Check out the HP OMEN Transcend 14 (2024) if you want a more portable gaming laptop.

The Dell m16 R2's serviceability is outstanding. Accessing the internals is very easy; you only need to remove eight Philips screws and undo a few clips. A prying tool helps but isn't necessary. The two bottom screws are captive, meaning they remain attached to the panel, which helps with the reassembly. The storage slots support M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

See the owner's manual here.

• 240W power adapter and cord
• Documentation
• Alienware stickers

The Dell Alienware m16 R2 is only available with a QHD+ IPS panel. The screen looks very sharp, making it suitable for gaming, media consumption, and productivity. Its 16:10 aspect ratio is quickly becoming the norm; it doesn't affect gaming much, but it's great for productivity, as the extra vertical space lets you see more information at once when reading a document or website, so you don't have to scroll as much.

The display has a high refresh rate and a fast response time, resulting in a clear image in fast-moving scenes with minimal ghosting. There's some overshoot causing artifacts, but it isn't too bad. The display supports G-SYNC to reduce screen tearing; just make sure you turn off Optimus via the NVIDIA Control Panel and set the system to use the discrete GPU only. Otherwise, the system defaults to using Windows' Dynamic Refresh Rate.

The display's contrast ratio is decent and within the typical range of most IPS panels. However, it's still relatively low compared to other display technologies like VA and OLED. The contrast level makes blacks look gray in dim settings.

The screen gets reasonably bright. It's fine for most indoor use, but you may have visibility issues in well-lit or sunny rooms, especially when viewing dark color content. It gets pretty dim at the lowest brightness setting, which is great for dark room viewing, as it causes less eye strain.

The display's reflection handling is decent. Its matte coating does a pretty good job of diffusing and reducing the intensity of bright light sources. You can still see some reflections when viewing bright-color content with the screen at maximum brightness, but they aren't overly distracting.

The display's horizontal viewing angle is okay. The image dims and washes out relatively quickly as you move to the side, so you need to be more or less directly in front of the screen to get perfect accuracy.

The display's vertical viewing angle is okay. Like the horizontal viewing angle, the image dims and washes when viewing from above and below, so you need to look at the screen more or less straight on to see an accurate image. This can be challenging in tight places with little room to tilt the screen, like on a bus or airplane.

The display's accuracy is sub-par out of the box. The color temperature is overly warm, resulting in a noticeable reddish tint throughout. Most colors are visibly off, with reds being the most inaccurate due to oversaturation. The gamma doesn't follow the curve at all; everything is too dark.

The Dell Alienware m16 R2 has essentially an sRGB display, meaning it only has full coverage of the commonly used sRGB color space. It doesn't have enough coverage of the wider Adobe RGB and DCI P3 color spaces for print photography and HDR video production.

The Dell Alienware m16 R2 has an excellent keyboard. Unlike its predecessor, the Dell Alienware m16 R1 (2023), this 2024 model is only available with scissor switches, though you can choose between a 1-zone or per-key RGB backlighting. This keyboard's layout feels spacious and is easy to get used to. It's a pretty large keyboard, so people with small hands may find it hard to type on. The keys are mostly stable, have a lot of travel, and provide good tactile feedback. However, they require a fair amount of force to actuate, which can be tiring over an extended period. You can customize the RGB backlighting in the Alienware Command Center app.

The touchpad is okay. The size is decent, though it could be bigger, considering the amount of space available on the deck. Tracking is good except around the edges, where it isn't quite as responsive, and gestures work as intended. Actions like dragging and dropping items across a long distance or zooming in and out of images can be hard to perform, mainly because of the size. The buttons feel a tad mushy and are only clickable in the bottom half of the touchpad.

The Dell m16 R2's speakers get reasonably loud with minimal compression at higher volume levels. They sound relatively natural, with a decent amount of bass, but also slightly boxy and muffled.

The webcam is decent. The image has a fair amount of fine details; it's just too dark. Voices sound loud and relatively clear over the microphone, with no background or static noise.

The Dell Alienware m16 R2 has an outstanding port selection. Both USB-A ports support USB 3.2 Gen 1 data transfer speed of up to 5Gbps. The one closest to the back of the laptop supports PowerShare, a feature that lets you set how much of the battery's charge a connected device can draw when charging. For example, if you set it to 25%, charging will stop when you've used 25% of the laptop battery's total charge. You can also turn off charging completely. As for the USB-Cs, the one on the left (with lightning bolt icon) supports Thunderbolt 4 (up to 40Gbps data transfer speed and two 4k displays @ 60Hz), USB 3.2 Gen 2 (up to 10Gbps), and Power Delivery (up to 15W), while the one on the right only supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed. Although both USB-Cs support DisplayPort 1.4, the left USB-C connects to the integrated GPU, while the right one connects to the discrete GPU. The HDMI port connects directly to the discrete GPU and is a true HDMI 2.1 port that can output a 4k @ 120Hz signal. The Ethernet controller is an Intel Killer E3100 with a maximum speed of 2.5Gbps.

While not factored into the score, it's worth noting that the ports on the sides are in the middle rather than towards the back of the device. This can be annoying, as the cables might be in the way when using a mouse.

The Dell Alienware m16 R2's wireless adapter is an Intel Wi-Fi BE202. You can also get this laptop with an Intel Killer AX1675x Wi-Fi 6E adapter.

The Dell Alienware m16 R2 is available with the following CPUs:

• Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (16 cores/22 threads, up to 4.80GHz, 24MB cache)
• Intel Core Ultra 9 185H (16 cores/22 threads, up to 5.10GHz, 24MB cache)

Both are high-performance processors from Intel's Meteor Lake family with the same core composition (6 performance, 8 efficiency, and 2 low-power efficiency) and TDP of 45W. Unlike Intel's 14th Gen (Raptor Lake) CPUs, these Core Ultra processors use Intel's new Arc integrated graphics and sport a new neural processing unit (NPU) to accelerate A.I.-based tasks, like background blurring on video calls and certain functions in photo editing apps. They can handle general productivity tasks and more demanding workloads like gaming, video editing, and programming. The Core Ultra 9 has slightly faster clock speeds and will perform a bit better overall.

The Dell Alienware m16 R2 is available with the following GPUs:

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU 6GB GDDR6 (135W TGP)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 RTX 4060 Laptop GPU 8GB GDDR6 (135W TGP)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU 8GB GDDR6 (140W TGP)

Unlike the Dell Alienware m16 R1 (2023), which is configurable with up to an RTX 4090, the 2024 R2 model is only available with up to an RTX 4070, a mid-range GPU. All three GPU options have the same features, including ray tracing, DLSS, and Frame Generation. If you're to play at the display's native QHD+ resolution, getting a model with at least an RTX 4060, preferably an RTX 4070 is best. The RTX 4060 can handle 1440p gaming, too, but you might have to play with low settings or rely on DLSS and Frame Generation to bring the frame rate back up. As for the RTX 4050, it's mainly for 1080p gaming. It can handle some games at 1440p, like 2D platformers or highly optimized titles, but like the 4060, you'll have to lower the graphical settings or rely on performance-boosting features to get playable frame rates.

You can configure this laptop with 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of RAM. The memory is user-replaceable.

You can configure the Dell m16 R2 with 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, or 8TB of storage. Except for the 1TB storage option, the other storage configurations are available in a RAID 0 array, meaning the laptop will have two SSDs acting as a single unit. RAID 0 significantly boosts drive speeds by splitting the data evenly across multiple drives; however, the failure of one drive can cause data loss across all drives. The SSDs are user-replaceable; both slots support M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

The Dell Alienware m16 R2's overall score in Geekbench 5 is outstanding. Its Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 can handle a variety of productivity tasks and heavy multitasking. The Core Ultra 9 185H CPU is faster, though not significantly. There are faster CPUs and GPUs on the market if you need more processing power, like the Dell Alienware m18 R2 (2024)'s Intel Core i9-14900HX and RTX 4080.

The Dell Alienware m16 R2 scores remarkably well in the Cinebench R23 benchmark. Its Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU can easily handle intensive, multi-threaded applications and heavy multitasking. That said, there are much faster CPUs on the market, like the Intel Core i9-14900HX in the Dell Alienware m18 R2 (2024) and Apple's M3 Max SoC in the Apple MacBook Pro 16 (M3, 2023).

The Dell Alienware m16 R2 is outstanding for Blender work, as its NVIDIA discrete GPU renders 3D images very quickly.

The Dell Alienware m16 R2 with an RTX 4060 GPU scores well in the Basemark GPU benchmark. As mentioned in the GPU section, the RTX 4060 and 4070 are suitable for 1440p gaming; you just have to tweak the settings a bit more on the 4060 to get playable frame rates. The RTX 4050 is best suited for 1080p gaming, and even then, you might have to turn down some settings because it only has 6GB of VRAM.

The larger capacity SSDs and models with two SSDs in a RAID 0 array will have faster speeds.

Borderlands 3 runs well on the Dell Alienware m16 R2 with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060. The gameplay is relatively smooth at 1080p with high settings. There are noticeable stutters, but not enough to make the game unplayable. Switching to the Overdrive mode results in a small performance boost, raising the average frame rate to 114 fps, which is roughly a 5% increase. Every CPU/GPU configuration can handle this and other similar games, though you'll have to play with low settings to get playable frame rates on models with an RTX 4050.

Here are some additional benchmarks in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 to give you a better idea of the performance on a Core Ultra 7 model paired with an RTX 4060:

Red Dead Redemption 2

• 1080p, High settings (Balanced): 63 fps
• 1080p, High settings (Overdrive): 66 fps

Cyberpunk 2077

• 1080p, High settings (Balanced): 74 fps
• 1080p, High settings (Overdrive): 78 fps
• 1080p, High settings, ray tracing: 31 fps

Every CPU/GPU configuration can run Civilization VI smoothly. You can even play this and other similar games at 1440p without issues. The Overdrive profile boosts performance slightly, raising the average frame rate at high settings to 178 fps. Upgrading to the Core Ultra 9 CPU won't significantly shorten the average turn time.

Counter-Strike 2 runs very smoothly on the Dell Alienware m16 R2 (2024). Every CPU/GPU configuration can push high, consistent frame rates in this and other similar games at 1080p or 1440p.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs smoothly. Every CPU/GPU configuration can handle this and other similar games at 1080p. You can play at 1440p, too, though you'll have to play with low settings and use DLSS to get playable frame rates on models with an RTX 4050. The large frametime spikes are scene changes and aren't representative of the performance. The Overdrive mode boosts the average frame rate to 140 fps (1080p with high settings), roughly a 5.5% performance boost.

The Dell m16 R2 gets hot and loud under load. The hot spot is closer to the top of the keyboard deck, so it doesn't cause discomfort when typing. However, you might want to think twice before using the laptop on your lap because the bottom gets even hotter, reaching a temperature of 63 °C (145 °F). The posted fan noise level is a measurement taken in the Balanced profile. Switching to the Overdrive mode increases it to 56.5 dBA.

You can choose between Windows 11 Home or Pro when buying the laptop directly from Dell. The laptop comes with many pre-installed applications, including:

• Alienware Command Center: Lets you change the power and performance settings, launch games, customize the RGB lighting, and view system status like CPU/GPU usage and temperature.
• Alienware Customer Connect: Survey about the system's performance.
• Alienware Digital Delivery: Lets you download digital content purchased from Dell.
• Alienware Update: Keeps the BIOS, drivers, and firmware up to date.
• Dell SupportAssist: Scans your computer for firmware and driver updates.
• Killer Intelligence Center: Lets you optimize network performance.
• My Alienware: Shows your laptop's specifications, warranty, and other info.
• Solitaire & Casual Games: Solitaire, FreeCell, Spider, Mahjong, Sudoku, and other casual games.
• Spotify Music: App for the music streaming service.

The Dell Alienware m16 R2 has a facial recognition IR camera. You can use it to log in quickly, authorize purchases in the Windows Store, and auto-fill saved passwords on supported websites. You can customize the keyboard's backlighting, the lighting on the lid, and the lighting on the back of the laptop via the Alienware Command Center application.