Dell Alienware X16 RTX 4080 review: A portable workstation?

The Dell Alienware X16 is a lineup of premium computers powered by some of the very best hardware in the market. Both desktop PCs and laptops are offered under the subsidiary, with most offerings tending to the enthusiast class. The company launched its RTX 40 series-powered devices earlier this year. The lineup includes devices with the budget RTX 4050 up to the RTX 4090 laptop GPU.

The laptops are mostly bundled with Intel 13th gen Core CPUs. The Ryzen 7040HS-powered laptops should be somewhere on the horizon, but aren't confirmed (AMD Ryzen-powered Alienware is a rare sight).

Dell was kind enough to send over an RTX 4080 and Core i7 13700H Alienware X16 R1 laptop for review. We thoroughly tested the device and will you fill you in on the same in this article.

What does the Dell Alienware X16 R1 offer?

Pre-delivery

The Dell Alienware laptop (Image via Dell)

The Dell Alienware X16 R1 laptop we reviewed features a Core i7 13700H CPU and an Nvidia RTX 4080 laptop GPU. This was paired with 16 GB of LPDDR5 6000 MHz memory and a 512 GB M.2 PCIe Gen 4 SSD.

The laptop packs a massive 6-cell 90Wh battery to power these beefy components. It comes with an impressive 16' QHD+ 1600p IPS display and some RGB lighting features on the rear, the keyboard, and even the trackpad.

	Dell Alienware X16 R1
CPU	Intel Core i7 13700H
GPU	Nvidia Geforce RTX 4080 laptop GPU
RAM	16 GB LPDDR5 6000 MHz
Storage	512 GB M.2 PCIe Gen 4 SSD
Battery	6-cell 90 Wh
Display	16" QHD+ 2560 x 1600, 100% sRGB, 3 ms response, Advanced Optimus, Nvidia G-Sync
Weight	2.72 kg (6 lb)
Price

Since the laptop in question is part of the premium Alienware design, it does costs a lot. The unit we are reviewing costs $2,999, for example.

Unboxing experience

The packaging of the Dell Alienware X16 R1 laptop (Image via Sportskeeda)

The Dell Alienware laptop comes with a solid unboxing experience. From the looks of it, the device comes in a big black box and isn't an attention grabber. However, the real magic sits inside the outer covering.

The box almost opened up like an armor crate — much like what we have seen in games like Call of Duty, if you ask me. These small little things speak heaps about why you are paying the extra for Alienware. I loved unboxing the X16 R1.

A closer look at the Dell Alienware X16 R1

Looks

The Alienware X16 R1 we are reviewing is no exception to the traditional formula the high-end gaming-focused brand is known for. The colorway is called Lunar Silver, and it is a blend of silver and white parts on the outside and a full-black design in the interiors.

I liked the design language of the new Alienware — it isn't an attention grabber and blends in perfectly with any environment. The company has also invested heavily in making the laptop slim, which helps modernize the lineup that was known for its chunky designs in the past.

Is the Dell Alienware X16 R1 portable?

The Alienware X16 R1 weighs over 2.5 kg (Image via Sportskeeda)

A massive concern among gamers is the portability of big and heavy machines like Alienware. In my testing, I found the X16 R1 to be surprisingly carry-friendly. It isn't going to be as easy as a Zenbook or an Inspiron, by the way. The device is 16" and will take up a considerable amount of space in your backpack and add 6 lbs to your shoulder.

But, for the computing power you get, I believe these compromises are worth it.

Display

The display of the Alienware X16 R1 is stunning. As the name goes, it is a 16" IPS panel with a resolution of QHD+ (2560 x 1600), which makes it incredibly sharp. Specs-wise, it features 100% sRGB, a low 3 ms response time, and supports gaming-focused features like Advanced Optimus and Nvidia G-Sync.

However, the display is 16:10, which is sort of a con. Since the majority of content comes in 16:9, it leaves out black bars on the two sides which can be disturbing for some.

I tested the display in all types of scenarios - working with huge blocks of text, watching movies, gaming, and more. The colors are sharp and vibrant, and the clarity is next level because of the small 16" screen. You won't be disappointed with what the Alienware's display has to offer.

The screen also comes with a blue light filter built in. One can turn on ComfortView Plus to let the laptop intelligently adjust colors for the best viewing comfort without hurting the picture quality.

Keyboard and touchpad

One big issue with most laptops is the keyboard and touchpad they come with. For the former, most of them are low-quality and membrane-based, and thus don't offer the best typing experience. Touchpads generally tend to be too small for some, and aren't as responsive or run faulty within a year or two of usage.

Enter the Alienware. It comes with ultra-low-profile CherryMX mechanical switches that take the keyboard to the next level. The only exception are the function keys at the top, which still features membrane-based switches. However, you won't be pressing them a lot so it's not a problem.

However, the keyboard doesn't come with a numpad and that can be a problem for some.

The touchpad on this laptop supports multi-touch and is built with glass. It feels premium to the touch, and best of all: it features RGB. In all my years of using high-end gaming devices, Alienware has impressed me with the touchpads; I found the new X16 R1 to be no exception.

RGB lighting features

The RGB LEDs in the Stadium of the Alienware X16 (Image via Sportskeeda)

I can't skip on RGB lighting features in this review: the Alienware X16 R1 is filled to the brim with LEDs that can make even some gaming desktops look like child's play.

To start things, the Alien head logo is on the back of the laptop, and the keyboard lights up with customizable per-key lighting. Apart from this, there are RGB LEDs at the back of the laptop (called the Stadium) and the trackpad as well. The laptop packs an insane 100 micro LEDs in the stadium area.

The RGB is completely addressable and can be managed via the Alienware Command Center software.

Speakers

Dell hasn't taken the onboard audio system lightly either. The Alienware comes with a 6-speaker sound system. Two of them are top-firing, two are woofers, and the remaining two are bottom firing. Further, they also support Dolby Atmos. The software is polished and comes with a ton of quick presets that allow gamers to quickly adjust the audio according to a scenario.

I found the speakers to be superb at their job. The audio output is crisp, detailed, bassy, and loud. They rank among the best I have seen bundled in any laptop.

Internals

The internals of the Dell Alienware are high quality. The laptop employs a custom all-black PCB. All important components like the CPU and the GPU are hidden away so that users don't accidentally misplace any important cooling component/connector for the functioning of the device.

A large portion of the laptop is occupied by the massive 90Wh battery and the four cooling fans that are tasked with keeping the device cool.

Cooling design

The air intake grille on the top of the Alienware X16 laptop (Image via Sportskeeda)

The Alienware X16 R1 takes cooling very seriously. The company calls the underlying thermal dissipation technology as CryoTech. It employs a total of four fans to bring air in and out of the chassis — two of these are for cooling the CPU and the remaining two are for the graphics processor.

Like most other laptops on the market, users can customize the cooling performance depending on their use case via the Command Center software. The laptop has performance modes as well, and they are as follows:

Battery
Quiet
Balanced
Performance
Overdrive

A quick look at what each of these performance presets does is as follows:

The performance presets of the Dell Alienware X16 laptop (Image via Sportskeeda)

In my testing, however, I found that the laptop heated up significantly during heavy multitasking and gaming. The chassis becomes a boiling chamber while running a demanding game like Cyberpunk 2077 at 1600p. I just couldn't use it as a "laptop" while playing a game and had to set it aside on a table.

However, the keyboard area doesn't heat up as much as I have seen in other laptops. This is a plus point for some.

RAM and storage upgradability features

The SSD slots in the Dell Alienware X16 (Image via Sportskeeda)

The RAM and storage upgradability features of the Alienware X16 are a bit underwhelming. For starters, the laptop comes with LPDDR5 memory, which means the RAM modules are soldered onto the PCB with no extra slot for adding more memory. This means gamers can't upgrade the memory on their system.

The storage, however, can be upgraded. The Alienware features two SSD slots, and each of them is bundled with a thermal pad for heat dissipation. One of them is populated with a Samsung Gen 4 drive and the other is empty for ample upgrades.

I installed a Gigabyte NVMe drive into the empty slot to increase the total storage capacity to 1.5 TB. However, the laptop didn't boot on the drive we added, which may mean that you can't discard the original NVMe SSD that the Alienware X16 bundles out of the box.

How does the Dell Alienware X16 R1 perform?

Synthetic benchmarks

Now that we have looked at everything the Alienware X16 has to offer, let's check out the performance of the system. We are kicking things off with some synthetic benchmarks and will pitch the internals of the laptop against some desktop CPUs to judge where it stands concerning the competition.

The Cinebench R23 single-core test is a benchmark of how powerful each core of the CPU is. This test adds insight into gaming performance, which reportedly doesn't require more than two cores even a decade after multi-core CPUs became a norm.

The 13700H came off as slightly slower than the Ryzen 5 7600X and much slower than the Core i5 13600K in this test.

In the multi-core test, the i7-13700H pulls ahead of the six-core offerings. However, it still falls behind the 13600K, especially because of the much slower single-core performance. Thus, we can conclude that the chip is okay-ish for workloads like rendering, modeling, animation, and others that rely on multi-core performance.

The 3DMark CPU Profile test adds an interesting insight into how powerful a selection of threads in each CPU is. Our test sample for this benchmark is relatively small because it was recently added to the suite. However, the results paint an interesting insight - the 13700H is almost equivalent to the 7950X3D in 2 and 4-core benchmarks. This means the gaming performance should almost be the same across the board.

Unfortunately, we won't be able to pitch the 7950X3D and the 13700H directly against each other in games because of obvious reasons.

Now that we have looked at the performance of the Core i7 13700H CPU, let's get into the graphics processor's capabilities. We start things with the 3DMark Time Spy test - a DirectX 12 gaming benchmark.

The Alienware X16 R1 with the RTX 4080 scores an astronomical score of 17,452 points in this test. It beat some high-end desktop GPUs like the RTX 3080 Ti and the RTX 4070.

Our next test is 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme, a DirectX 11 benchmark. A similar trend continues in this test, however, the 3080 Ti takes a small lead ahead of the 4080 laptop GPU.

Our 3DMark ray-tracing feature test sample isn't big enough, yet. However, through it we can see the 4080 laptop GPU pulling ahead of the 7900 XTX, AMD's flagship offering. Thus, we can expect the video card to impress in ray tracing-heavy games.

The 3DMark Port Royal, again, is primarily a ray tracing-based benchmark. Our sample size is considerably bigger here, which will help in judging where the 4080 laptop GPU stands concerning the rest of the market.

As evident from the chart above, the 80-class RTX 40 series mobile chip is slower than the last-gen RTX 3080 Ti but manages to pull ahead of the RTX 4070 desktop GPU.

The 3DMark Speed Way is mostly a test of DirectX 12 Ultimate performance - the latest in graphics processing APIs. In this test, the 4080 laptop continues the trend and beats the RTX 4070 desktop GPU. However, like the other tests above, the 3080 Ti video card is faster than the 4080 laptop GPU.

For our concluding graphics-processing benchmark, we have Superposition, a DirectX 12 benchmark that tests performance at various resolutions. The RTX 4080 laptop is almost the fastest GPU among our sample sizes, but the scores are dwarfed by the 4090 desktop card.

Productivity benchmarks

In this section, we will test the competence of the Alienware X16 R1 in some productivity workloads. Let's start with file compression.

File compression is generally a CPU-based workload. Chips with higher core counts benefit from this test. The 13700H was slower than the 13600K again. However, it managed to score higher than the 7600X thanks to its higher core count.

The Blender benchmark is a test of modeling and rendering performance. the 13700H sits towards the bottom of our limited sample size here. Like the benchmark above, it is slower than the 13600K and faster than the 7600X.

Next, we ran some graphics processor-heavy benchmarks to test the GPU. The 4080 laptop GPU was faster, albeit slightly, than the 3080 Ti and the RTX 4070 desktop cards. Thus, we can conclude that Alienware will be a potent machine for 3D modeling, video editing, rendering, and other workloads.

Lastly, we tested the temporal-upscaling performance of the GPU. This test is new in our test suite as well, hence the sample size is pretty small. The RTX 4080 laptop GPU registered a 4x improvement over the no-DLSS numbers, mostly thanks to support for frame generation.

PCMark 10 Benchmark

PCMark10 results of the Dell Alienware (Image via Sportskeeda)

The PCMark 10 benchmark is a test of how good a PC is in general use case. It tests multiple workloads like browsing, video conferencing, photo and video editing, 3D graphics, and more. The Alienware scored an impressive 7,122 points, which means it is more than good enough for any form of basic computing.

Gaming benchmarks

Now that we have an idea of how the system performs in comparison to various other CPUs and GPUs on the market, let's look at the gaming benchmarks. We will test based on the Alienware device and not the 4080 laptop GPU or the Core i7 CPU specifically.

Firstly, we tested the performance in multiple games at 1600p (the Alienware's display resolution) with the highest settings applied. We tested the raw rasterization performance of the system without relying on any form of upscaling or ray tracing. The results are as follows:

Most games hit 60 FPS, with the only exception of Fortnite, which has gotten much more intensive following the Chapter 4 update.

Next, we turned on ray tracing to check out how the system performs in this regard. Most games dipped to the 30s, with Cyberpunk trading below 30 FPS. However, some well-optimized titles like Returnal and Far Cry 6 impressed me with their performance.

Next, we turned on some temporal-upscaling features to test how many frames we can add back to the games after turning ray tracing on. Since most games still support the last-gen DLSS 2, we tested a ton of titles with this technology. Mostly, the gains ranged between 20-30%, with the only outlier being Returnal where performance didn't change at all.

DLSS 3 is the buzzword for new RTX 40 series graphics cards. They can effectively multiply the framerates by a factor of two to five. In our testing, we found the framerates jump three times, which is pretty impressive for high-resolution gaming at the highest settings with ray tracing turned on.

What are the thermals and power draw of the Dell Alienware X16 R1?

Thermal efficiency

Like most other laptops, the Alienware X16 R1 struggled in maintaining decent CPU thermals. The processor shot up to 100 degrees when stress-tested with the AIDA 64 workload. The chip thermal-throttled during this time, which proves the cooling design of the laptop isn't paying off.

While gaming, the CPU touches 100 degrees more often than not. I logged brief periods of thermal throttling while playing Cyberpunk 2077 as well.

The graphics processor, however, didn't fare so badly. When stressed with the Furmark stress test, the temperatures hit a maximum of 69 degrees (nice), which is acceptable for any GPU out there.

The GPU heats significantly while gaming. We logged maximum temperatures of 88 degrees on the RTX 4080 laptop graphics processor while playing Cyberpunk 2077.

Overall, the Alienware X16 R1 doesn't have the best thermal performance out there. In addition, the body heats up significantly because of the metal build of the laptop. All of this makes it quite difficult to use while gaming or running the internals under full load.

Thankfully, the laptop has a Battery performance preset that massively undervolted the CPU and GPU for better thermals. But we don't recommend using it unless you multitasking or working on a school project.

Power efficiency

Power draw is one of the major concerns with laptops. However, don't expect to get any good performance without plugging the Alienware X16 R1 into the wall. We tried gaming on the battery: high settings in The Witcher 3 with frame generation turned on. It was barely playable at 30 FPS, but the entire battery was depleted within 30 minutes.

The detailed power draw results, when stressed with the AIDA 64 system stress workload, are as follows:

The power draw is pretty high for a CPU. The chip boosted to about 132W and settled around 120W for this benchmark.

While gaming, however, the Core i7-13700H in the Alienware X16 draws much less power. We only registered three spikes above 60W. For most of the time, the power draw was stable around the 30W mark.

GPU power draw is pretty similar to the CPU. When stressed with the Furmark stress test, the graphics processor was drawing ~130W.

Much like the temperatures, power draw while gaming boosted even further. For most of the while, the graphics processor drew close to 150W, with frequent spikes northwards of 190W.

Operating clock speeds

The Core i7 13700H is rated for a maximum of 5 GHz on the P-cores and 3.7 GHz on the E-cores. Since the chip thermal throttled for the maximum of the test, we didn't see the processor hit clock speeds close to those numbers. The detailed CPU clock speed characteristic is as follows:

The story is slightly different while gaming. The P-cores boosted up to 4.7 GHz in the test. However, for the most part, the chip maintained an average clock speed of around 2.5 GHz. The detailed clock speed characteristic is as follows:

The GPU clock speeds are rather more stable than the CPU core clock graphs. When stressed with the Furmark stress test, we logged a maximum of 2,430 Mhz. The GPU maintained the clocks throughout the test.

The clock speeds fluctuated while gaming, however. The detailed characteristic is as follows:

Overall, clock speeds aren't a direct competition source. They are a reflection of the temperatures and power draw, and help explain some of the trends seen in their graphs.

SSD performance

CrystalDiskMark results of the SSD (Image via Sportskeeda)

The Dell Alienware X16 R1 packs a 512 GB Samsung Gen 4 drive. In our testing, we found it hit almost 6,750 MB/s read speeds and 5,100 MB/s write speeds. This isn't the maximum spec of the Gen 4 standard, but it's plenty for any workload including moving large chunks of data and gaming.

RAM speeds and performance

AIDA64 RAM benchmark results (Image via Sportskeeda)

The memory bundled with the Alienware X16 R1 is stupendously fast. It is rated for DDR5 6000 MHz, which ranks it among the fastest RAM modules in the market. In my testing, I found it hitting almost over 69 GBs/ read and 85 GB/s write speeds. These results are consistent with some high-quality DDR5 6000 MHz desktop RAM.

Is the Dell Alienware X16 R1 with Core i7 13700H and RTX 4080 GPU worth it?

The sleek design of the Dell Alienware X16 R1 (Image via Sportskeeda)

The Dell Alienware X16 R1 with the Core i7 13700H and the RTX 4080 has its set of caveats. However, there's no denying it has a ton of positives and is a portable workstation. The device can be expensive, but the prices aren't too far off from other competitors in the market of the same caliber.

This Alienware X16 laptop isn't for everyone. It is built for those who want desktop-grade performance without investing in a machine that can't leave their homes. As such, you will find it worthwhile only if you fit into this category.