Alienware Reviews 168

could never recommend this overpriced, overhyped garbage. There's a reason they hand these worthless laptops out free to TV show producers - even at zero this unreliable cr@p is overpriced.

3x M2 SSDs destroyed in 2 years thanks to pathetically incompetent thermal management, woeful graphics performance, stalling/freezing, failure to boot - you name it, every hallmark of a garbage machine is there to enjoy.

I recently bought an Alienware M18. Within 3 weeks the thermal paste had given out and the company sent out a technician. He installed a new cooling system, but in doing so he damaged the graphics card and reinstalled the case so poorly that the screws were stripped. I had no chance to even open the thing up. The case was so badly warped by his clumsiness that I couldn’t plug in headphones or a mouse. In the end I had to send the computer back to Dell for a refund. Absolute waste of time.

It's a waste of computer space. I've had my gaming laptop for over a year and only used Alienware for the first time today. It serves no purpose I can see other than to disable dell client service manager randomly and without permission. If you open it it'll just sit on an updating screen for over half an hour doing nothing. It warns you not to cancel it or it'll corrupt the software. I cancelled it twice without issue. Save yourself the headache and just get rid of it. But be aware uninstalling it will take upwards of half an hour because once you uninstall one Alienware program and restart your laptop you'll still have other programs, and it's a lot like trying to extract a cancer, even if you think you've got it all, you restart your laptop and go into programs and there it still is.

The machine has a mind of its own and always runs at an unbearably hot temperature even when it is supposed to be in standby mode. Awful and most uncomfortable user experience to play games on this device due to the constant amount of interface updates which do nothing to enhance the experience coupled with the device being mega loud and running at a million degrees at the lowest setting on any video game. I really would like my money back. WOuld never recommend this model/Alienware in general to a friend.

Overpriced computer. Didn't work as well as my older, cheaper computer. Lights didn't function properly. Constantly "forgot" it had a mouse and keyboard. Took forever to load and close programs. Massive, ugly and so not worth the price. But I wouldn't be writing this here except that there is no way to leave a review on Dell's website. Looked everywhere, did a google search, opened a support ticket.... Could not find any way to leave a review.

Bought my son $200 gaming headset for Christmas. Not even two months later they are broken due to a defect. Cannot get any direct support from Dell whom it was purchased through. Send you to technical support but this is not a PC so without a tag number support stops there! Total ripoff.

Don't buy from this company. Horrible laptops. Let's put this out there. The first day I bought my alienware 13... Minecraft ran at 10 fps. They wanted me to buy an external gaming drive with my already $1200 laptop to make it run faster. Alienware is a scam. Never trust them. Put your money with any other company.

Amazing laptops. However I had an issue with the bezel and hinge of my Alienware M15 R3 (for the 2nd time since I bought it), and contacted Dell and Alienware who were not at all helpful and said that there were no authorized repairers or parts dealers in the country where I currently reside, and kept putting me into a customer service department infinite "loop". And my expired warranty was registered in Ukraine, so they couldn't help anyway unless I went through a complex process of "re-registering" it, but it was still unclear if they would actually help, once I had "re-registered" it. So I hoped that the hinges were still ok and ordered the correct part from Texas, the screen back cover and bezel (I had to find the part myself, Dell/Alienware didn't assist), which took a while, expecially trying to get it through customs, but it eventually came. The part was 2nd hand, but at least worked, with a change of one of the screws which was bent. I am very surprised that a company like Alienware or Dell, cannot source parts for laptops that are just a few years old. As I often live and travel in foreign countries, I would not consider Alienware or Dell again.

Too much declining in quality through years for such expensive laptops

As someone who has worked in the IT field for a long time and built countless computers this is my take on this gaming PC.

1. People have mentioned that they had issues with the computer restarting. I did not encounter this and I assume it’s because I followed this process.
- power on the pc
- install windows
- update windows
- make sure it’s fully up to date then check for updates again
- keep updating and checking for updates until you can’t anymore.
- download NVIDIA GeForce experience and install the latest driver
- go to Alienware’s website find r13 and have them search and install the latest updates.
- go to intels website and install the latest updates.

After I did this process I have had no issues and everything has ran very smoothly. The general consensus is that Alienware is overpriced and uses cheap components I have also heard a lot of comments about the computer being unbearably loud and hot.

In my humbled opinion It does run at a higher temperature than I would like but you can easily swap an AIO or air cooler that will be quieter.

I posted a video of the fan noise the highest I have ever heard it and the video does not do it justice. It sounds way louder in the video than it is. I’m alienware command center you can also control fan speed so if you set it to performance it’s going to sound like a jet engine constantly.

As for being over-Priced in the sense that “you can build a pc for cheaper” ya I suppose you can. That is also using the cheapest parts possible including case but if you spec it out for similar parts and a case of equal value then it’s right on par. You can also buy a refurbished one wait for a holiday sale.

As far as them using cheap parts or mismatching the CPU and GPU… they used to… they have listened to the public and improved. Their RAM Hynix which is a lead RAM manufacturer. The i7 12700F and RTX 3060 TI to go together perfectly without a bottleneck on performance.

I decided to buy Alienware instead of building because I wanted one since I was a kid and they look so cool. I also got a really good deal on mine that made it a no brainer. It smashes games like MW 19, BO Cold War, overwatch2, and world of Warcraft. I was playing these at 240 fps 1080p with a 3060 ti which is unbelievable performance. It’s nice to just order a PC and when it gets here just sit down and play it rather then having to put it together. “It just works”. The mouse and keyboard that are included are a joke you definitely want to order new ones for it it’s just like the basic $10 mouse and keyboard from dell.

Overall I would definitely recommend the machine to anyone. I can ease your mind that the bad reviews are either lack of knowledge, excessively high expectations or just people that like to complain. For your run of the mill gamer this machine is great.

ALIENWARE AURORA RYZEN™ EDITION R10 has gotta be the worst prebuild i've ever seen

They banned me for no reason, after lying that my login issue had been resolved. Then they ghosted me.

I've gotten this for like 3000 called the m17 r2 it literally overheats after 20 seconds and the CPU is 2.6 GHz and my mother is 3.9 but anyway, its a good laptop gets 100+ fps in gta5 and other games

If I could give Alienware 0 stars, I would. Where do I start is the real question. I have gone through countless laptops, both the R2 and R5. The R2 got so hot that you could barely touch the keys without literally burning your fingers. Blue screens happened daily so I returned every device I had. Thinking that the AMD R5 model would be a better machine and oh boy was I wrong. This thing was a trainwreck from the start. The Mifi LAN card failed repeated and made it to where I had to connect an Ethernet cable in order to access the wifi. So I returned that as well. After trying 4 R5's, I realized that not only tech support is worthless but these machines are absolutely the worst gaming laptops you can buy. Trust me on this folks, stay far away from Alienware.

So I was more or less 'gifted' a new desktop by someone that was trying to support my efforts to start a fresh career as a developer/programmer. This was my first experience with a 'prebuilt' PC, as I'd always just put them together myself in the past, or have someone I knew do so, mixing and matching parts to meet the specs and costs I was looking for.

When I contacted one such person who had performed this service for me in the past, they said that things have shifted such that big companies like Dell (who own Alienware), and whoever else is left (Gateway? MSI?) had mad arraignments with GPU makers, and other parts makers, so that effectively making your own machine is now at least 50% more money than going with a major company's prebuilt option. Trying to keep costs as low as possible as it wasn't even my money, I went forward with Alienware despite bad reviews even back then (this was about a year ago).

Initially, it was good - or at least OK - until the warranty expired. I'm not a conspiratorial minded person - this could very well have been a coincidence - but after getting an email warning of my impending warranty expiration on a daily basis for several days before it finally expired (maybe longer), and refusing to pay over 300 dollars to extend it, then literally ONE WEEK later, on a PC that was just over 6 months old, watching it fall apart so fast it was blinding - all makes me think something a little fishy is happening with Alienware's warranty process. I've never had a PC fall apart and become unusable in less than a year (which it eventually did). It didn't occur to me that I'd need an extended warranty on a brand new computer. Looking back, it's hard not to see it as a thinly veiled threat and impossible to prove protection racket. All it would take is some remote switch - the problems all started as it refused to update anymore. This is the thing that happened within a week, I should say - the failing updates. At first, that won't cause a lot of problems, but eventually, it'll mean you're going to get hacked (which I was), and at some point it won't even boot into windows anymore (which it won't). I can't telll you how much time I spent trying to source out the problem - online support from Dell amounts to a 99$ fee for them to wipe your drive and reset it - something you can do yourself for free. Because there was data I didn't want to lose, I tried a repair shop, and despite their insistence that it was fixed, with a 2nd internal HD installed with a fresh copy of updated windows, the problem just started happening again. It wouldn't update, and eventually failed. I ended up doing the reset and losing a lot of data that was important to me - but it didn't help. At most, it would buy me about a week or two before the problems would start happening again - sudden crashes for no reason, while doing next to nothing, writing some code in a light weught text editor, etc. And ultimately it would always get to a point where it would just get locked into an endless cycle of trying to boot into windows but crashing before it even got to the log-in screen, leading eventually to the BIOS options.

So after my third or fourth installation of windows (I went back and froth from 10 to 11, and it kept happening wither way), this time 10, from a flash disk where I'd saved an image of it to, I quickly set up a partition on the extra drive I have internally and installed Linux onto it. That way, at the very least, I could always boot into Linux. This seemed like the ultimate victory, as whenever Windows began to fall apart, I could stilll at least boot to Linux, make sure any data I wanted was saved in the cloud or on the partition, then do another reinstall of windows. A major pain, to be sure, but it meant I could get back to work after months of delays.

Then, very oddly, Alienware updated the BIOS for the first time I'd noticed in a long while. Just a week or two after I started with the Linux thing. After their 'update', I could no longer boot to Linux from their BIOS screen. I spent many an hour trying to find a work around but came up empty.

So... that's when I took the darned thing out back and shot it, then went inside and bought a Mac, which I should have done all along, with money I'd scraped together - it wasn't cheap, but after all the repair fees and programs I tried to fix the Dell Alienware prebuilt, it worked out to less, but now I have an M1 Studio with specs that are significantly superior, it makes almost no noise (the Dell sounded like a Jet engine - and had NO liquid cooling despite their claim it did), and is 1/3 to 1/4 the size. 35+ user of PCs, and only PCs, converted to a Mac used for the rest of my life - that's how bad a product they sell.

Specs of the Dell:
CPU: AMD® Ryzen™ 7 5800
GPU: NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3060 Ti
16 GB DDR Ram
1 TB SSD drive
Liquid cooled chasis (NOT) add-on as well as larger power supply.

The worst and most expensive laptop we have owned.
Terrible build quality, hinge came out just over one year of normal use. Key chipped off on the keyboard, battery never lasted anywhere near what was advertised. The worst part is their after sale service or lack off. Getting any support or help from their customer service is a waste of time. Currently going through their complaint process. Will do whatever it takes for Dell to rectify their poor product.

Terrible terrible service you will never get in touch with dell and forget about a return, specked a pc that costed 2100 dollars and the ssd never worked must’ve been fried tried for hours to get in touch got out sourced to a company in Indian who said I’m unable to make a return but they can check it out by going into your computer and do a whole lot of nothing for the love of god do not buy form this company find a friend or a shop that can help you build a pc, with the time spent trying to get a return I could’ve just learned how to build one myself

Alienware is the most DISGUSTING AND THE WORST PC BRAND IVE EVER OWNED. I recently got this pc not even 1 month ago and it’s already FREEZING AND LAGGING ALL THE TIME. When i first opened the pc and started setting up the pc on the startup menu, filling in my information. A few steps in, it froze and it REFUSES to let me interact nor does it let my cursor move. It also lagged BADLY while i was setting it up. I ended up having to turning the power off to fix it since the pc wont shut itself down. A few days in, the pc freezes and lags on the simplest things. I was watching YouTube with no other applications running in the background and it automatically freezes itself for no reason at all. I wasn't watching it at like full resolution. I made no tweaks to the pc except get chrome downloaded and started to watch YouTube. A couple days later, i downloaded genshin impact on my pc, and it lagged so badly every time i open Genshin Impact. It’d say “GenshinImpact.ex not responding” and asks me to wait for it or close it. Note that i have lowest graphics on Genshin Impact and i’m still on the title screen trying to open the game. The entire pc freezes too and i wouldn’t be able to press the shut down button on my computer screen and i had to close my entire pc by cutting off the electricity to it AGAIN. It keeps on happening and it drives me MAD. Every time you open a game you have to have your fingers crossed for it to not crash and every time it does crash, you’ll have to just cut the electricity and restart the pc, and then type in all your passwords in again, and hope it doesn't crash again and wait an extra 10 minutes to restart it, It was torture. It was pure TORTURE. I couldn’t even play any games with slightly high graphics without it overheating and making loud noises. The entire pc felt like a frying pan at high heat. It could probably fully cook an entire meal with no problem. This PC is overpriced and its quality is down in the dumps. Way too overpriced.

I have been involved in a saga with dell that started when I bought a $3000 alienware laptop in Feb 2021. It arrived with a non functioning power supply, which I received in March. It also had serious issues with stuttering, crashing, and over heating out of the box. They said they'd replace it, but then cancelled the replacement in March because of component issues. They sent someone out to repair it and broke it worse, now there was no sound and it still had the same issues. They sent someone else out and they replaced the motherboard but there was still no sound. This is when I found out that they were giving me refurbished motherboards and that "they always have issues" I lost my mind, and Dell sent me a replacement laptop in NOVEMBER.

this laptop ran well at first, then started having issues in January. It's been worked on a few times remotely and each time it works better for a little while then has issues. In May of 2022 I started having major problems with it after a Windows 11 update. No Windows features will work now. Not notepad, not photos, nothing. Dell attempted to roll back Windows, it wouldn't roll back. Dell attempted to update things, they won't update. Each time they tried to repair something remotely it was unsuccessful, it simply wouldn't implement any of the changes. I had to reinstall Windows, and it is STILL BROKEN.

Dell decided that they needed to repair it again, so they ordered replacement parts, which kept being delayed. Then they decided that they were just going to upgrade my laptop with a much better refurbished one, which arrived today.

BROKEN. It was simply tossed into a box with no padding, nothing, just put into a large box. It began rattling the moment I powered it up.

Now they are looking for another replacement..

update: replacement arrived, without a number pad ( which I use for work ) and the escalation specialist K Swami told me too bad, deal with it. It also crashed twice while I was setting it up. I am waiting for an external keyboard ( which I will have to pack with me for travel ) and then I will see how it performs.

After reading all the negative reviews after my purchase, I thought oh dear what have I done. However everything has been superb. I received my X17 R1, i9 32gb Ram, 2T SSD, Comfort view, slight lead time due to pandemic as ordered when first went on sale; a first for me after progressing through the various consoles in my life from, Atari, Sega Megadrive, Playstation, XBox etc. Well what can I say, but awesome! Been using for 7 months now, and added the mouse headphones and 25" Monitor everything from gaming to programming not a glitch, super fast and responsive. Streams my D&D Talespire session to discord without any bother, perfectly. Also downloads games from Steam without a hitch, pairs up Xbox controller no problem, runs Unreal engine just great. Just one small problem, it didn't come with my prepaid McAfee quiet build, but McAfee sorted that after I gave them my order number. Would thoroughly recommend, as for the fan noise, can't hear it with my headphones on ha ha.