Alienware made quite a show yesterday at CES 2015, unveiling new variants for both the Alienware 15 and Alienware 17. The beefy beasts live up to their name as expected. What exactly has the company upgraded in the form of the Alienware 17? Let’s tackle it and see.
The Alienware 17 weighs in roughly an extra 0.5 kg compared to the Alienware 15, so we are talking about a total weight of 3.7 kg and only marginally thicker than its counterpart. The design on the new Alienware 17 renders it roughly 20 % thinner than its predecessor. The display on the Alienware 17 does not offer a 4k resolution option like its smaller brother, but then again you will have a hard time finding hardware that can perform with a decent frame rate for a 4k screen. The display on it is a 1080p in either anti-glare or TrueLife variants.
The basic option for the new Alienware 17 comes packing a quad-core Core i7 chip, with added options should you choose to further customize the machine. It can support up to 16 GB of DDR3L and the storage options are multiple, as for any Alienware device, and it includes the super-fast M.2 SSDs.
One of the most important updates comes in the lines of the GPUs. The new Alienware 17 can be outfitted with either of these graphic cards: the Nvidia GeForce 965M/970M/980M and the AMD Radeon M9 M295X. On top of that we get the Alienware Graphics Amplifier, which is basically a classic desktop GPU fitted in a box that pair through a unique port to the Alienware 17 and its smaller brother, the Alienware 15. The basic price for an Alienware 17 is at $1.499, but for now it was only made available in the U.S.
As far as gaming laptops go, the Alienware 17 might be one of the best launched this year so far, but we are still expecting more from the renowned company. With 4K displays on the rise, the hardware is surely about to catch up, so we might be seeing even more powerful (and expensive) Alienware gaming laptops coming our way by the time we hit 2016.