Alienware 15 - 2026

Hands on: The compact design, with no thermal shelf adding to the footprint, means the Alienware 15 slides easily into a backpack or messenger bag. The combined weight of the laptop (up to 4.96 lb, or 2.25 kg) and its power adapter (up to 1.25 lb, or 0.58 kg) is manageable for daily commutes, and the option to charge via USB-C during lighter workloads means it is possible to leave the larger adapter at home on days that do not call for heavy gaming.

Hands on: Look at the Alienware 15 as Dell’s most affordable Alienware laptop, but know you're paying a brand premium for it. And, in its RTX 4050 configs, compare it on value to similarly priced GeForce RTX 50-series machines. They may not have alien heads on the lid, but they'll probably push more frames per second.

Hands on: While I wouldn’t call a $1,299 starting price cheap, it’s still affordable given the current state of things. I’ll have a full review for you once I get to test a final model, but for now, I like what Alienware is cooking up.

Hands on: If you have $1,300 to spend on a gaming laptop, you probably have $1,500 or so to get a considerably more powerful one. And if you don’t, you’ll probably be fine with the same RTX 4050 graphics card and an older CPU, which can be had for around $800 from other manufacturers. Alienware was never a cheap brand, but the RAM crisis is making its attempt at an entry-level laptop feel superfluous at best, instantly irrelevant at worst.