Dell and Alienware announced a suite of new AMD machines at PAX East that feature AMD’s new Ryzen 6000 processors. The highly anticipated Alienware m17 R5 and m15 R7 are available now, alongside the new Dell G15, which you can pick up for as little as $900.
Although AMD launched its Ryzen 6000 processors in February, there haven’t been too many laptops available with them inside. Dell and Alienware join Asus on a small but growing list of vendors offering AMD’s Zen 3+ architecture.
The Alienware m17 R7 starts at $1,500, while the larger 17-inch m17 R5 starts at $1,600. Although the machines ship with Ryzen 6000 H-series processors, they’re paired with one of Nvidia’s RTX 30-series mobile GPUs. Dell says AMD Advantage Edition configurations — which pair an AMD CPU and GPU — will be available for the m17 R5 later this spring.
Both machines are a little more premium than Dell’s non-Alienware offerings. The m17 R5 is available with a 4K screen, for example, and both machines support Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.
For specs, the 17-inch model can support up to an eight-core Ryzen 9 6980HX, which is the most powerful Ryzen 6000 chip AMD currently offers. You can pair it with up to 64GB of DDR5 memory, along with an RTX 3080 Ti mobile GPU.
If you’re in the market for something cheaper, the new Dell G15 is for you. It starts at only $900 for a Ryzen 5 6600H, Nvidia RTX 3050, and 8GB of DDR5 memory. However, you can scale it much higher, up to an Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti, Ryzen 9 6900HX, and 32GB of DDR5 memory. The base model comes with a 1080p screen with a 120HZ refresh rate, but you can upgrade to a 1440p screen with a 240Hz refresh rate as well.
AMD’s Ryzen 6000 CPUs are largely based on last-gen’s Ryzen 5000 offerings. The underlying architecture is similar, but Ryzen 6000 takes advantage of a smaller 6nm manufacturing process to achieve higher clock speeds and better thermals. These chips also come with RDNA 2-powered integrated graphics — the same architecture behind AMD’s RX 6000 graphics cards — but you’ll probably want to stick with the discrete GPU for gaming.
All three models are available from Dell now, and there are several different configurations on offer. All three machines ship with Windows 11 preinstalled.
Alongside the three laptops, Alienware announced the Aurora Ryzen Edition R14 gaming desktop. It has been a few years since Alienware updated its desktop offerings from AMD (we reviewed the previous Aurora R10 Ryzen Edition in 2019). The new R14 model sports the design Alienware introduced with Intel processors in October 2021.
Outside of a new case design — which features a clear side panel for the first time — the new Aurora Ryzen Edition is available with AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor. Dell is offering it with an AMD or Nvidia graphics card, up to an RX 6900 XT or RTX 3090, respectively.
