Alienware m16 R2 laptop review: Big and risky changes

[Hotz]

Come on Neenyah, you are not being serious. The wattage of 80W is probably just an example.

It would definitely make sense to create standards for power consumptions: for example 3 standards depending on the size of notebooks. We roughly have 3 notebooks sizes (small - medium - large), and each one of them could be given a maximum power consumption of 35W, 70W, 140W. I'm not saying that it must be these exact values, it's just an example. And each category should have standardized Pl1/Pl2 values across all notebook manufacturers. If any user wants more, he should be able to overclock at his own risk (like on desktop computers), but other than that it should come with the standard settings out of the box.

We have a total mess and chaos with laptops. Comparing different laptops is almost impossible because each one has a different PL1/PL2 values. I regularly get annoyed when looking for benchmarks on notebookcheck, because the  are all over the place. There are other factors too, which make comparisons difficult (different hardware specs), but the power consumption is the one thing that could be limited easily across every laptop. And that would already make things better.

[Neenyah]

Niko is always repeating precisely 80W thus my question why 80 and not some other figure. And I agree with that in general, I agree with you too, but there really mostly are total power consumption limits in place; most slim & light laptops without dGPU are using up to 65W. Some of them up to 100W but not that many as in the first group.

Gaming laptops and workstations are also in three groups pretty much - up to 170W, up to 230W and up to 300W. Again, rare exceptions exist above that but those are some standards.

PL1 and PL2 values are different because of different manufacturers and their approach(es) to design(s) and thermal solution(s). That won't be changed unless we get standardized laptops and just one manufacturer (but then we can all move to North Korea too). Compare that with Formula 1 for example because that is a great parallel in this case - different teams (laptop OEMs) run identical engine (CPU) in their cars (laptops) but their results greatly differ because one team is struggling with proper cooling (thermals in laptops) so they have to run at more conservative mode (PL1/PL2), other team is struggling with something else... In the end we have McLaren being much better with Mercedes engine than Aston Martin is with that same/identical engine, just like we have Lenovo or Asus being better at optimising their gaming laptops for less noise and better thermals than Dell/Alienware is capable to do so with their own, despite each of them using the very identical CPU and GPU combo.

And about benchmarks... I agree with you too there but I would argue that thermals and fan noise is of greater factor for laptops than absolute benchmark numbers. Hypothetical situation and question about it - would you rather have a laptop which is loud like a fighter jet and runs relatively cool to get max performance or would you rather get almost completely silent laptop with just a tad warmer temperatures and 92% of performance of that first one? I know which one would I get, heh.
 

[NikoB]

The wattage of 80W is probably just an example.

Almost so, the Neenyah bot, as usual, lies, I previously wrote both 100 and 120, as an example, but I would like 80W to be the peak power, because modern cooling systems can easily cope with this in a fairly large case from 16" .

Of course we need standards, not PL1/PL2 scams. NVidia has forced all laptop manufacturers in their contracts to EXPLICITLY write the consumption of chips in order to stop fraud with different levels of performance at different power and therefore different noise levels.

But the cheaters and swindlers at Intel naturally did not do this, for a banal reason - they have nothing to hide against the obviously better technical processes of TSMC and therefore AMD will always win against them at the same PL1/PL2 level. Do you understand? The scammers at Intel could stop this fraud with different PL1/PL2 with one stroke of the pen, but it was they who benefited from it with their outdated "10nm". And AMD in 7x45HX, in 2022, realizing that Intel was blatantly deceiving buyers, they simply took it and were forced to do the same with Zen4 and immediately defeated Intel in absolute performance. But at the same time, they were also 30-60% more energy efficient.

Now Intel has a slightly better "7nm" Meteor Lake, but it's still nowhere near Zen4 in terms of performance per 1W. No miracles.

If Intel (which partially, to its complete shame, already uses some of the crystals from TSMC in Meteor Lake) by some miracle gets ahead, I'm sure they will immediately require writing a real PL1/PL2 for each laptop model in contracts with all laptop manufacturers, because it will now be profitable for them. But AMD simply has a small market share and does not have such influence.

80W is a purely empirical figure, which allows you to cool the processor and dgpu in a 16" case at an acceptable noise level.

The main thing, of course, is not consumption - but silence when working with a laptop, which is what most buyers want. But to simply compare laptops, you need to know PL1/PL2 right on the product box and the volume of the case and the cooling system.

Now there is complete chaos going on, and even obviously reviews with false data on performance or noise level, or all together.

How can you choose the right model, except for the option of personally checking all the interesting models, and doing it all over again every year? But who is capable of this, except multimillionaires?

All reviews are half-hearted and hide details, leave things out or outright lies, which are revealed when cross-comparing the data in these reviews.

I have seen many popular bloggers and review sites, but all of them leave out important details either intentionally or due to lack of understanding from the authors. And at the same time, there is a lot of subjective information outside of formalized tests.

And where there are no comprehensive formalized tests by which it is easy to compare different models, there is deception or omissions that are beneficial to someone.

[Neenyah]

The wattage of 80W is probably just an example.

Almost so, the Neenyah bot, as usual, lies, I previously wrote both 100 and 120, as an example,

Lol.

10 November 2023, 18:38:08:

I have already written many times before - it is necessary to legally prohibit laptops with a consumption of more than 80W...

Yesterday at 21:53:05

It will be normal when all laptops are legally limited to a total consumption of 80W,...

Today at 12:06:04:

It is necessary by law, as with the ban on incandescent light bulbs, to limit the total consumption of all notebooks, including 80W gaming laptops...

There is more, I'm lazy to keep copy/pasting from a phone.

[Hotz]

...
80W is a purely empirical figure, which allows you to cool the processor and dgpu in a 16" case at an acceptable noise level.
...
(other explanations)

Aaah! Ok, I understand your point with the 80W. Very interesting indeed. I mostly agree with your writings (and other explanations as well).

[Arn]

As an FYI, just bought this laptop from Dell Australia directly, and my 2560x1600 240HZ is an LG LGD0784 - 160WQG  [DELL P/N: 2FC6C] (According to HWID)

Can't find much information online on this panel, but it definitely looks way better than the one reviewed here, and way brighter than the advertised 300 nits.