Alienware X14 R2 Review: Thin and light but outperformed by laptops less than half its price

The Alienware X14 R2 may be the thinnest 14-inch gaming laptop you can get your hands on, but it’s ultimately quite disappointing. The specs are too weak for the price, which we don’t think the build quality or display alone can justify. The Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 features a brighter display that’s almost as good, with a higher refresh rate to boot. It also outperforms the Alienware X14 in most processor and GPU benchmarks, all of which cost half as much. Sure, it doesn’t feature the same build quality or portability, but I don’t think that warrants 2x the price at all.

The Alienware X14 R2 is Dell's premium 14-inch gaming laptop offering. It continues to be the thinnest 14-inch gaming laptop on the market, making this a portable and compact machine that can easily accompany you anywhere for some on-the-go gaming. Despite the size, the Alienware X14 R2 is packing the latest 13th gen Intel Core i7 processor which is paired with an RTX 4060 Laptop GPU. With a price tag of Rs 2,51,490, the Alienware X14 R2 certainly isn't cheap; we've seen plenty of laptops with similar or better specs at much lower price points. However, none of them offers the same level of build quality or portability that the X14 R2 does. That said, let's take a look at how well the Alienware X14 R2 performs and if it truly is worth the premium you're paying for it.

Alienware X14 R2 specs

Processor: Intel Core i7-13620H | 10 Cores (6P, 4E) | 16 Threads GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU, TGP: 85 W RAM: 32GB-LPDDR5-4800, Integrated Storage: 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD Display: 14-inch, QHD+ (2560x1600), 165Hz, LCD  Dimensions: 14.50 mm x 321.08 mm x 260.41 mm Weight: 1.91 kg

Alienware X14 R2 Build and Design

Continuing Alienware’s tradition of delivering premium gaming machines with sleek and attractive designs, the Alienware X14 R2 features a futuristic and eye-catching design that sets it apart from traditional gaming laptops. 

The first thing you’ll notice is the colour. The ‘Lunar Silver’ colour variant is the only one available, and it is incredibly eye-catching. Unlike last year’s model, the lid features a more metallic finish, as opposed to the egg-shell matte finish. You have the signature alien head logo illuminated on the lid and an embossed X on the lid representing the series. At 14.5 mm the Alienware X14 R2 continues to be the thinnest 14-inch gaming laptop you can get your hands on and it is truly impressive that they managed to fit a discrete GPU into this machine. 

The Alienware X14 R2 felt incredibly sturdy and well-built in our hands. They certainly didn’t hold back at all when it comes to build quality. The hinge mechanism also feels very sturdy and allows for smooth opening and closing of the laptop lid with little to no wobbling.

The keyboard offers a comfortable typing experience with good key travel and tactile feedback. Additionally, it includes anti-ghosting and N-key rollover features, which is pretty essential for any gaming laptop. The 14-inch form factor does mean that you have a smaller keyboard and no numpad, but the overall spacing is still good and comfortable. 

The trackpad is pretty small, and as such, doesn’t get in the way much while you’re typing. You’re most likely going to be using an external mouse for gaming anyway.

Alienware X14 R2 I/O

As far as 14-inch form factor laptops are concerned, the Alienware X14 R2 does pretty well in the I/O department. You have a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 with PD and DP, a combo audio jack, an HDMI 2.1 port, a USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port with PowerShare (this is a feature in Dell laptops which allows you to charge devices even if the laptop is off as long as it is plugged in), two Thunderbolt 4 ports with PD and DP and a microSD-card slot. Very nice.

Alienware X14 R2 performance

With that, we come to the performance. The X14 R2 features a 13th gen Intel Core i7-13620H processor which is paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU. Having tested several laptops this year featuring various CPU and GPU combinations, the specs on the Alienware X14 R2 are quite frankly underwhelming, especially for the price. While the X14 R2 certainly has the upper hand when it comes to build quality and portability, in terms of performance it falls short. For this review, we’ll be comparing the Alienware X14 R2 to the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 we tested recently. The Helios Neo 16 features a slightly better processor in the 13th gen Intel Core i7-13700HX. As for the GPUs, we’ll be comparing the RTX 4050 with a TGP of 115W in the Neo 16 to the RTX 4060 with a TGP of 85W in the Alienware X14 R2 to show you just how much of a difference TGP can make. We should also point out that the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 costs half as much as the Alienware X14 R2.

Gaming performance

Starting things off with the synthetic GPU benchmarks. While the scores between the two laptops are very close, the RTX 4050 on the Neo 16 actually manages to pull higher scores in the majority of the benchmarks.

This trend continues with real-world gaming benchmarks as well, where save one or two games, we see higher frames on the Predator Helios Neo 16 across both the high and medium presets.

Ultimately, it all comes down to the TGP, with a higher TGP of 115 W on the RTX 4050 in the Predator Neo 16, you actually get better numbers than an RTX 4060 with a much lower TGP of 85 W. Once again, this is pretty disappointing, especially considering the price of the X14 R2. That said, the RTX 4060 is still a pretty powerful GPU, and you can comfortably game at high settings as long as you're playing at FHD resolutions. At QHD resolutions you can bump the settings down to medium and still get decent numbers.

Processor performance

Coming to processor performance, the processor on the Neo 16 is better than what we have on the X14 R2. We use the PCMark 10 benchmark to test productivity and it comes as no surprise that the Neo 16 pulls ahead pretty easily.

We test single-thread and multi-thread performance using the Cinebench R23 benchmark. Here, we can see that the Intel Core i7-13620H on the X14 R2 pulls slightly ahead in single-thread performance, but is no match for the Intel Core i7-13700HX in multi-thread performance; it has more cores. Again, the X14 R2 costs twice as much as the Neo 16.

Coming to storage, the Alienware X14 R2 comes with 1TB of PCIe gen 4 NVMe SSD storage. We saw read speeds north of 6000 MB/s and write speeds north of 5000 MB/s during our testing. However, the Neo 16 actually tested higher read speeds at around 7000 MB/s and around the same write speeds. 

The RAM on the Alienware X14 R2 is also slightly slower, which makes sense since we're comparing LPDDR5-4800 RAM with DDR5-4800 RAM. The Alienware does come with 32GB of RAM, however, which is nice, but with no room for expansion since it's integrated.

Alienware X14 R2 display

If there’s one thing the Alienware X14 R2 has going for it, it’s the display. The display on the Alienware X14 R2 is fantastic. You have a 16:10 14-inch QHD+ (2560x1600) display with a refresh rate of 165 Hz. The laptop comes with an advertised brightness of 300 nits, and during our testing, we got a peak average brightness of 335 nits. We tested 99.9 per cent sRGB coverage and 98.8 per cent DCI-P3 coverage, making this one of the best laptop displays we've tested this year. Considering the form factor, the 16:10 aspect ratio, and the specs on board, the Alienware X14 R2 makes for an excellent portable content-creation machine. 

Alienware X14 R2 Heat and Noise

Compact machines don't do too well when it comes to thermals. The Alienware X14 R2 gets pretty hot during intensive workloads but it does seem to manage internal heat fairly well. During our processor stress test, we recorded temperatures of around 80 degrees Celsius on the processor, which is not bad. The processor didn't throttle much either despite rising surface temps. Surface temps can get uncomfortably high, especially at the centre of the laptop where we saw temps north of 45 degrees Celsius after long gaming sessions. 

In terms of noise, last year's Alienware X14 got pretty loud, to the point that we compared it to a plane taking off. This time around the noise is a lot more manageable. It will still get fairly loud during intensive workloads.

Alienware X14 R2 verdict

The Alienware X14 R2 may be the thinnest 14-inch gaming laptop you can get your hands on, but it’s ultimately quite disappointing. The specs are too weak for the price, which we don’t think the build quality or display alone can justify. The Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 features a brighter display that’s almost as good, with a higher refresh rate to boot. It also outperforms the Alienware X14 in most processor and GPU benchmarks, all while costing half as much. Sure, it doesn’t feature the same build quality or portability, but I don’t think that warrants 2x the price at all.

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