Alienware X14 Review: Sleek, stylish, powerful

The Alienware X14 is an impressive machine. It's compact, looks extremely stylish, and comes with some crazy specs. However, it could have done more in the specs department for the price, since you can get similar and in some cases even better gaming performance on cheaper laptops.

The Alienware X14 is Dell's self proclaimed "world's thinnest" laptop, and at a glance, this is certainly a very compact device. Don't let that fool you though, because it still comes packed with beastly specs for all your gaming needs. The latest 12th gen Intel processor, an RTX NVIDIA GPU, a crisp and bright display with a high refresh rate and more. Of course, all of this does not come cheap, with a Rs. 1,74,990 price tag. Is the Alienware X14 worth the price? Read our review to find out.

Alienware X14 Build and Design

The Alienware X14 is a sight to behold. This is the kind of laptop that immediately draws all attention in the room. To say that it looks like a spaceship or a hypercar would be fairly accurate. This IS an Alienware laptop through and through, and you will recognise it from across the room.

If it hasn't been established yet, this is a very cool looking laptop. Dell has put impressive attention to detail into this. Every aspect of the design, including the placement of the vents and hinges plays into the overall aesthetic of the laptop. It's well thought out, and feels secure and sturdy. The laptop's outer body is composed of magnesium alloy. The internal body makes use of aluminium and stainless steel. The vents and surfaces inside the laptop, such as the bezels and keyboard, use plastic. There's a good balance without compromising too much on weight. Plus, the outer frame is resistant to fingerprints, which is a nice touch.

The X14 comes with a new, patent pending hinge system. The hinge moves back and forth along a track which results in a more stable experience while using the lid. Opening and closing the lid is smooth, and there's just enough tension with little to no flex or wobble. Additionally, the lid doesn't sit completely flat when closed, and is at a slight angle to make opening the laptop easier.

With such a small form factor, understandably you do not get a full-sized keyboard. Things are squished to ensure everything you need is present, including the function keys, and even the trackpad. However, the keys themselves are pleasant to type on, have tactile feedback and decent travel as far as laptop keyboards are concerned. They're also RGB backlit, but it's not per-key, so no custom lighting layouts.

The "world's thinnest" laptop is only 1.4cm thick and at 1.8kg fairly light as well. You should have no trouble with portability when it comes to this laptop. It's even more impressive when you consider the specs on this laptop. There are two variants of the X14, the one we received has a 3050Ti, but there's a variant with an RTX 3060, more RAM, and storage capacity as well, which will set you back by Rs. 2,05,989.

Alienware X14 Specs at a glance

Display Resolution: 1920 x 1080, 144Hz Processor: 12th Gen Intel Core i7-12700H Graphics: Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti Memory: 16GB LPDDR5, 5200 MHz OS: Windows 11 Home Storage: 512GB NVMe SSD Ports: 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 port, 1 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C with PD and DisplayPort, 2 x Thunderbolt 4 port with PD and DisplayPort, 1 x headset combo port, 1 x HDMI 2.1 port, 1 x MicroSD Port Connectivity: Intel AX211, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2 Battery: 80 wHr Dimensions: 321.5mm x 262.77mm x 14.5mm (WxDxH) Weight: 1.8kg Price: Rs. 1,74,990

As you can see from the images, the laptop hinge is not at the very back, but slightly forward, which is why we said it kind of gave off a hypercar look. This rear section is where you will find all the laptop's IO ports.

Alienware X14 IO Ports

Speaking of IO ports, you've got plenty of options. A USB 3.2 Gen 1 port, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, and two Thunderbolt 4 ports. You've also got an audio combo jack, an HDMI 2.1 port and a MicroSD slot as well. While the laptop does not have an ethernet port, an adapter is provided along with it in the box.

Alienware X14 Display

A 14-inch display might be on the smaller side for a lot of people. However, it should more than suffice. During our time with the laptop, we didn't at any point think that the smaller display was hindering our enjoyment. The 1080p display is crisp, with vivid colours, which our benchmarks can attest to. It's also bright, reaching close to 400nits at peak brightness. The 144Hz refresh rate is also nice, especially for gaming. You should have no trouble hitting those frames as well, considering the hardware onboard.

Alienware X14 performance

The X14 comes packed with the latest 12th gen Intel Core i7-12700H processor. The 14 cores and 20 threads should have no trouble meeting any and all of your multitasking needs, as can be seen on our Cinebench R20, R23 and PCMark10 benchmark results.

We tested the 16GB LPDDR5 memory several times on AIDA64; however we did come across an anomaly where the L1 read and write speeds were always far too low to be right. However, the memory read and write speed speaks for itself.

The X14 also has fast NVMe storage, with our variant having 512GB of storage. We were getting close to 6500 MB/s read speeds and 4000 MB/s write speeds in our tests, which are close to as advertised and fantastic.

Next we come to the 3DMark performance. On paper, the Alienware X14 has great specs. For the most part, this reflects on our benchmark results as well. However, when compared to the similarly specced Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3i which has the same processor and GPU, the X14 just barely falls short in some benchmarks.

The same continues with real-world gaming benchmarks as well, with the X14 at par or slightly behind the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3i. This may well have to do with the X14 running comparatively hotter due to its compact nature.

Alienware X14 Noise and Heat

The X14 is no slouch when it comes to gaming. However, with a laptop so compact, it becomes hard to find a proper cooling solution while trying to keep the noise down. The X14 has two fans, each independently controlled to cool the CPU and GPU. While this certainly keeps the temps somewhat in check, you could be forgiven for thinking the X14 was about to take off of a runway. It does actually get that loud. But the tradeoff is worth it in our opinion, better to be loud than hot. At least in the case of a gaming laptop.

Alienware X14 Verdict

All things said and done, the Alienware X14 is an impressive machine. It's compact, looks extremely stylish, and comes with some crazy specs. However, it could have done more in the specs department for the price, since you can get similar and in some cases even better gaming performance on cheaper laptops, such as some of the ASUS TUF laptops, and even the Lenovo Gaming 3i we compared the X14 against in this review. That being said, we totally wouldn't fault you for going for this just for its looks if you have the moolah for it.

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AMD Ryzen 9 7950X Desktop Processor Review: Knocking it out of the park, yet again

AMD Ryzen 7950X, like it’s predecessor, the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, is a 16-Core / 32-Thread processor featuring a host of new improvements including a new microarchitecture in the form of AMD Zen 4, much higher clock speeds, IPC improvement of close to 13 per cent, shift to a more efficient TSMC 5nm process, inclusion of current gen graphics cores across all SKUs, support for DDR5 and PCIe Gen 5.0 and a new AM5 LGA socket. With so many high-impact changes over the Ryzen 5000 series processors, the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series of processors has plenty of things that can really push it over the edge but it has an equal number of things that can go wrong. Hopefully, that’s not the case.

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X Specifications

Moving to the more power-efficient TSMC 5nm process is going to help the Ryzen 7000 quite a bit on the power efficiency front. The AMD Ryzen 7000 series can eke out up to 49 per cent more performance on a 16-Core processor compared to the Ryzen 5000 series at the same socket power and core count. And if the performance were to be normalised, then the Ryzen 7000 series can manage to do so while consuming 62 per cent less power. Obviously, these improvements are not just because of the shift to the TSMC 5nm process but also because of all the architectural improvements. One of the easiest ways to see the improvement is by observing the clock speeds. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X has a base clock speed of 4.5 GHz and a Turbo clock speed of 5.7 GHz. And this is without an improvement to the Precision Boost algorithm. 

As for the other specifications, we can see that the L3 Cache per core has remained the same but the L2 Cache has been doubled and is private to each core. L1 Cache is also the same with 32K for the Instructions and 32K for data. The TDP has been raised by a huge amount to 170W compared to the 5950X which was designed for 105W. However, this number doesn’t indicate the power consumption. When AMD states a certain TDP for a processor, it indicates the caps for several parameters. In the case of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, a TDP of 170W means that the Socket Power is 230 Watts, the Peak Current is 225 Amperes and the Sustained Current can be as high as 160A. This is really going to do a number on the VRM of the motherboards, so always check the peak parameters of the motherboard’s VRM before you decide on buying one.

Lastly, all processors falling under the Ryzen 7000 family will have inbuilt graphics capabilities and instead of getting a really old GPU architecture, we’re getting RDNA 2 IGP Cores in all four processors that are being launched on the 27th of September. The core configuration is the same across all SKUs. Each processor will have two RDNA 2 cores which have a base clock of 400 MHz and a peak clock of 2200 MHz. RDNA 3 GPUs are right around the corner so one could have always hoped for more, but this is good enough. On to the benchmarks then.

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X Performance

The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X seems to have a lot of potential to beat the competition to become the reigning desktop processor across a wide variety of workloads. Let’s see how that pans out in the benchmarks. 

We tested the unit on the following configuration: AMD RYZEN TEST RIG CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X Motherboard: ASRock X670E Taichi SSD: WD SN850 1TB NVMe SSD HDD: Seagate FireCuda 2 TB ST2000DX002 RAM: 2x 16 GB Kingston FURY DDR5 @5200 MT/s Cooler: Deepcool 280mm AIO PSU: Cooler Master MWE 850W V2

 

Gaming

We tested the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X at 1080p resolution with HITMAN 3, Borderlands 3, Far Cry 6, Cyberpunk 2077 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Folks buying an top-tier desktop processor and graphics card such as the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and the NVIDIA RTX 3080 probably aren't going to be gaming at 1080p resolution, so we'll be adding 1440p and 4K benchmarks once we get done testing those. From the 1080p gaming benchmarks we can see that the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X is at pay with the Intel Core i9-12900K in most benchmarks with the exception of one game -- Far Cry 6 -- where the Intel processor maintained a slight lead. As for HITMAN 3 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the Zen 4 processor seems to have gained a significant lead of up to 40 FPS. 

 

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Apple iPhone 15 series may use the Ultra branding for its flagship model instead of Pro Max: Heres what we know

More reports have now surfaced that Apple may replace the current "Pro Max" branding next year with the top-end iPhone 15 series, calling it "Ultra".

The "Pro Max" branding appeared for the first time with the iPhone 11 series in 2019.

According to Apple tracker Mark Gurman, who expects iPhone 15 to come with some "bigger changes," including USB-C (instead of Apple's proprietary Lightning port), the tech giant could introduce a new branding for high-end models.

The company has already launched a rugged Watch Ultra and now has 'M1 Ultra' processor.

According to supply chain analyst Ross Young, the 'Dynamic Island' feature could arrive on all iPhone 15 models.

The company has reportedly started testing the new USB-C feature owing to the European Union's new law that requires all new phones to have USB-C ports by 2024.

Analysts Ming-Chi Kuo has also suggested that "Ultra" will exclusively have a periscope lens (6x or 5x). Also, the Ultra will come with an improved battery life that lasts three-four hours longer.

With all these exclusive upgrades, the iPhone 15 Ultra is expected to go up in price compared to the 14 Pro Max, possibly starting at $1,200 (up from $1,100).

(Except for the headline and cover image, the rest of this IANS article is un-edited)

For more technology news, product reviews, sci-tech features and updates, keep reading Digit.in

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Apple Store Online in India has announced festive offers, and a lot more: Know what they are here

As India enters the festive season, Apple Store Online has announced several attractive offers on its new product line-up of iPhone 14 series, Watch Series 8, AirPods Pro (2nd Gen) and more for the fans in the country, along with free customised engraving on devices and 'Today at Apple free educational sessions.

The consumers can get Rs 7,000 instant savings on orders over Rs 41,900 across all products with HDFC Bank or American Express credit cards.

This season, Apple is offering more flexible ways to pay. When you use eligible HDFC Bank credit cards and American Express cards, you'll get 7 per cent instant savings up to Rs 7,000 across all products.

The users also have low monthly instalments options with EMI and can get upfront savings to cover interest with 'No Cost EMI' for three or six months.

"And, if you're buying a new iPhone, you can exchange your current smartphone for instant credit" according to the Apple Store Online in India.

Customers can also personalise iPad, AirPods, AirTag or Apple Pencil (2nd Gen) by engraving a unique mix of emoji, numbers and text in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, Gujarati, Telugu and English for free only at Apple Store Online.

The company also has 'Today at Apple' educational sessions, ranging in topics from photo and video to music, coding, art, design and more.

These sessions are held all over the world and are led by 'Creative Pros', and at times world-class artists, photographers and musicians, teaching sessions from basics and how-to lessons to professional-level programmes.

On October 5, Canadian-born artist and architect Keerat Kaur will bring your favourite memory to life on iPad in a session on India Apple Store Online.

Guided by her, "you'll explore colour, characters, motifs and more to make a piece as personal as the memory that inspired it".

(Except for the headline and cover image, the rest of this IANS article is un-edited)

For more technology news, product reviews, sci-tech features and updates, keep reading Digit.in.

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NASA plans to crash spacecraft into asteroid: Heres why

A NASA spacecraft was set to smash into an asteroid early on Tuesday, in a bid to test a technology to defend Earth against potential asteroid or comet hazards in the future.

NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a first such mission, was set to impact its target asteroid -- which poses no threat to Earth -- at 7.14 p.m. on Monday (4.44 a.m. on Tuesday IST).

"This test will show a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and intentionally collide with it to change the asteroid's motion in a way that can be measured using ground-based telescopes," the US space agency said in an update.

DART's target is the binary, near-Earth asteroid system Didymos, composed of the roughly 780-metre diameter "Didymos" and the smaller, approximately 160-metre size "Dimorphos", which orbits Didymos.

DART will impact Dimorphos to change its orbit within the binary system, and the DART Investigation Team will compare the results of DART's kinetic impact with the asteroidAto highly detailed computer simulations of kinetic impacts on asteroids, according to NASA.

"Doing so will evaluate the effectiveness of this mitigation approach and assess how best to apply it to future planetary defense scenarios, as well as how accurate the computer simulations are and how well they reflect the behaviour of a real asteroid," the space agency added.

DART will provide important data to help better prepare for an asteroid that might pose an impact hazard to Earth, should one ever be discovered.

(Except for the headline and cover image, the rest of this IANS article is un-edited)

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Apple iPhone 14 assembly begins at Foxconn facility in India, but what about other iPhones

Apple has begun assembling its new iPhone 14 at the Foxconn facility in India, a first in years when a new iPhone is being assembled within weeks of its global launch in the country, the tech giant confirmed on Monday.

The locally-assembled iPhone 14 will go on sale in the country in the fourth quarter, as the company bolsters its local manufacturing.

Foxconn is assembling the new iPhone 14 at its Sriperumbudur facility near Chennai.

"The new iPhone 14 lineup introduces groundbreaking new technologies and important safety capabilities. We're excited to be manufacturing iPhone 14 in India," Apple said in a statement.

The tech giant first started manufacturing iPhones in India in 2017 with iPhone SE.

The tech giant manufactures some of its most advanced iPhones in the country, including iPhone 11, iPhone 12 and iPhone 13, at the Foxconn facility, while iPhone SE and iPhone 12 are being assembled at the Wistron factory in the country.

As India doubles down on local manufacturing of technology products, Apple is likely to move 5 per cent of its new iPhone 14 production to India by the end of this year, and 25 per cent by 2025, according to a JP Morgan analysis.

Analysts have earlier predicted that Apple has shortened the production period of its new iPhones in India this year, barely six weeks or so from the production cycle in China.

Next year, Apple iPhone 15 may see its production at the Foxconn and Wistron manufacturing facilities in India at the exact production time with China.

"India's iPhone supply chain has historically supplied only legacy models. Interestingly, Apple has requested that EMS vendors manufacture iPhone 14/14 Plus models in India in 4Q22, within two to three months of the start of production in Mainland China," according to the JP Morgan report.

"The much shorter interval implies the increasing importance of India production and likely higher iPhone allocations to India manufacturing in the future," the report noted.

"We believe Apple only produces iPhone 14/14 Plus models in India now due to the more complex camera module alignment of the iPhone Pro series (done by EMS vendors) and higher local market demand for the iPhone 14 series (tax savings)," it added.

Buoyed by the ease-of-doing business and friendly local manufacturing policies, Apple's 'Make in India' iPhones will potentially account for close to 85 per cent of its total iPhone production for the country this year.

(Except for the headline and cover image, the rest of this IANS article is un-edited)

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Netflix Games adds Oxenfree into its library: Heres where you can play it

Video streaming platform Netflix is making the Oxenfree game freely available to its users with a subscription, more than six years after the game made its PC debut and five years after it debuted for iOS and Android users.

According to Engadget, users can now download the new "Netflix Edition" of the game from the iOS and Android app stores. This version of Oxenfree has expanded localisation support.

Users can now play the popular game with subtitles in more than 30 languages.

The popular game joined Netflix's catalog of games but is particularly notable for being an in-house release, the report said.

The company acquired Oxenfree developer Night School Studio last year.

The company will release 'Desta: The Memories Between', the latest project from Monument Valley developer Ustwo, on September 27. It also teased that the critically acclaimed Kentucky Route Zero would "soon" be available for free as well.

(Except for the headline and cover image, the rest of this IANS article is un-edited)

For more technology news, product reviews, sci-tech features and updates, keep reading Digit.in.

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