Dell’s popular starts-under-$1,000 gaming laptop, the G15, continues its trajectory away from inconspicuous and moving toward looks-like-Alienware with its 2022 AMD Ryzen-based model. It joins AMD updates of the Alienware M series laptops and Aurora desktop PC updates announced at CES 2022 which also began shipping today.
Though the 15-inch G15 essentially retains essentially the same exterior design as last year’s model, the Specter Green model forgoes speckles in favor of a matching camo keyboard deck. And while it oddly seems to drop the “Ryzen Edition” branding, the 5525 joins the Intel 12th-gen-based 5520 with a selection of Ryzen 6000-series processors. It also loses the slight starting price differential, though, beginning at the same $900 as the Intel models.
That entry price doesn’t buy a lot, though, with a Ryzen 5 5600H and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050, dim and small-gamut (but relatively fast 120Hz refresh rate) 1080p screen, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and a nonbacklit keyboard.
Alienware
AMD just shipped its fastest gaming CPU, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the first AMD processor to incorporate its 3D V-Cache technology and which the company says outperforms a Ryzen 9 5900X. Thus, Alienware follows with an updated model of its Aurora Ryzen Edition R14 PC incorporating the chip. Prices start at $2,949, though it might be possible to configure a model for less, depending upon what the options are when Alienware updates its configurator.
The new models of the Alienware m15 R7 and m17 R5 based on AMD’s Ryzen 6000-series CPUs were supposed to ship in March, but unsurprisingly slipped a little to April. They’re now available, for starting prices of $1,500 and $1,600, respectively. The AMD Advantage Edition of the m17, which incorporates an AMD Radeon RX 6000-series GPU and benefits from special AMD-only integration for performance and power management (as we saw in the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14), won’t be available until at least May, though.
