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Dell's Alienware laptops get a boost thanks to Intel's Core i9 Coffee Lake CPUs

Power trip

Dell's Alienware aesthetic may not be to everyone's tastes, but there's no denying that their gaming laptops are seriously beefy bits of kit - especially the dinky Alienware 13 I reviewed earlier in the year. The larger Alienware 15 and Alienware 17 laptops, however, are about to get even more powerful, as Dell's just announced it's bringing Intel's souped up Core i9 Coffee Lake CPUs to both ranges.

Arriving on April 5, both lines will offer six-core Core i9 models that can be overclocked up to a whopping 5.0GHz. Naturally, Dell's also been tinkering with the Alienware's cooling system so each laptop can actually run at that speed for more than three seconds without bursting into flames due to overheating. In the new line-up, the fan blades will be 50% thinner than previous models, and Dell say the CPU will also have its own vapor chamber to help cool down each of its six cores more efficiently.

All this will supposedly add a 10% performance boost to the Alienware 15 and Alienware 17, according to Dell, allowing for smoother-looking games and a more stable portable VR experience.

Each new Alienware laptop will also come with Dell's new Alienware Command Centre software that was first debuted at CES this year. This should help make optimising and overclocking your laptop much easier than fiddling around in the laptop's BIOS settings, and you'll also be able to use it for customising the Alienware 15 and Alienware 17's, wait for it, 13 programmable lighting zones. Yes, even here you cannot escape the RGBs.

The two new Alienware laptops are also being joined by a new line-up of Dell's G Series gaming laptops: the Dell G3 15 (coming mid-July), G3 17 (available on April 26) and the Dell G5 15 (arriving on May 3). Starting at £799, these 'more affordable' gaming laptops will come with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1050 and 1060 Max-Q graphics chips as well as a variety of Intel's 8th Gen Coffee Lake CPUs. Each one will also come with dual fans and dual storage drives with the option to add an SSD into the mix.

The G5 15, meanwhile, will come with a GTX 1060 Max-Q graphics chip as standard, along with 6GB of RAM and processor options that go all the way up to a six-core Core i7 Coffee Lake CPU. You can also opt for a 4K IPS panel, although that's probably a bit wasted when you only get a GTX 1060 for playing games with.

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Katharine Castle avatar

Katharine Castle

Editor-in-chief

Katharine is RPS' editor-in-chief, which means she's now to blame for all this. After joining the team in 2017, she spent four years in the RPS hardware mines. Now she leads the RPS editorial team and plays pretty much anything she can get her hands on. She's very partial to JRPGs and the fetching of quests, but also loves strategy and turn-based tactics games and will never say no to a good Metroidvania.

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