According to initial feedback, the high-end Alienware M18 laptop is suffering from problems that are, to say the least, annoying. In fact, between its sluggish autonomy and other display-related problems, it’s quite a blow for this $2800 laptop!
Alienware M18: watch out for battery life!
According to NotebookCheck‘s readings, we end up with very poor autonomies. Under load, the machine equipped with an RX 7900M and a Ryzen 9 7945HX will last just 41 min, compared with 44 min for a PC equipped with an i9 13980HX and an RTX 4090. While the 3 min difference is not significant here, the difference becomes more significant in idle: 268 min vs. 334 min, and the situation even becomes critical in browsing mode, with 85 min for the AMD config vs. 260 min for the machine equipped with NVIDIA/Intel hardware.
The main reason for these poor autonomy results is mainly due to high power consumption in these scenarios. According to our colleague’s readings, the machine consumes 55.6W idle on average, with peaks of 101.1W. In any case, it’s simple: the PC records the highest power consumption in these conditions.
Finally, if autonomy were the only problem, that would be fine, although it’s a handicap for a portable machine. But obviously, you also have to contend with display crashes, start-up problems, frame jumps during video playback and in-game stuttering.
At the moment, this is not a machine that we’ll be rushing out to buy. On the contrary, we’d prefer to wait for AMD to correct the teething problems of its GPU, which is nonetheless very high-performance.
UPDATE: The above-mentioned problems have been corrected via a specific driver . However, this is an earlier driver version than the current one, so don’t hesitate to disable automatic updates via the AMD driver panel. Similarly, browsing autonomy seems to have been improved to 3h30. However, a few minor bugs remain. These include the inability to launch 3DMark Speed Way, Blender Classroom HIP and Baldur’s Gate 3 on Vulkan.