Alienware has always been known for its over-the-top and expensive gaming PCs, but it just announced the Alienware 15, its first true budget gaming laptop.
The Alienware 15 will come with either an AMD Ryzen or Intel Core chip, along with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU to start, with options to spec it up to an RTX 5060. It’s available today, starting at $1,299 for the base AMD Ryzen-equipped version and $1,349 for an Intel model.
The Alienware 15 debuts at a lower price than the $1,690 Alienware 16 Aurora Gaming Laptop, which the company released last year. The smaller model gets new AMD chip options – a Ryzen 7 260 or Ryzen 5 220 – ships with either a 512GB or 1TB NVMe SSD, and features a 300-nit, 165Hz refresh rate, 16:10 WUXGA (1920 x 1200) display.
By contrast, the base-model 16-inch ships with an 8GB RTX 5050 grapics card and 16GB of DDR5 RAM, but only with an Intel CPU and a 120Hz display. The Alienware 15 will be configurable with 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of RAM, and a 54Wh or 70Wh battery – both specs with starting points that feel like sign-of-the-times trade-offs to hit the lower price point that stand in stark contrast to what’s offered on some of our favorite gaming laptops.
“We made deliberate choices about where to invest and where to pull back,” Alienware writes in a press release the company shared with IGN. It’s a not-so-subtle nod to the ongoing, AI-addled RAM crisis that’s engulfed the tech industry at large.
While the $1,299 seems like a high price for a budget laptop, it’s important to keep in mind that Dell, and by extension Alienware, often puts its laptops on sale. So if you want to grab this laptop, it might be best to wait a couple months to see if the price drops below a thousand bucks. But, with the way PC gaming has been trending so far this year, that’s not exactly guaranteed.
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.
