The Alienware X14 is a thin and light gaming laptop packed with some serious hardware. Is it worth the high asking price?
Thin and light gaming laptops like the Alienware X14 are becoming more common as mobile PC components become more power efficient and PC makers get better at designing cooling systems that don’t take up as much space. We’ve already seen a few laptops try to pack high power and light weight in a single chassis, but now Alienware is throwing its legendary hat — and design into the ring. And, it ends up with one of the thinnest and lighting gaming laptops we’ve ever used. This laptop is just 0.57 inches thick and weighs just under 4lb, making it easy to carry in your backpack. But it doesn’t sacrifice power to fit in that chassis. The model we reviewed comes with an Intel Core i7-12700H,32GB of RAM and an RTX 3060. That’s not the most powerful hardware on the market, but its more than what you’ll find in most laptops this size. But with that high power in such a portable chassis, you’re going to have to pay. The model we got in for review will cost a whopping $2,299 (about £1,700, AU$3,200) in the US, quite a bit more expensive than an equivalent Razer Blade 14, though it is a bit thinner and lighter. With the high price of entry, the Alienware X14 really is a gaming laptop for people that want something that can play the best PC games at high settings, but without weighing them down. And the fact that it uses USB-C charging instead of a giant power brick definitely helps, too. The Alienware X14 is available today, starting at $1,649 (about £1,250, AU$2,300). That will get you a 12th-generation Intel Core i7 processor,16GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050. That would be enough for most esports games, and should be more than capable of handling most AAA games, especially if you use DLSS. If you want a bit more gaming power, though, you can up the GPU to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for $1,849 (about £1,360, AU$2,580). This is the configuration we’d recommend for most people, and the price is actually pretty good, and about what you would pay for other gaming laptops with similar specs — including our favorite low-profile gaming laptop, the Razer Blade 14. The configuration reviewed here will set you back $2,299 (about £1,700, AU$3,200), and comes with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. This is definitely an overkill amount of RAM and storage space, especially in a gaming laptop that maxes out with an RTX 3060. But as far as Alienware laptops go, this max configuration is actually pretty tame. In fact, we wish Alienware pushed a little further with the X14. Even if it just included a 3070 configuration for people that want to play some Cyberpunk 2077 on the go or something. But it’s likely that would have added to the bulk of the device, and it would have lost some of its charm. It is immediately striking how thin the Alienware X14 is when you pull it out of the box and look at it. And then, when you pick it up and notice how light it is, it’s easy to forget that this is, in fact, a gaming laptop. This is a laptop that measures just over half an inch thick and weighs just around 4lb. In a lot of ways, it’s a similar profile to a MacBook Pro or a Dell XPS 15, just with a little bit of extra gaming juice behind it. The one thing that does bulk up the laptop’s profile a bit, though, is the protrusion on the back. A lot of the hot air is channeled through the vents back here, and this is also where every single port is found.
