14 DAY TRIAL // No one wants to buy bulky tablets and laptops these days and device manufacturers are well aware of that. That’s why you’re witnessing an increasing avalanche of ultra-portable, thin and light devices flooding the market.
Back in August, Dell announced the advent of what is marketed to be the thinnest and lightest Alienware gaming laptop to date, which got a lot of people really excited.
Alienware 13 is now available
A few months later, Dell finally announced the Alienware 13 is now available for configuration and can be ordered online in the US. But you can expect the laptop to ship out in time for the holiday season.
For the first time ever in its Alienware notebook history, Dell will be offering the 2560 x 1440 QHD resolution option to go with the 13-inch panel, alongside the standard 1366 x 768 pixels and more advanced 1920 x 1080 pixels. The model with the highest resolution will also come equipped with a touchscreen.
Dell is also offering two additional screen configuration options, in the form of a 720p, 200 nits TN-panel with 45% color gamut and 1080p, 350 nits IPS panel with superior 72% color gamut.
In the GPU department, you might be a little disappointed because the Alienware 13 doesn’t take advantage of NVIDIA’s latest graphics cards (the 980M and 970M) but of the GeForce GTX 860M card, which is not even top of the line (the 880M is).
More hardware options are expected to be offered at some point
The model that goes on sale now will take advantage of an Intel Core i5 processor (from the Haswell family), but models with Core i3 and Core i7 should make their way into the wild at some point. Also, a few months back Dell promised a Broadwell variation too.
As for connectivity, the laptop has 802.11ac Wi-Fi, USB 3.0, two solid state drives and support for 16GB of internal memory.
But the Alienware 13’s strongest selling point is certainly the tight frame. Dell says the new model is 40% thinner than the previous-generation Alienware 14, as it weighs 4.5 lbs / 2.04 kg and is just 1 inch / 25 mm in profile.
The laptop is constructed from an aerospace-inspired carbon fiber composite surface, which gives it a very premium industrial design.
The competition in the highly-portable gaming laptop market is quite intense, as companies like Origin, CyberPower, MAINGEAR, ASUS, Auros, MSI and Razer all put out notebooks with similar claims.
Alienware 13 with Intel Core i5 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M and 2GB of dedicated GDDR5 will start at $999 / €785.
