If you’re seeking a big, powerful gaming laptop at a bargain price, look no further than the huge saving on this massive Alienware gaming laptop. With $500 knocked off its price, this 18-inch machine is packed with top-tier hardware that will ensure this notebook can tackle anything you throw at it, whether for gaming or work.
With this Alienware laptop’s smaller sibling – the M16 R2 – currently being our top pick for the best gaming laptop you can buy right now, this M18 R2 model is just as desirable but even bigger. And when it comes to gaming laptop features, bigger is better.
This monster houses an 18-inch IPS display with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 and a refresh rate of 165Hz. This screen also boasts 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, which means it can deliver dazzling colors that can meet even the most demanding HDR standards for vividness.
Also top tier is the choice of CPU and GPU, with both being among the fastest of their generation. While Intel’s latest desktop CPUs, as seen in our Intel Core Ultra 7 265K review, aren’t blowing us away with their performance, its laptop Core i9-14900HX is a proven powerhouse with its eight performance cores (8 P-Cores) and 16 efficiency cores (16 E-Cores) for massive multi-core processing power that can tackle any gaming or working tasks with ease. That chip is also accompanied by a plentiful 32GB of DDR5 RAM running at 5,600MHz.
As for graphics power, this laptop runs the laptop Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080. It’s not as powerful as the desktop RTX 4080, which you can read more about in our Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 review, but it’s still the second fastest laptop GPU currently available, after the RTX 4090.
The size of this laptop also means you get a full-size keyboard including a number pad, plus connection options are plentiful too. You get an Ethernet port, full-size HDMI, mini DisplayPort, four USB-A ports, three USB-C ports, and an SD card slot.
All this lot is wrapped up in a design that’s striking but not ridiculous, with a subtle metallic gray color and neatly integrated RGB lighting.
There are some caveats to the strength of this laptop. For instance, you only get 1TB of storage, and the display has a relatively slow response time of 3ms. Plus, of course, the CPU and GPU are technically last-gen, with RTX 5000 series laptop GPUs coming soon and the latest CPUs from AMD and Intel now available in some laptops.
However, for high-end gaming laptops right now, this combo could only be beaten by the addition of an RTX 4090, plus that storage is super easy to upgrade, with three spare M.2 SSD slots available to add new SSDs. Meanwhile, that 3ms response time is still plenty for most games, and a decent match for the panel’s 165Hz refresh rate.
Normally priced at $2,799.99, with today’s $500 discount, you can grab this Alienware M18 R2 for just $2,299.99, which is a saving of 18%. What’s more, there are no coupon hoops through which to jump. Just head over to Amazon via this link and the deal is yours.
For more gaming laptop recommendations, check out our best thin and light gaming laptops guide, or for more mobile gaming options, check our best handheld gaming PC guide, which includes a host of Steam Deck alternatives for gaming on the go.
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