Many people associate Alienware with distinctive chassis designs, fast components, and high prices. This Alienware M16 gaming laptop covers the first two, but we found it on sale at Best Buy for $1,900.

It's a bit of an awkward chassis design with a fairly large rear lip and a fairly large lower deck, but it manages to pack some really high-performance components into its frame. First, let's talk about the GPU. Here we have a mobile RTX 4080 with a TDP of 175 W, which for a mobile GPU is much better than the RTX 4090 laptop we regularly test.

It is far more likely to deliver high performance without throttling back and at a much reduced price. In fact, it is as capable as any of Nvidia's mobile GPUs that we recommend, and should be able to handle even the most demanding games with no problems at all, especially if you push the frame rate into the stratosphere with DLSS 3 and Frame Generation.

The 16” 240Hz 1600p panel should also have no problem displaying as many frames as possible. And with 32GB of DDR5-5200 on board, you won't have to do the browser tab dance every time you launch a game. Unlike many other gaming laptops that get away with 16GB, this is a bit on the tight side for a modern gaming system. [At the heart of this machine is an AMD Ryzen 9 7845HX CPU with 12 cores, 24 threads, and a boost clock of 5.2 GHz. This is a Zen 4 chip, capable of handling even the most demanding tasks with no problems at all. It is not as productive at multitasking as Intel's top-end products, but it can still handle just about anything with relative ease.

So what's not to like?” well, the chassis design is not for everyone, and it's only $200 away from the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, the best RTX 4080 gaming laptop we've tested.

1 TB is a good place to start, but an inexpensive 2 TB Gen 4 NVMe drive would be something special.

Still, if you want comparable specs for less money, this Alienware M16 really has a lot to offer. It may be from a brand that often trades at a high price, but with this product, you can get a laptop that rivals the best of the best at a price that makes sense.