No gaming laptop screen is faster than the Alienware m17 R5’s

The m17, long the mainstay of Alienware’s gaming laptop line-up, has never been short of performance – but now you can equip one with a suitably speedy screen as well. The m17 R5 is the first laptop to land with a 480Hz display, which aims to give twitch aimers that millisecond advantage over lesser players.

The Full HD panel has a 3ms response time, and plays nicely with both AMD FreeSync and Nvidia G-sync depending on which graphics card is found inside the laptop. It also handles Dolby Vision HDR playback, but it’s the ridiculously quick refresh rate that really stands out. It bests everything else in the line-up, which already included 165Hz and 360Hz options.

If you prefer to run things at a high resolution, there’s also an optional 3840×2160 panel. Even that has a 120Hz refresh rate, which isn’t to be sniffed at.

Elsewhere, the m17 R5 gets a triple helping of AMD goodness, with Ryzen 6000 CPUs, Radeon RX 6000 graphics and AMD Smart Technologies. The latter includes dynamic power shifting between the APU and dedicated GPU for a performance boost while gaming, Smart Access Memory that cuts out the middleman between the processor and the graphics memory, and SmartAccess Graphics for longer battery life without sacrificing FreeSync dynamic refresh rates.

You can equip the m17 R5 with up to a Ryzen 9 6900HX processor, 64GB of RAM and 4TB of NVMe SSD storage. The newest addition to the range is the RX 6850M XT, a beefy dedicated GPU with 12GB of GDDR6 memory – although picking it limits your choice of display. For the full 480Hz experience, you’ll need to go with Team Green and either 3070Ti or 3080Ti graphics.

The Alienware m17 R5 is available to configure on the Alienware UK website now, with prices starting from £1599. To get one with an RX 6850M XT GPU inside, expect to pay from £2949.

480Hz panels are also on the way for the Intel-powered Alienware x17 R2. It’s Nvidia-only here on the GPU front, with a choice of 3060, 3070 and 3080 graphics. You can also load it up with as much as 64GB of DDR5 memory and 4TB of NVMe storage. You can order one from the Alienware website, with prices starting from £2249.

• Related: Best gaming laptops – power portables for Windows 11 PC games

Tom Morgan-Freelander Deputy Editor

About

A tech addict from about the age of three (seriously, he's got the VHS tapes to prove it), Tom's been writing about gadgets, games and everything in between for the past decade, with a slight diversion into the world of automotive in between. As Deputy Editor, Tom keeps the website ticking along, jam-packed with the hottest gadget news and reviews.  When he's not on the road attending launch events, you can usually find him scouring the web for the latest news, to feed Stuff readers' insatiable appetite for tech.

Areas of expertise

Smartphones/tablets/computing, cameras, home cinema, automotive, virtual reality, gaming