At CES 2022, Dell has announced a unique update to the Alienware m17, bringing out an all-AMD configuration.
Despite AMD’s successes in the gaming laptop world, the amount of all-AMD laptops is still surprisingly small.
And this new Alienware m17 will easily be the most premium “AMD Advantage” gaming laptop you can buy. Previous models, such as the Dell G5 SE and ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage, are midrange, landing on the lower end of the price spectrum.
Like those laptops, the new Alienware m17 supports certain AMD specific enhancements such as SmartShift, SmartAccess Memory, and SmartAccess Graphics.
You’ll be able to choose from an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H up to a Ryzen 9 6980HX. You can also get either an AMD Radeon RX 6700M or RX 6850M XT. And if you’re partial to Team Green, you can still get an Nvidia 30-series GPU.
The Alienware m17 retains the same display options as the previous model, including the 17.3-inch 1080p screen with a 360Hz refresh rate. The 4K display option does get a bump up to 120Hz from the previous 60Hz. You can get up to 64GB of dual-channel DDR5 4800MHz RAM and up to either a4TB single NVMe SSD or dual 2TB NVMe drives (though you’ll have to put it into RAID yourself).
Like the Alienware X-series, both Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos are supported.
Most of the updates are spec bumps, but Intel’s Alder Lake offerings are a big upgrade over the 11th-gen and should provide gamers with much needed power. The “AMD Advantage” laptop is a rare opportunity for AMD to shine in the laptop space and hopefully inspire other manufacturers to offer AMD CPU and GPU options in their respective lineups.
