While it's ever-so slightly softer gaming performance versus MSI held us back from an Editor's Choice award, we still highly recommend the new Alienware x17 R2 for anyone looking for a super-premium 17-inch gaming laptop.

Software and firmware updates can be tweaked and optimized, but hardware is locked down for the most part. We'd like a USB-C port or two on either side edge, but otherwise this is a well-behaved, slim and sleek beauty with serious gaming horsepower on board. And if Alienware's Legend 2.0 design language catches your eye like it does ours, you have to agree it's one of the best looking gaming laptops on the market right now. Regardless, the premium build quality of this machine is significantly nicer than the competitive MSI product. And while there were no show-stoppers in that regard, a couple of hiccups from NVIDIA's drivers for Advance Optimus GPU output hinted that there was still some software tweaking to be done.

In addition, it's apparent to us that it's still a little early for the Alienware machine, as its software setup was a touch more finicky. In fact, we'd expect Alienware to continue to tune the performance of the x17 R2 such that it could possibly close this small GPU-centric gap in the future. That said, rolling-up just a hair behind the new Intel 12th Gen-powered MSI GE76 Raider, with the same GPU on board, isn't really much of a miss. This new Alienware laptop put up some of the best benchmark scores we've ever experienced from a mobile platform, and if it weren't for having two similarly configured, hot-off embargo lift machines in house to test, it would have led the pack by a large margin across the board. Infused with Intel's new 12th Gen Core series mobile processor technology (which, by the way, stay tuned for Marco's full Intel Alder Lake-H 12th Gen mobile platform coverage coming right up), along with NVIDIA's fastest, most powerful mobile GPU yet, we expected great things from this svelte but still spacious 17-inch machine, and we weren't disappointed.

And in that regard, the new Alienware x17 R2 gives us a lot to look forward to this year for gaming laptops.

However, it's all this new tech and newfound performance that gets us up in the morning so all good as they say. With the launch of both Intel's Alder Lake Mobile processor platform, combined with NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (and 3070 Ti) hitting the market on the same day, you might say we're a tad over-worked and sleep-deprived around here currently.

Alienware laptop fan control