Holy shit. Notebookcheck just posted their review of the AW15 R2 (Revision with Skylake) :
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Alienware-15-R2-Notebook-Review.153808.0.html
Here is the cliff notes:
- 7 and a half hour of battery life in both Wi-fi test and 1080p test.
- Fantastic construction on the chassis
- Great Keyboard (keytravel, little flex, good spacing, numpad. Only minus is those dumb media keys in left side)
- Cooling is fantastic. It's not a ultrabook thin notebook, and it's heavy coming in at 3,1kg (6 pounds), but you get a machine that doesn't melt.
- 1080p IPS display is great, but the 4K touch display is amazing, bright and has fantastic color.
- Good loud speakers
- You can upgrade HDD, RAM and even add 2 M2 slots. So if you wanted to you could 2x 512 GB SSD M.2, and then a 2 TB HDD or hybrid SSHD in the 2.5 HDD slot.
- You can disable all the illumination bullshit if its not your fancy.
To me this is heaven, because virtually other gaming notebooks have terrible battery. I want a notebook with real power, but I need to do stuff with it for a lot of hours away from an outlet during the day as I am doing other stuff like writing on it. And I dont want a secondary notebook just for that.
The other thing is that some other mobile notebooks focus on a thin and light design, and then become a throttled mess, overheat and reduce the lifespan. those Arourus notebooks are thin as hell, but if the temps go that high that fast, then what is the point?
I'm gonna save for one of these guys. I'm not gonna need a 980m, 970m is more than enough, but I want to opt for that 4K Display. I need to use it for editing. I'll just game in 1080p. Scaling never made a visible difference to me. Windows scaling has gotten a lot better over the years.
I also like I can buy it bare bones. I'll upgrade with my own ram, hard drive and SSDs.
I hope the competition follows suit. I'm not going to buy a gaming laptop with 2-3 hour battery. even a gaming computer can be used for different things, and being glued to an outlet constantly, just sucks!