Alienware launches gaming laptops with fast 480Hz displays, and we have questions

techradar.com:

Alienware breaks through the refresh-rate ceiling as its new m17 R5 and x17 R2 gaming laptops come with the industry’s first 480Hz displays.

Admittedly, it’s tricky to conceptualize what a 480Hz display even looks like in action. Dell describes what this tech brings to the table(opens in new tab) and it all sounds impressive. The company claims these displays will bring a “multitude of gameplay benefits…” In-game animations will be made smoother, system latency will be lowered, and ghosting will be reduced. Ghosting, for those who don’t know, occurs when a game runs at such a high speed that the monitor can’t keep up and causes afterimages to appear. It’s an annoying problem and any feature that reduce it is a big plus.

In addition to the 480Hz refresh rate, the laptops’ displays come with Dolby Vision for a wider range of color and contrast and ComfortView Plus for reducing eye strain. However, the unheard-of refresh rate comes at the cost of resolution as it’s only available on the Full HD (1920 x 1080) display. The m17 and x17 do have an Ultra HD (3840 x 2160) display option, but the refresh rate drops to 120 Hz which is still decent.

With regard to other hardware choices, the m17 R5 laptop offers more variety. 

As its most optimal, the x17 R2 offers a 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900 HK processor, NVIDIA GeForce 3080 Ti graphics card, 64 GB of RAM, and a 4 TB SSD. There are options for less memory, smaller storage capacity, or other GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs if you’re looking to lower the price tag.

The m17 R5 leans more towards AMD hardware. For the CPU, you have a choice between a Ryzen 7 6800H or Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU. For graphics cards, there are the Radeon RX 6700M and Radeon RX 6850M, but you can choose to have one of