The “budget” gaming laptop always seemed like a misnomer. In today’s age, with RAM prices through the stratosphere and gadgets suffering from shrinkflation, any notion of affordability is practically a dead language. You can see this trend best with the new Alienware 15. It is the Dell-owned gaming brand’s first real attempt at a budget gaming laptop, and it still costs an eye-watering sum.
The Alienware 15 is pared back as much as it can get away with. The laptop starts at $1,300 configured with a six-core AMD Ryzen 5 220 CPU, a single lane of 16GB of DDR5 5600MT/s RAM (you can slot in another stick for two lanes of RAM), and 512GB of storage. It’s also packing an older Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU. Alienware is planning an Intel variant with an eight-core Intel Core 5 210H CPU for $1,350, though that won’t arrive until later on.
If you want the gaming laptop with more powerful components like the Intel Core 7 240H CPU or an RTX 5050 GPU, you’ll need to spend at least $1,450. The highest-end configurations, with an RTX 5060 GPU and 1TB of storage, will cost at least $1,850 for the AMD version and 16GB of RAM. An Intel Core 7 with 32GB of RAM will set you back $2,300. Go ahead, take a moment to weep over the grave of affordability.
“The memory market is pretty dynamic,” said Dell’s head of PC gaming products, Matt McGowan, in a call with journalists. “We’re doing the best to hold that [pricing]. There’s still a lot of dynamics. You may see us change pricing at a future date depending on memory availability.”
Ever since CES 2026, Alienware has been hinting about plans for its first “affordable” gaming machine. From a brand better known for outlandish, overly expensive designs, that already sounds like something worthy of attention. I finally had the chance to go hands-on with the newly dubbed Alienware 15 last month, and by “hands-on,” I mean clattering away on its clacky keyboard and inspecting the port selection. There are two USB-A, a headphone jack, Ethernet, and two more USB-C (the left-side port allows for 100W charging). There’s another proprietary charging port to support the laptop’s max 110W total power package.
The Alienware 15 may not bear any of the standout looks of the company’s flagship Area-51 16 and 18 laptops, though the shell also doesn’t feel overly cheap. The gaming laptop lacks a thermal shelf, though the company claimed it paid extra attention to airflow. The models with an RTX 5060 GPU also have Alienware’s “Cryo-Chamber” on the chassis’ bottom for increased airflow. It weighs just under 5 pounds, so while it may fit inside your backpack on the way to your college lecture, you’ll certainly feel it on your shoulders.
Dell’s mainstay gaming brand is trying in its own way to be more budget-friendly. Last month, Alienware unleashed its $350 QD-OLED gaming monitor that was truly one of the best deals you could get for that display type. The 1440p resolution AW2726DM is hindered by its low brightness, but it still has enough going for it in terms of pure OLED eye candy.
The Alienware 15 exists in the same vein as the AW2726DM, though its screen will come off as a bit of a disappointment. It’s a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution IPS LCD display that hits a max 165Hz refresh rate. It sits at a 62.5% sRGB color coverage. No matter what, you’ll have to sacrifice something for a cheaper price—even if few would call $1,300 “cheap.”
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