Looking for the best Alienware’s 17-inch gaming laptop? The entire lineup is full of powerful, but expensive options. With so many of them to choose from, we’ve narrowed down the selection.

Dell’s Alienware tech brand is legendary, but not always for the best reasons. Their prebuilt PCs are elaborate but expensive, and often, it comes down to the weird funky cases. Their laptops, however, are a different story altogether.

Gaming laptops are expensive, even with better APUs and CPUs being made with higher quality integrated graphics, if you intend to game on a laptop you need something with a little bit of oomph behind it.

Alienware does not skimp out on durability, and quality of specs, and their 17-inch lineup is one of the best in the market today.

Though the options are plenty and the choices can leave you a little stranded if you decide to go all in on the wrong laptop.

You can get the Alienware x17 R2 with an i9-12900HK and RTX 3080 Ti from Dell, starting at $4048.99.

Coming in at a whopping $4049.99 (on sale), the Alienware x17 R2 with an i9 and 3080 Ti is one of the most expensive consumer-grade laptops on the market. It is, without a doubt, a beast. A ridiculous monster that will squash everything put in its way and do it without even breaking a sweat.

Battery life is not your concern here. This isn’t something you expect to get hours out of. This is something you need a heavy-duty charging bank for. Plug sockets are your friend.

Inside is 32GB of DDR5 RAM, as well as the aforementioned i9-12900HK and Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti. Games? Content creation? Actual science? It’s all doable. You’ll even be able to store a lot of games on this, with its 2TB NVMe drive offering a speedy way to get into the games you love at the quality you expect.

Connecting this to one of our recommended 4K monitors, or even including this as a replacement for the desktop in our best PC setup will bring you so, so much performance.

This is a laptop we like to put into the upper echelons of laptops. This is something that will last you a long time and you shouldn’t expect to replace it – other than critical damage being done – for at least ten or so years.

Once the 3080 Ti has been surpassed, it will keep going as a top-tier card, because DLSS is going to keep that thing on life support forever. You can probably game on this for far longer than you currently realize.

You can get the Alienware x17 R2 with an i7-12700H from Dell, starting at $2859.99.

If you’re wanting something that will securely game on the go and then also game in 4K at home, this is the one for you. Alienware’s ‘mid-range’ 17-inch laptops aren’t mid-range in the same way as we’d recommend out of something like a back-to-school laptop but are just an entirely different beast.

On a regular list, this would go in the premium tier.

However, don’t be deterred by its 1080p screen, you’re going to need all the battery life you can get, and upping this to the 4K screen will not only cost you extra, but you’ll be losing out on potential excellence with a 144Hz response time. Yes, while it can go up to 360Hz, most games won’t benefit from going much higher – until you begin to place Nvidia Reflex on it.

This is a special kind of laptop, in that it can and probably will replace your desktop experience entirely. Getting an extra keyboard and mouse wouldn’t go amiss, as closing the lid on the Alienware x17 would provide you with a top-end gaming experience if you leave the portability behind.

Nvidia’s 3070 Ti is pretty much the go-to recommendation for gaming, content creation, and more right now, as it offers price-to-performance unparalleled, even by Nvidia’s own line of cards. Inside, the i7-12700H won’t give you the same battery life as the AMD alternatives, but it provides a hefty amount of performance in comparison.

According to UserBenchmarks, it provides 16% single-core performance over its AMD rival and an overall 10% better performance once multicore is taken into account.

Usually, with our other laptop buyer’s guides, we will split them into ‘budget’ and so on. However, because Alienware’s budget option for a 17-inch laptop nearly clocks in at $2000, we decided to go with the entry-level tag.

The Alienware m17 R5 with its AMD 6000 series CPU, the Ryzen 7 6800H is an absurdly great laptop, with its specs essentially browbeating various games from a glance. The 3060 and DDR5 RAM combination will punish anything that tries to look at it funny for a while.

Nvidia didn’t update the 3060 Ti also to include a laptop version of the GPU. While the rest of the specs on these laptops got a massive kick with the new generation of CPUs and RAM, the 3060 still seems to be ruling the roost.

This isn’t to discredit the GPU in any capacity though, as Nvidia is making headway with their DLSS supersampling and the 3060 will still be kicking around in plenty of desktop PCs for the foreseeable future.

While the SSD inside is stuck at 512GB, it does have a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port included, so external drives will make excellent alternatives instead of upping the price and having to shift to the AMD 6700M.

While a better card on paper means you’d lose out on all the fancy Nvidia additions like DLSS and RTX Broadcast.

You can get the Alienware m17 R5 from Dell, starting at $1849.99.

Our recommendation for an external SSD is the Crucial X8.

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