Alienware’s newest laptop screens have speeds that have never been seen before.
PC screens are about to get faster. Both of Alienware’s updated 17.3-inch gaming laptops, the m17 R5, and x17 R2, will have the option for 480 Hz screens. This is about 33 percent faster than the previous top speed of 360 Hz.
The 480 Hz options for the laptops aren’t for sale yet, but an Alienware representative told Ars that they should be available online soon.
The 480 Hz displays have a resolution of 19201080 and a response time from grey to the grey of 3 milliseconds. In its announcement, Alienware promised, “smoother animations so it’s easier to track your target, less ghosting so it’s less distracting, and lower system latency so you can see other players earlier.”
The laptops are made for serious gamers who want to play as well as professional esports players. Alienware didn’t say who makes its 480 Hz screens, but we’ve known for a few months that companies like AU Optronics make screens with that speed. We’re still waiting for Asus to release a 500 Hz desktop monitor, but in the meantime, Alienware’s laptops have the fastest consumer displays.
If you’re used to 360 Hz, for example, you might not notice the boost as much, but if you’re coming from 60 Hz, you should notice a big difference. We haven’t tried Alienware’s 480 Hz laptops in person, but we can say that 360 Hz screens have made a big difference in how things look, especially when there’s a lot going on, like when you scroll text quickly.
To get the most out of 480 Hz, you’ll also need to be playing content that the system’s hardware can handle at 480 frames per second.
Alienware’s m17 R5 comes with up to an AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT (12GB GDDR6, up to 175 W) or an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (16GB GDDR6, up to 155 W and 1,410 MHz), an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU (eight cores, 16 threads, up to 4.9 GHz), 64GB of DDR5-4800 memory, and 4TB of SSD storage
The x17 R2, on the other hand, is designed to be the thinnest 17-inch laptop from Alienware. It has up to a 14-core, 20-thread, 5-GHz Intel Core i9-12900HK CPU, an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti (16GB) GPU, and 64GB of DDR5-4800 memory, and 4TB of storage.
The displays are said to have a brightness of up to 300 nits and cover 100 percent of the sRGB color space.
They also support adaptive sync with AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync, as well as Nvidia Advanced Optimus, which lets the system switch between integrated and discrete graphics as needed and uses “a hardware-based dynamic display switch that allows GeForce GPUs to directly control the display” instead of just the integrated graphics.
The screens with 480 Hz will cost $300 more than the standard configurations of the laptops, which have screens with 165 Hz.
Both laptops will have screens with up to 4K resolution, but they will only be able to refresh at 120 Hz and respond in 3 ms at most.
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