There was a time when gaming laptops were as monstrous in performance as in size and design. There was no such thing as "less is more", and manufacturers always seemed interested in surprising us with grotesque designs that were far away from the aesthetics of ultrathin laptops.

But that has changed, and the new generations of discrete graphics cards for laptops has ushered us to a new generation of machines in which thinness is finally a virtue, not a symbol of weakness. The Dell Alienware m15 is the first gaming laptop from this manufacturer that bets on this kind of design, and the result seems to be a well balanced machine that represents a good compromise between power, thinness and weight.Alienware seemed reluctant to give up in the field of "bulky" designs, and the truth is that its proposal is interesting especially when compared with the Alienware 13 that precedes it: it is 14% thinner, but even being a laptop with a 15.6 inch screen (versus Alienware's 13 13.3 inches) its weight (2.2 kg) is 20% lower than that model.

The specs reveal small sacrifices, however: we can choose between an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or a GTX 1070 Max-Q, while for the CPU we can choose between an quad-core Intel Core i5-8300H or a six-core Intel Core i7-8750H. The entry model brings us a 1080p 60 Hz panel, but from there we can go to 1080p 144 Hz or even a 4K 60 Hz resolutions and refresh rates. These machines came loaded with up to 32 GB of RAM and up to a 1 TB SSD plus another 1 TB hybrid drive. The standard Alienware m15 has a 60 Whr battery, though we can jump to a 90 Whr version that offers 10.6 hours of continuous video playback according to Dell.

The Alienware m15 will be available on October 25th, and will have a starting price of $1,299.