Alienware 15 for Unity Development and light gaming

My dad has an Alienware 15 (This Configuration) (TLDR: GTX 1060 core i5 7 Gen). I was thinking that would it be good enough to run Unity (Especially that FRUSTRATING lightmapper ). Also I might do some light gaming on it. I just wanna know if I REALLY need to get a new laptop or not, because I've heard alienwares are nice pieces of gaming hardware. Thanks in advance .

P.S: this is my first forum post (I think) so please excuse any mistakes .

 

What's your current laptop?

 

@Ryiah : I had to read it like 3 times. But it's sounding like they are wanting to use their dad's Alienware 15 mentioned up top.

 

@Ryiah, @N1warhead:
I have a dell latitude E5430 (Dell fanboy here) and my dad has an Alienware for work. We're planning on exchanging laptops as he doesn't really need such a high end laptop and I do.

 

Lightmap / enlighten baking is slow on the strongest machines if you use poor settings or don't know how to optimise it so the option of using fast settings, then switching to slow settings for nightly builds might be open to you.

 

Just a word of caution based on my previous experience with Alienware X51 on Windows 10.

Spoiler: caution

The machine freezes after 10-15 minutes of idling (sometimes shorter) forcing a hard reset every single time. Checked around the internet and there's quite a few cases like mine with Alienware. Even with all the latest driver and windows update it still frequently happens. Nobody seems to know what's the cause (even tech support. Using desktop Skype instantly trigger the freeze. Fortunately I have the habit of saving after doing even minute changes so I didn't encounter any disastrous losses.

Performance wise it's good, what takes ~15 minutes to bake on my PC is reduced to ~3-5 minutes (just approximation, I never timed them).

i5 3570 vs i7-6700
RX9 280 vs GTX960
8GB vs 16GB RAM

 

@ikazrima, @hippocoder : Lightmap baking takes a WHOLE NIGHT on my laptop (Scene with one terrain and a cube) and I'm highly annoyed by this. I'm pretty sure low specs are to blame and not bad optimisation

 

My dad's alienware never showed any problems and I don't even use skype but... thanks anyway for the heads up

 

You're underestimating the power of your laptop. Lightmapping is entirely CPU-bound. Your dad's i5-7300HQ is only roughly half again as fast as your i7-3540M. A completely unoptimized scene will still take you most of your night.

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-7300HQ-vs-Intel-Core-i7-3540M/m223877vsm921

Outside of the CPU and GPU, there isn't anything your laptop can't do that his can. Both laptops have the rather tight limit of 16GB of RAM and both can hold an SSD in place of the HDD. For an actual gaming laptop the Alienware 15 isn't bad and it has good battery life, but it's somewhat inferior to the competition for a workstation.

https://www.amazon.com/MSI-GT62VR-Dominator-240-Powerful-i7-7700HQ/dp/B01NCQHZGC/
https://www.amazon.com/MSI-GT62VR-Dominator-Powerful-i7-7700HQ/dp/B01MY2NKH1/

That said even the processor in these two laptops isn't miles better than your laptop. Intel has been rather slack with their releases and have only been bringing roughly 10% increases every generation.

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-7700HQ-vs-Intel-Core-i7-3540M/m211019vsm921

 

I briefly had an alienware 15 but it had heating and throttling issues so I returned it.

 

And here I thought alien tech would be ahead of us piddly human's tech.

 

If you have access to the laptop then don't ask us to guess how good it'll be, install Unity and find out first hand.

Before you get carried away with getting new hardware, though, think about the kind of game(s) you'll be making. You might not need something as fancy (and expensive) as a recent gaming laptop to work productively. Are you currently doing Unity dev on your existing laptop, and are you actually having performance issues? If you are, do you really need something as fancy as an Alienware? (Though if circumstances make that a cost effective solution then go for it!)

Also think about more than the performance specs. Day to day use is important. I have a Surface Pro 4 and a 17" gaming laptop with a GTX1070 in it. Yesterday it's the Surface I grabbed when I left the house, because it's light, portable, and still powerful enough to do all I needed. I was fitting some work in during a commute, so the 17"er would actually have been pretty painful in that situation. Anyhow, think about stuff like how good the screen is, whether the keyboard/trackpad are comfortable, battery life (if it's important to you), weight and shape, and generally whether or not it's a thing you'll want to carry around with you day to day.

 

Alienware, eww.

They're overpriced. At least they used to be.

 

I don't know about elsewhere, but here "Alienware" is a Dell brand, and the jump in price between "Dell" and "Alienware" products certainly does not look proportionate to the jump in specs. It looks like you're paying quite a bit for the different branding.

 

You'd love their Alienware Area-51 Threadripper-based system. It's cooled by an itty bitty 120mm AIO that according to Linus's benchmarks struggles to keep the system cool. For over $4,000 you'd think they'd have invested in better cooling but apparently they felt that was unnecessary for the 180W TDP CPU the system ships with.

 

I'll be honest, ever since I heard the rumor years ago about Dell reusing used components for new machines I've been distrustful of them. Not sure if it's true, but this implies it may be (last post).

 

I only skimmed that link, but from what I saw the only people claiming direct information from Dell (including the last post) were all specific that it was for warranty stuff, not new systems.

 

Sorry for not stating specs: It's an i5 3rd Gen with an HDD and 6GB RAM and Intel HD (4000 I think)

I already have one at home... The question is that whether I'll be able to use it for Unity or not

Honestly, I have a TON of laptop coolers lying in the attic just BEGGING me to use them

Not sure of that are we

You ARE right but my wifi sucks so installing unity takes HOURS... maybe even DAYS... OR Weeks(Don't want to go through THAT trouble)

 

Oh sorry, I thought you were thinking about buying another.

As others have said, you can use Unity on potatoes, so I'm sure you can.

You can download Unity install files (somewhere which has better internet) and then move them to another computer. That's what I do sometimes.

 

^this.. I mean, for reals. Obviously not a lot of us have the same gear as you do, so "doing" instead of guessing is your only real answer.

 

Other than the heating issues, it was a really nice computer. I had one with the 1070 but it was the cpu that would overheat. Some people reportedly had success repasting the cpu. I would do some stress testing to see how it does with your coolers.

 

Difference between an i5 and an i7 isn't that great though it does depend on the generation. Biggest thing holding you back will likely be the Intel HD 4000. My own laptop has Intel HD 3000 and it's barely able to handle unoptimized 2D games running within the Unity editor.

Modern Intel HD though is considerably better than the previous generations have been. The Intel HD 550 is approximately equivalent to a GeForce GTX 940M which isn't exactly stellar, but the battery life of one laptop with it (Dell XPS 13) is up to ten hours which is quite a bit better than many laptops with dedicated graphics hardware will be.

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compar...le-Skylake-vs-Nvidia-GTX-940M/m129148vsm28796
http://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/dell-xps-13-performance-and-battery-life-page-2

 

@Ryiah @GoesTo11 @tswalk @EternalAmbiguity @angrypenguin @hippocoder

Thank you all, Just installed Unity and works like a charm, takes some time to load but still, THAT DARN TERRAIN WORKS at 100s(maybe even 1000s) of FPS (According to the stats menu). Still a bit scared to bake lightmaping so... I'll tell you more on that

 

Unity can run on a potato. It's a matter of how fast you want it to run. If you want it to run faster, then get a faster computer. It's not that complicated.

 

And what you want to do with it. If you're making the next Crysis, don't expect a good experience on a machine with little RAM and integrated graphics. If you're making a mobile game then that machine might be perfectly fine,though.

 

I'm tryina build Crysis and Skyrim and GTAV and No mans sky... All of them in one... *laughs sarcastically*

 

Then it doesn't matter what laptop you have, it won't help you.