Next-gen Intel Core Ultra H Meteor Lake CPUs power upcoming Dell Alienware laptops, to be announced at CES per leak
The Windows Report claims to have leaked every product that Dell is set to unveil at CES this upcoming January, including Alienware gaming laptops equipped with Meteor Lake CPUs. Dell’s choice to use Intel’s next generation CPU is a vote of confidence for its gaming performance, though Meteor Lake won’t be powering every upcoming Alienware laptop according to the leak.
Core Ultra H CPUs, such as the Core Ultra 7 155H and Core Ultra 9 185H, will feature in the m16 R2 and the x16 R2. The Windows Report didn’t specify which exact CPUs would be present in the laptops, though we can expect at minimum Core Ultra 5 chips (equivalent to Core i5s) as that’s the branding’s lowest tier. Of course, Dell wouldn’t likely replace the Core i7s and Core i9s in the current m16 and x16 with i5 equivalents, so we can probably expect the company to use Core Ultra 7 and 9 CPUs.
However, the top-end m18 R2 will not use Meteor Lake but instead a 14th Gen CPU, presumably a Core i9. The leak doesn’t explain why Raptor Lake Refresh got the job instead of Meteor Lake, but it’s probably because Raptor Lake chips outperform Meteor Lake at a higher power draw, which this laptop is likely to have. That’s also probably one of the reasons why Meteor Lake isn’t coming to mainstream desktop PCs either.
These upcoming Alienware laptops will also stick with Nvidia RTX 40 series GPUs as current models have. The m16 R2 is also noted as getting a chassis and cooler redesign; the Windows Report doesn’t say one way or another whether the x16 R2 and m18 R2 are getting a new design too. One new feature that all these laptops get is Stealth Mode, which is supposed to disable all the Alienware gamer features, making a user’s laptop more suitable for professional environments.
Meteor Lake is also making its way to the XPS line-up, though we already got a hint of that with a leaked Core Ultra 7 155H benchmark that was apparently run on the XPS 13. The report doesn’t mention any 14th Gen CPUs being used for the next generation of XPS laptops, so presumably they all use Meteor Lake. That’s another indication that Meteor Lake is great at lower power, but doesn’t scale particularly well with more watts.
