Dell’s gaming offering is an attractive option even for non-gamers. When I was looking for a ‘work from home’ laptop, I was thoroughly distracted by the Dell G5 Gaming Desktop. For the same price, I could get an upgradeable system, with a better video card and a more powerful processor.

Just when my Dell Inspiron 13 5300 arrived, Dell announced some new gaming machines and peripherals, both under the Dell Gaming and the Alienware branding.

In their announcement, Dell showed off a new Dell Gaming Laptop, an iteration of the Dell Gaming Desktop, two Dell Gaming Monitors (one of which is curved), and a new Alienware RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard.

We know the Dell G5 Gaming laptop is already available on the Malaysian Dell online store. Perhaps with newer options: more colours and more powerful options would be nice. One thing to note about the Dell G5. It uses a server power supply unit, not a standard one. That is why it is so compact. 

This also makes it a little tricky to upgrade, because you will need to manage the power usage. Or buy a more powerful power supply from Dell. 

However, we are going to avoid getting distracted by that again and go straight to the devices that are scheduled to be available in Malaysia starting with the Dell G7 Laptop. 

This is where calling one of these beasts a laptop is a misnomer. They are huge with a 15-inch or a 17-inch screen. They will cook your thigh if you use them on your lap. No, these are portables. Alright, I don’t expect them to be light either, but they can be lugged around. Wait, we haven’t even seen the adapter yet. So keep that in mind.

In Malaysia, we are getting the 15-inch model, the Dell G7 15 (7500). 

The price: RM6,499.

When: 14 July.

Let’s look at the specifications starting with the display. As the name suggests, this model has a 15.6-inch display. The FHD resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels), wide viewing angle (WVA), anti-glare, LED with a backlit display, and narrow borders are pretty standard stuff. That’s some money-saving right there.

The gaming feature comes in the form of the 144Hz refresh rate and the 300 nits of brightness.

The brain is a 10th Generation Intel Core i7-10750H (12MB Cache, up to 5.0 GHz, 6 cores). 10th generation is the latest and the Core i7 is near the top of the consumer-level processors. The Core i9 would be the ceiling, but the price would be much higher too.

For memory, we get 8GB, 2x4GB, DDR4, 2933MHz which, to me, seems low, but also upgradeable. For a gaming system like this, I would prefer 16GB of RAM.

Storage is 512GB via an M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive. On the surface, this seems low. The size of games nowadays are huge and you will run out of space in no time. That said, the 512GB solid-state drive gives the best balance of capacity, price, and performance.

The Dell G7 Laptop would not be a gaming machine if it didn’t have a dedicated graphics processor. Here we have the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti with 6GB GDDR6 RAM. Here we see another decision to balance cost and performance. The result is something that will deliver, even in demanding games in perhaps the next couple of years.

There are no optical drives but there is a Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 (2×2) 802.11ax Wireless and Bluetooth 5.1 support. In plain English, this means that the G7 is compatible with the new upcoming standards with a boost in performance.

Finally, the all-important keyboard. Of course, it lights up with all the pride colours, it is for gamers after all. It has 4 Zone RGB backlight, a palm rest, and a fingerprint reader for easy log-in.

To complement their gaming devices, Dell is also releasing the Dell 27 Gaming Monitor (S2721DGF), and the Dell 27 Curved Gaming Monitor (S2721HGF).

The flat monitor is available starting from 28 July with no price tag. What it does have is a QHD IPS panel, 165Hz refresh rate, and compatibility with both NVIDIA G-SYNC and AMD FreeSync.

The curved monitor is available starting from 21 August. It too doesn’t have a price tag, but is only rated as compatible with NVIDIA G-SYNC has a 144Hz refresh rate, and capable of FHD resolution.

Bring pride to your gaming setup with the only Alienware on the list, the Alienware RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard (AW410K). This uses the Brown CherryMX switches, the same kind that is used in writing this post!

It is more tactile than the red (for gamers) and quieter than the blue (for writers). 

The AlienFX per-key RGB backlighting can replicate all the colours of the rainbow as it can produce up to 16.8 million brilliant colours.

As for the price, your guess is as good as mine as Dell has not announced it yet. But they did say that this keyboard will be available on 4 August.