Those with an eye for flair will appreciate the included AlienFX application, which allows you to create your own custom color profiles for the allotted eight zones on the laptop. The software offers 20 colors and three effects to help your laptop stand out from the crowd.

The Alien Fusion feature lets you create custom power profiles for the laptop while Adrenaline assists in creating a set of conditions to run for each game. This is also where you can monitor your laptop's performance or access settings for the optional Graphics Amplifier.

It's not a DSLR, but the Alienware 13 R2's integrated camera will do when you want to video chat or broadcast your latest gaming glory. Despite the copious visual noise, the 2-megapixel camera did a great job of accurately capturing my skin tone and my bright blue dress. I could also make out some of the many rubber bands holding my hair in place.

Heat
Whether you're gaming or watching video, the Alienware 13 R2 can get hot under pressure. It started out well enough, with the touchpad measuring 87 degrees Fahrenheit after 15 minutes of streaming full-screen videos from Hulu. The space between the G and H keys hit 93 degrees, which is 2 degrees below the 95 degree Laptop Mag Comfort Threshold. The bottom vent was the warmest at a balmy 109 degrees.

I spent 15 minutes infiltrating a Russian base in the middle of the dry, arid Afghanistan desert. At the end of my session, the Alienware 13 R2's touchpad measured 88 degrees. However, the space between the G and H keys rose to 100 degrees, while the middle vent underneath the laptop jumped to a blazing 133 degrees. It's lucky I play with a little space between my legs -- otherwise things might have gotten crispy. In other words, don't put this laptop directly on your lap.

Gaming and Graphics
You can expect some solid frame rates with the Alienware 13 R2's midlevel, Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M GPU with 2GB -- particularly on games played at 1080p. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain ran at a steady 32 frames per second (30 fps is playable) at 1080p with every setting pushed to high. It made my time skulking amongst the surprisingly dense foliage of the Afghanistan desert a lot more pleasurable, such as discovering a few tarragon plants, with their hardy yellow petals growing defiantly against the bleak backdrop.

When we ran the Bioshock Infinite benchmark, the Alienware 13 R2 produced 36 fps at 1080p on high, just missing the 38 fps average. The Razer Blade and the Aorus X3 Plus v3 with their Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M GPUs were neck and neck at 71 and 72 fps, respectively.

During the Metro: Last Light test, the Alienware 13 R2 hit 57 fps on low settings at 1080p, smashing the 15-fps average. The Plus v3 and Blade delivered 29 and 28 fps for a distant second and third.

• COMPAQ Armada E500 Battery
• HP G42 Battery
• HP G56 Battery
• HP G62 Battery
• HP G72 Battery
• HP Pavilion dv3 Battery
• Compaq Presario CQ42 Battery
• HP Pavilion g4 Battery
• HP 630 Battery
• HP 635 Battery
• HP 650 Battery
• COMPAQ Presario CQ56 Battery
• HP 593550-001 Battery
• HP 593553-001 Battery

Graphic Amplifier
The Alienware 13 R2's 960M GPU is nice, but sometimes you want to crank things up to 11. On those occasions, you pull out the graphics amp. The $299 device is an external enclosure that houses a desktop graphics card that adds a noticeable performance boost, depending on the GPU. The device can support both AMD and Nvidia GPUs, including those powerful enough to support 4K gaming and multiple displays.

When connected to the Alienware 13 R2, the amp will bypass the laptop's 960M GPU and use the desktop graphics card instead. Depending on the card inhabiting the enclosure, your frame rates should get a sizeable increase.

Keep in mind that the graphics amp is a bring-your-own-GPU kind of deal, which means you'll have to find some extra dough to get a card. Alienware offers several chips, including the GeForce 970 card ($329), the 980 ($599) or the Titan X ($1,000). The company also has a few AMD cards, such as the Radeon HD R9 290 GPU ($529) or the Radeon HD R9 290X ($599).

Performance
Say hello to Skylake. The Alienware 13 R2 is one of the company's first laptops to ship with Intel's 6th Generation Core Series CPUs (aka Skylake). Intel claims that Skylake CPUs will deliver longer battery life, quicker performance and the ability to overclock the processor. That should come in handy for gamers who want to squeeze every bit of performance from their systems.

In my real-world stress test, I ran MGS V in one window, while I streamed an episode of The Awesomes on Hulu with eight open tabs in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. The Alienware 13 R2 and its 2.5-GHz Intel Core i7-6500U CPU with 16GB of RAM shrugged it off, keeping everything running without a stutter or hiccup.

The laptop continued to hold its own on our synthetic benchmarks, scoring 6,864 on the Geekbench 3 test, easily topping the 4,340 ultraportable average. However, both the Aorus X3 Plus v3 (2.5-GHz Intel Core i7-4710HQ CPU) and the Razer Blade (2.6-GHZ Intel Core i7-4720HQ CPU) beat the Alienware 13 with scores of 12,863 and 10,915.

The Alienware 13 R2's 256GB PCIe SSD completed our File Transfer Test in 28 seconds, for a transfer rate of 181.7MBps, passing the 152.7MBps average. The Blade, which has a 256GB SSD (SATA m.2) did marginally better at 182MBps, while the Plus v3's dual 256BG SSD stole the show with 299MBps.

During the OpenOffice Spreadsheet Macro Test, the Alienware 13 R2 matched 20,000 names and addresses in 4 minutes and 20 seconds. That's much faster than the 8:32 average, but not as fast as the Plus v3 or the Blade, which clocked in at 3:52 and 3:46, respectively.

• HP 593554-001 Battery
• HP 593562-001 Battery
• HP HSTNN-181C Battery
• HP HSTNN-F01C Battery
• HP HSTNN-F02C Battery
• HP HSTNN-IB0W Battery
• HP HSTNN-LB0W Battery
• HP HSTNN-Q61C Battery
• HP HSTNN-UB0W Battery
• HP MU06 Battery
• HP MU09 Battery
• HP WD548AA Battery
• HP Pavilion tx1000 Battery
• HP Pavilion tx2500 Battery
• HP TouchSmart tx2 Battery

Battery Test
The Alienware 13 R2 is light enough to take anywhere, but you'll need to carry the power brick with you. The notebook lasted 3 hours and 16 minutes on the Laptop Battery Test, which involves continuous streaming over Wi-Fi at 100 nits of brightness. The Razer Blade and the Aorus X3 Plus v3 had significantly better times of 5:52 and 5:38 on the same test. However, if all you're doing is streaming video, the system will last longer: It endured for 5 hours and 10 minutes when we played Netflix on it.

Software
Similar to most gaming laptops, the Alienware 13 R2 is blissfully free of bloatware. Outside of Flipboard and Microsoft's standard Windows 10 apps (Calendar, Mail, Cortana and Groove Music), the notebook is a blank slate, waiting to hold your library of games.

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