The “budget” gaming laptop always seemed like a misnomer. In today’s age, with RAM prices through the stratosphere and gadgets suffering from shrinkflation , any notion of affordability is practically a dead language. You can see this trend best with the new Alienware 15. It is the Dell-owned gaming brand’s first real attempt at a budget gaming laptop, and it still costs an eye-watering sum. The Alienware 15 is pared back as much as it can get away with. The laptop starts at $1,300 configured with a six-core AMD Ryzen 5 220 CPU, a single lane of 16GB of DDR5 5600MT/s RAM (you can slot in another stick for two lanes of RAM), and 512GB of storage. It’s also packing an older Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU. Alienware is planning an Intel variant with an eight-core Intel Core 5 210H CPU for $1,350, though that won’t arrive until later on. The USB-C on the left accepts 100W charging, though there’s an additional proprietary power port.…