IS the Dell Inspiron Gaming 15 2017 a good laptop??? Was Linus RIGHT???

[startrekkie1701]

To start, I need to admit that I DID get this laptop after watching Linus's review on this laptop and emphasize that my model is the entry level model here with an Intel Core i5-7300HQ mobile processor and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 with 4GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory in the laptop with 8GB DDR4 memory clocking at 2400Mhz (upon which I added an additional 4GB of memory from an ASUS Ultrabook I had lying around that clocked at 2132Mhz) and a 1TB hybrid hard drive with 8GB NAND flash memory on board. For RAM, I can run as much as 64GB since Linus's review with a BIOS update Dell pushed since his review, and there is a free slot for an m.2 SSD in the model that I own. I have a TN display on this machine, though there are models in which you can get an IPS display instead. If you go the next level up, you'll get this CPU with a GTX 1050 Ti in the laptop, and the next two steps up have an i7-7700HQ with the GTX 1050 Ti. I can't say too much on those laptops as I don't have those particular models, but I can specifically think on the one that is priced on Dell's website at $849 at the time of this review, though I must admit that I bought my model at Best Buy and only paid $800 for it. (Sorry Linus, I didn't have your referral link at that point!)

 

Now that specs for my model of the Dell Gaming 15 7000 series that I personally own are out of the way and I made you know of the other models they offer, let's begin the review. Right off the bat, I can tell you that this hybrid drive in this laptop is fast. I couldn't be happier with the speed of file transfers on this laptop with the NAND memory this laptop has in the drive for cache memory, DESPITE my model not having an SSD to help out as it ships from the factory. The hybrid drive in this laptop is manufactured by Toshiba, and is highly efficient and reliable, while offering the storage offerings you expect from an SSD (though nowadays this is a moot point.) Even so, you may want to replace this with an SSD, which you CAN do now with the latest BIOS update on top of the m.2.

 

The RAM that came stock is a sizable 8GB, which is DECENT, but for most circumstances, probably isn't IDEAL. Fortunately, there is a spare slot for RAM that you can add more later on and the laptop can take up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM if you have the latest BIOS update. For me, at this point, 8GB is enough to get by on this, as I was using it for a good month like that. HOWEVER, as I stated earlier, I have since upgraded this to 12GB and it has made this laptop a lot more capable of a machine, so I would definitely recommend adding the SSD and the extra RAM.

 

The keyboard is the nicest chiclet keyboard I've used on a laptop, not feeling gummy at all and is in fact quite stiff and very good quality for a laptop. I'd go as far as to say that the keys feel to be of a different caliber than other Inspirons from Dell, feeling more solid than most other laptops even from Dell. Could it beat out an XPS or Alienware? Probably not, but for an $800 model, I'm very pleased. It's obviously not the MSi that Linus looked at that had a machanical keyboard but it's one of the nicest chiclet keyboards I've used. Being it's a gaming laptop, the WASD keys do have a box around them for indicating PC controls, and I love the red backlight. It's dim enough for you to be able to leave on and not even notice there's a backlight on during the daytime and bright enough to illuminate the keys should you find yourself in a dark room or using the laptop at night.

 

The laptop's trackpad feels great, with a satisfying click and is nice to use. Personally, though, I still prefer a mouse, but find myself able to still satisfiably use the trackpad in the cases where I am forced to, like in class or in a tight area.

 

Onto the display. For a TN display, this gets the job done much better than most TNs. From side to side, the viewing angles are great, not washing out. The anti-glare coating is top notch, completely shrugging off glares without a single hint of washing out of the on-screen colors. Colors are not bad, though could be better. Viewing directly, I've seen far worse screens than this one-it is pretty satisfying visually when you're looking at it. Though the drawback here is the same with all other TN panels-it's satisfying only when at the right angle. This panel probably wouldn't be your best friend if you're going to have an at-home date with your significant other and plan to Netflix and chill, but if you're a loner like me and plan to use this for things like work and play, the TN does the job well enough. HOWEVER, Dell has remedies this problem for most by replacing the TN panel with an IPS panel, so if that's a drawback for you and are looking to get this laptop, I'd go to Dell for this one.

 

The wifi on the laptop is great and reliable, however, if you're planning on transferring files from the laptop to a server, it's worth noting that file transfer speeds on the radio built-in are capped at 20 megs a second, so if you're wanting more than that, you'll probably want to make use of the built-in Ethernet port. I use Bluetooth for my mice on this model, and using them with the built-in Bluetooth 4.2 radio is a very pleasant experience. Not once has the laptop dropped the signal from my devices that I've paired with it.

 

The speakers are rock solid. I love music and I love it to sound the best it can. The laptop's built-in speakers are all you really are ever going to need, sounding very cinematic in nature with thunderingly crisp lows, solid mids, and highs as clear as crystal. I cannot complain with anything regarding this, as they are also backed by a subwoofer on this model. It's not like the XPS woofers from a few years ago, but it very much gets the job done and then some. There is one complaint though-they are VERY prone to interference and when there is interference, the audio gets VERY crackly.

 

Ports on all your models are as follows: 3 USB 3.0 ports (one with PowerShare), an Ethernet jack like I previously mentioned, one HDMI 2.0 port, an SD card slot, and a Kensington lock port. Whilst I wish this laptop had a USB-C port or a Thunderbolt 3 port to use an external GPU on this laptop for games that may push my GTX 1050 to its limit or beyond it or even a USB Type A port, for the price I paid, I can't really complain about this too much, and think it's not that big a deal. It would also would have been nice if there was a built-in optical drive as well, but with all the components this thing has packed into it, I not only understand why there's not, but had an external one for the rare occasion that I need to use it anyways.

 

With this laptop's dual fan system and the dual intakes on the base of the laptop, this laptop stays fairly cool considering everything. Sitting idle, the CPU sits around 42C and the GPU 52C. Under load, the CPU goes up to really about 60C and the GPU about 73C. The laptop is one that cools itself very well. The drawback is that it has to be powerful, so it's somewhat loud too as a result; but in contrast, it's MUCH quieter when compared to thin-and-light gaming laptops like the Razer Blade.

 

FPS results do not vary too much from models with a 1050 Ti with maximum graphics, with me getting around 65 FPS in Skyrim, 65FPS in NBA 2K16, Duke Nukem Forever I can push out around 100FPS, and around 70FPS in the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot. Mass Effect 1 I get close to 90FPS. When I'm playing Civilization V, I'm pushing close to 150 FPS. Fallout 3, I get about 100FPS, as does New Vegas. I can safely tell you that this beast takes well what you throw at it, having used Battlefield 4 when I got this laptop to serve as my benchmark game, hitting about 60-65 FPS in that title with the laptop actually staying quite cool as well.

 

Onto battery. Dell told me when I asked them for their figures on battery performance that you can get a max of 13 hours out of the laptop's 6-cell 6480mAh battery, but I decided to test this for myself. First, though, before I give you my figures, know that these ARE just the estimates that I got from Windows itself after it calculated the battery life I would get as I didn't have the time or ability to actually test the ACTUAL battery life and get the most accurate results I could, as this is my main machine that I use on a day-to-day basis.

 

Now that I got that out of the way, onto what I found. For light usage, like browsing the web and checking email, once I followed the advice Linus gave in his video regarding battery life (found here) and turned off the keyboard backlight, dimmed the screen, set the laptop to turn off the display and go to sleep after one minute, flipped on Battery Saver within Windows 10, and shut down any non-essential programs running in the background that would eat battery life like Steam, Discord, Origin, and Outlook, as well as set up and use a custom modified version of the default High Performance setting with the mindset of maximum battery life when running that way and to push the most performance out of it when I'm on AC power. For this plan, I decided to turn on USB Selective Suspend setting, as I use my USB devices frequently but didn't want them to be the reason that once my battery was at 25% it ended up dying 15 minutes later, set the intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Network TDP level to 35W at 1.6GHz instead of the default 45W @ 2.5 GHz, set the power plan to hibernate when I hit the power button or close the lid instead of simply going to sleep (I would rather maximize battery life by having Windows save my system state and power off completely instead of simply entering a low-power state) and I also set the plan to lower my CPU to only use 50% of its normal rate of power and changed the system's cooling policy to Passive, as the only thing I personally am going to be doing on this laptop when on battery is listening to music or typing a paper for college, NOT gaming.  I was able to get an estimated battery life of about 11 and a half hours. However, the moment I simply opened up Steam, Discord, and Origin, that dropped to 9 hours and 16 minutes. Downloading a game caused it to plummet to an even lower 7 hours 57 minutes, and launching a game like Minecraft caused the battery life expectancy to drop to 5 hours 42 minutes, and Forza Motorsport 6: Apex, a more graphically intensive game, dropped it to a pathetic 2 hours and 51 minutes! So if you plan to do light computing when you're on battery, you'll be golden for quite a bit. Gaming on battery? You may want to get that 130w charger cord out too-you'll be needing that soon.

 

So overall, what is my verdict on this laptop? Get this one. For an $800 gaming machine, you'll be hard pressed to find one with these specs for better, or one as upgradable. And you probably wouldn't be able to build one for this price with these specs. When I'm gaming I'm getting desktop grade gaming in a portable 15-inch package with the GTX 1050, and while it might not be the BEST gaming laptop out there, to say that I can run AAA titles on this laptop at 60+ frames per second and I only paid $800 for the machine to do it and that I can take that machine with me is something that is worth being able to say, and one that I strongly recommend you take a look at being able to say as well.

 

But don't take my word for it-here's the YouTube review from Linus on the Inspiron 15 Gaming 7000 Series laptops as a whole (though their review model is the next one up from what I have given here, though their stats given are for my machine): Watch that here.

Edited May 29, 2017 by startrekkie1701
Updated to include battery tests, which I initially forgot

[genexis_x]

[deleted]

Edited May 22, 2017 by ZM Fong

[startrekkie1701]

5 minutes ago, ZM Fong said:

For night theme users

OP please remove formatting

I'd assume you mean the different paragraphs? If so I'll do that now. My apologies for that, I'm still pretty new on the forums here and was not aware that that was a thing.

 

EDIT: There, is that better now? If that wasn't what you meant, please let me know-I'll gladly fix it again.

Edited May 22, 2017 by startrekkie1701

[genexis_x]

3 minutes ago, startrekkie1701 said:

I'd assume you mean the different paragraphs? If so I'll do that now. My apologies for that, I'm still pretty new on the forums here and was not aware that that was a thing.

No

 

Don't change the colour of the font, set it to automatic

There's a feature in this forum which you can switch background colour to dark (night theme) so if the texts are all in dark/black colour, we won't be able to see them

Oh yes, welcome to the forums!

[startrekkie1701]

Just now, ZM Fong said:

No

 

Don't change the colour of the font, set it to automatic

There's a feature in this forum which you can switch background colour to dark (night theme) so if the texts are all in dark/black colour, we won't be able to see them

Oh yes, welcome to the forums!

Oh okay. I'll fix that now, and thank you!

[startrekkie1701]

2 minutes ago, ZM Fong said:

No

 

Don't change the colour of the font, set it to automatic

There's a feature in this forum which you can switch background colour to dark (night theme) so if the texts are all in dark/black colour, we won't be able to see them

Oh yes, welcome to the forums!

There, it should be changed now-is this better? I assume you use Night mode, so that's why I'm asking.

[genexis_x]

19 minutes ago, startrekkie1701 said:

There, it should be changed now-is this better? I assume you use Night mode, so that's why I'm asking.

Yup
Still remain the same, try remove formatting (highlight all the texts and click the icon just beside the font size, you can only do that with desktop version not on phone)

[startrekkie1701]

1 minute ago, ZM Fong said:

Yup
Still remain the same, try remove formatting (highlight all the texts and click the icon just beside the font size, you can only do that with desktop version not on phone)

All right, I tried that again-not sure what happened, but does it look better now? I don't recall changing the font color when I originally posted it but I posted it from the laptop the review is on so I may have bumped the trackpad too. Thanks for the feedback by the way!

[genexis_x]

13 minutes ago, startrekkie1701 said:

All right, I tried that again-not sure what happened, but does it look better now? I don't recall changing the font color when I originally posted it but I posted it from the laptop the review is on so I may have bumped the trackpad too. Thanks for the feedback by the way!

Yes it's clear now. Good review BTW.

[startrekkie1701]

Just now, ZM Fong said:

Yes it's clear now. Good review BTW.

Thank you! I edited this from the original review I gave on the Dell subreddit and noticed that I guess I was inspired by Linus's review styles. It's one I like a lot though so hey, it works!