A very angry review of the Dell G7-7700

[Mnky313]

Little bit of background:

My thicc-17 died, randomly out of nowhere it just went black and eventually stopped turning on. It was still under warranty so I sent it off to repair and in the meantime I planned to use my surface pro but I quickly realized that it's not that fast.
After some searching around I noticed bestbuy allows returns until jan 2nd because of the holidays so I figured I would just get whatever they had and return it once my machine gets repaired.

The fastest machine they had that had mini displayport and USB-C (I needed those for my monitor and dock) was a dell G7-7700, I figured it would be fine

it was not fine

The Issues
I had audio and USB devices randomly cutting out (more on this later)
I need to disconnect and reconnect my main monitor every single time the machine rebooted
The GPU randomly decides it's to go to the lowest power state (101Mhz MEM, <30W power draw)
The CPU sometimes is happy to pull almost 100W and sometimes won't go above 30W
The Fans (while quieter than my thicc-17) are way more annoying, instead of a low pitched woosh noise it's more like a high pitched reeee 
They don't include a screw for the secondary ssd for some reason

Audio Issues
I spent hours days trying to figure out why out of nowhere audio would turn to static and USB devices would stop working properly, I eventually narrowed it down to mining. For some reason if it's mining with nicehash randomly (sometimes within a few minutes and sometimes not for several hours) audio and usb would break. I still haven't fixed this, I just mined only at night

Monitor/GPU Issues
I tried everything I could think of, reinstalling windows, reinstalling drivers, DDU, NVCleaninstall, older drivers. Nothing fixed either of these issues.
I HOPE this is just an issue with my unit.

CPU Being Weird
I doubt this one is just my machine, I assume it has some dumb ass system to divert power to the GPU in games however it's fucking obnoxious, if you can't cool/power a high end CPU and GPU THEN DON'T PUT IT IN THE LAPTOP IN THE FIRST PLACE, I can't stand this shit, especially when there actually was temperature headroom for the CPU to pull more power...

What I Liked?
Idk, I guess the keyboard lighting was ok, I mean it's not great but it's definitely better than my clevo's garbage software to control the keyboard lights. Typing was pretty good as well. 
That's about it.

Sorry for the rant, but I haven't had a machine that was this bad in a long ass time,
please pick something else, this laptop was awful.

I was concerned I might question my giant desktop replacement and think above getting something more portable but this laptop firmly reminded me that nah, I think I'll keep the thicc ass laptop.

[jre84]

sounds like you should stick to lego or research before buying something

[Mnky313]

10 hours ago, jre84 said:

sounds like you should stick to lego or research before buying something

I don't know what you're trying to argue. Almost all of my complaints probably wouldn't have been mentioned in reviews....

And what does lego have to do with it

[DANK_AS_gay]

On 11/10/2021 at 10:39 PM, Mnky313 said:

Little bit of background:

My thicc-17 died, randomly out of nowhere it just went black and eventually stopped turning on. It was still under warranty so I sent it off to repair and in the meantime I planned to use my surface pro but I quickly realized that it's not that fast.
After some searching around I noticed bestbuy allows returns until jan 2nd because of the holidays so I figured I would just get whatever they had and return it once my machine gets repaired.

The fastest machine they had that had mini displayport and USB-C (I needed those for my monitor and dock) was a dell G7-7700, I figured it would be fine

it was not fine

The Issues
I had audio and USB devices randomly cutting out (more on this later)
I need to disconnect and reconnect my main monitor every single time the machine rebooted
The GPU randomly decides it's to go to the lowest power state (101Mhz MEM, <30W power draw)
The CPU sometimes is happy to pull almost 100W and sometimes won't go above 30W
The Fans (while quieter than my thicc-17) are way more annoying, instead of a low pitched woosh noise it's more like a high pitched reeee 
They don't include a screw for the secondary ssd for some reason

Audio Issues
I spent hours days trying to figure out why out of nowhere audio would turn to static and USB devices would stop working properly, I eventually narrowed it down to mining. For some reason if it's mining with nicehash randomly (sometimes within a few minutes and sometimes not for several hours) audio and usb would break. I still haven't fixed this, I just mined only at night

Monitor/GPU Issues
I tried everything I could think of, reinstalling windows, reinstalling drivers, DDU, NVCleaninstall, older drivers. Nothing fixed either of these issues.
I HOPE this is just an issue with my unit.

CPU Being Weird
I doubt this one is just my machine, I assume it has some dumb ass system to divert power to the GPU in games however it's fucking obnoxious, if you can't cool/power a high end CPU and GPU THEN DON'T PUT IT IN THE LAPTOP IN THE FIRST PLACE, I can't stand this shit, especially when there actually was temperature headroom for the CPU to pull more power...

What I Liked?
Idk, I guess the keyboard lighting was ok, I mean it's not great but it's definitely better than my clevo's garbage software to control the keyboard lights. Typing was pretty good as well. 
That's about it.

Sorry for the rant, but I haven't had a machine that was this bad in a long ass time,
please pick something else, this laptop was awful.

I was concerned I might question my giant desktop replacement and think above getting something more portable but this laptop firmly reminded me that nah, I think I'll keep the thicc ass laptop.

So basically, DELL. Not news really.

[Mnky313]

5 hours ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

So basically, DELL. Not news really.

I've actually had semi good experiences with dell in the past, I had an Inspiron 7559 and while it wasn't particularly great, the cooling was actually quite awesome & there really wasn't anything that I hated about it.

My Precision M6700 was amazing, I loved that thing. To be fair when it was new it was expensive as hell but it had just about everything.

[DANK_AS_gay]

On 12/3/2021 at 8:59 PM, Mnky313 said:

I've actually had semi good experiences with dell in the past, I had an Inspiron 7559 and while it wasn't particularly great, the cooling was actually quite awesome & there really wasn't anything that I hated about it.

My Precision M6700 was amazing, I loved that thing. To be fair when it was new it was expensive as hell but it had just about everything.

I have had some DELLs as well, an Alienware Area 51 R1, an Inspiron 8600 (2003), Dell Precision T3400 (actually was fine, but is a server so what would you expect?), some other Dell laptop from 1999, a Pentium 4 Dell of some sort, and all of them have had issues except for the Alienware, and that is because all of the DELL parts are server parts, and the only DELL part was the 1100W power supply. They had issues in terms of the laptops had TERRIBLE cooling, even for 1999 and 2003. The fans were choked by the keyboard, as if it was designed without a keyboard in mind, on a laptop. The (2003)laptop had a Pentium M in it, so choking the cooling was paramount to making a bomb. To be fair, all of the dumb stuff has not resulted in product damage, but it has been annoying to maintain these ancient machines, even for ancient machines. 

[motomat86]

tldr:  dont buy dell

 

in other news, water is wet