HARDWARE REVIEW

Dell Inspiron 15 7000 (7577) Gaming Laptop Review

by Luke Walsh, February 1st, 2018

Dell has quite an impressive line-up of gaming laptops and pcs which can offer decent gaming specs for a price that won’t break the bank. With Alienware though, the Inspiron range is in the middle ground as to be affordable but not cross the line where Alienware sits. This is where the Inspiron 15 comes in.

The latest version of the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 gaming laptop brings some new specs from the previous version, the biggest being the 7th generation i7 core processor and a Nvidia 1060 with Max-Q Design. There are also some smaller additions like a fingerprint scanner on the power button and the screen being switched to an IPS panel.

Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Specifications and Pricing

The starting cost for the Inspiron 15 7000 on the Dell is £799.99 which comes with a 1TB hard drive, 15.6-inch screen and an i5 processor. If you want the i7 7700HQ Quad-Core (6MB Cache, up to 3.8 GHz) processor, with 16GB of ram with an additional 256GB SSD then it will cost £1199.99.

The highest end model for the 15 7000 is costs £1599 and comes with a 512 SSD but more importantly, has a UHD 4K IPS panel.

Design & Build

There’s been a slight design change with the next iteration of Inspiron, Dell has upgraded the look to be a little sleeker and instead of being just completely matte black there are hints of red. Instead of going over the top they have decided to just highlight parts of the laptop which are the logo on the top and around the mousepad. It would have been a nice choice however to have the option for just black or maybe a hint of grey for those not wanting to splash for red.

The display is held by a hinge centred on the laptop body which is different to other laptops that usually have hinges on either end of the body. The screen itself has a fairly large bezel around the screen with some of it taken up by silver Dell logo. There’s a webcam in the top which has a 720p resolution and microphone plus comes with face-tracking built in. Coated in a soft plastic, the “lid” is the type that attracts a lot of fingerprint marks but does look quite nice in the matte aesthetic.

In terms of quality, the IPS panel is okay, with a fine contrast between the white and blacks but it did seem just a little dim compared to other displays. Unlike the other models you can also get a UHD display, so you can game in 4K but we only looked at the 1080p display. Viewing angles are alright but you do lose the colours a bit when you are viewing the screen at an angle. The screen could be much better but it seems to be an issue around a lot of mid-level laptops.

A full-sized keyboard comes with backlighting but unlike the Alienware laptops, the touchpad does not. Being a full keyboard it comes with a complete numpad with the power button sitting just above it. As mentioned before, the power button also doubles as the fingerprint sensor which is designed with Windows Hello in mind. The keyboard itself feels quite nice to type on thanks to the chiclet-style buttons but the touchpad like most touchpads is passable not really being something you’ll use much being a gaming laptop.

Audio is decent and one of the best things about this laptop, there are some tweeters and a subwoofer inside the chassis which makes the music quite loud for a laptop. Additionally, the included subwoofer allows more bass than you’d get without it which is a nice bonus. Tweaking the audio is possible to get a little bit more control over the bass levels, in games such as Battlefield 1, the explosions should nice and deep.

Dell has packed a decent amount of ports into the laptop and should be enough to connect up most of the devices you need. On the left side of the laptop, you’ll find the power button, Ethernet and USB 3.1 Type-A. The right side of the laptop features a headphone jack, two USB 3.1 Type-A ports and one each of USB Type-C and Thunderbolt with an SD Card reader for good measure. With so much space on the sides of the laptop, it would not hurt to add an extra Type C USB considering more and more devices are using them such as smartphones like the Google Pixel 2.

Software on the device is kept to a minimum, being a gaming laptop Dell have opted to not include too much bloatware apart from McAfee. This was probably the worst bloatware to include though as it would constantly tell me I need to “buy” as the trialled had run out. Really, save the annoyance and just not include anything additional on gaming laptops, gamers just don’t want Anti-virus programs pre-installed they will choose one.

Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming Benchmarks and Performance

Firestrike – 8989

Firestrike Ultra – 2378

Bioshock Infinite

Ultra 1920 x 1080 – Min 27, Max 172, 130 Avg

Very High 1920 x 1080 – Min 22, Max 216, Avg 112

High 1920 x 1080 – Min 33, Max 174, Avg 117

Medium 1920 x 1080 – Min – 25, Max – 268, Avg – 162

Dishonored 2

Ultra 1920 x 1080 – Min 26, Max 62, Avg 44

Very High 1920 x 1080 – Min 33, Max 73, Avg 53

High 1920 x 1080 – Min 30, Max 118, Avg 74

Medium 1920 x 1080 – Min 37,Max 120, Avg 78

Fallout 4

Ultra 1920 x 1080 – Min 30, Max 53, Avg 39

High 1920 x 1080 – Min 28, Max 63, Avg 40

Medium 1920 x 1080 – Min 30, Max 63, Avg 45

The benchmarks do quite well, it’s not the most powerful laptop but handled the games I usually test. For 1080p gaming, it does perfectly well but if you opt for the 4K screen with the same graphics card it might struggle to play the latest games at 4K resolution.

I’ve also played Overwatch and Battlefield 1 with it and the games are handled well considering they are newer than the others. Playing on high settings for Overwatch, the game was able to happily stay above the 40FPS mark and Battlefield 1 did the same but there was a lot more ups and downs with the more graphically intensive game.

Similar to other laptops, it has an issue with the cooling noise which drowns out a lot of the game volume due to it trying to keep everything cool. Even when playing something like BioShock Infinite, the fans were at max and created quite a bit of noise. There are programs you can download to control the speed of fans and tweak the noise while having the performance not be too diminished but run the risk of creating hardware issues if done incorrectly.

When you compare it to something like the Aurora R6 gaming PC that was very quiet getting a laptop is always a trade-off for the added portability. Sure it is not deafening but you will want to turn up your in-game volume which is fine as the speakers are one of the best bits. Something not specific to the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 as a lot of gaming laptops have the same fan noise issue.

Overall for performance is pretty decent, it is only a little off the Razer Blade for the Firestrike benchmark which scored 9156 in our tests.

Dell Inspiron Battery Life

While using the laptop for over a month, the battery life was pretty exceptional for all the kit that is inside the machine. Day to day use saw about 6-7 hours of time before it needed to be recharged which saw usual browsing and YouTube watching.

Gaming was, of course, a lot less with a couple hours max but enough to get you buy if you really needed it.

Should I buy the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming?

The Inspiron 15 7000 is a decent gaming laptop for price vs performance, as it was able to play modern games and older games without a problem. You’d most likely not be able to play everything on Ultra but you are getting a good ratio of performance. The laptop’s four-cores will also do well for video editing, streaming and other tasks which are helped by the impressive battery life. The screen could be better with it being dimmer than I’d have liked and the noise like other laptops is something I am not a fan of ( no pun intended…). Finally, the 256GB SSD is nice but not big enough considering how cheap they’ve become.

If you are a student or a gamer on a budget, the 15 is a valid choice for your money.