When it comes to Gaming laptops, there aren’t many which fall under the price tag of $1000. Most of the gaming laptops are priced above $1300 at least, yet the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 is one such Gaming laptop which you can get for a much less $949.99.
It isn’t just a normal gaming laptop but is also Virtual Reality Ready. This means that the when the time comes your laptop shall be able to play Virtual Reality games smoothly, thus future-proofing yourself. It should be noted that most gaming laptops with VR ready system, usually cost too much, but surprisingly, this one doesn’t.
Perhaps, for the price tag of $949.99 the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming, is worth the buck. Powered by the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q GPU, rest assured of playing top quality games with great detail, on a laptop which offers solid performance. Not only this but compared with other laptops in the industry for the same price tag and segment, the laptop offers considerable longer battery life, which is important if you want to carry it around all day.
Though, like with anything in the world, there are some caveats. Yes, it is true that the Display has gotten better over the years by Dell, but it still lacks somewhere, that it doesn’t quite alright beat the rivals’. Furthermore, you won’t be finding yourself a fan of its keyboard either. Though, these things can be overlooked, if you are willing to get a gaming laptop, for the price of a common one.
Design
Since most gaming notebooks out there, associate the color red with gamers, for some reason or another, the Dell Inspiron 7000 also features a black and red design. Though, when you go out there to buy your laptop, do check for colors, as different colors offer a varying degree of style in the sense, that one laptop could feel dull, while the other bright. Perhaps, the one to my liking is the Matte-Black Inspiron, which has a soft touch lid. The lid features a red colored Dell logo designed in a way to attract eyes.
For the heat release purposes, there are vents at the laptop’s rear. These vents are perfectly designed in a series of straight, gray plastic lines. Some would agree that this new vent design doesn’t appear better than the previous spiderweb design the Inspiron has featured in the past.
The laptop interior has a similar design: The deck is soft-touch too and in black. Around that, you can feel the island-style keyboard with keys painted in red. Not only this, but the backlighting for the keyboard is also in red. There is a crimson border surrounding the touchpad. Perhaps the interesting thing is that the button on the upper left has dual functions: It serves the purpose of a fingerprint-reader as well as the power button.
Weight and Dimensions
Regarding the laptop’s dimension, well the laptop is large with dimensions measuring 15.2 x 10..8 x 1 inches. Not only this, but the laptop also weighs a hefty 6 pounds; Not your average laptop to carry around. Though compared with other gaming laptops, it isn’t that heavier but in contrast with notebooks like the Acer Predator Helios 300 weighing 5.5 pounds, or the Lenovo Legion Y520 and Asus ROG Strix GL503 weighing 5.6 pounds each, the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming laptop, might seem heavier. Though, the laptop makes up for that by being slimmer.
Ports
Although companies like Apple are resorting to fewer ports and adopting a single USB Type C port, Dell at least does the courtesy of offering a plethora of them. There is even a Noble Lock Slot on the left side where you would also find the Ethernet jack, a USB 3.0 port, and an SD card slot. On the left side, you get to see the headphone jack, a pair of USB 3.0 ports, a Thunderbolt 3 port, and an HDMI output. Put simply, the laptop is easily backward compatible with the ports as well as future-proofed.
Display
The display as we said has improved but still lacks out in some areas. Dell switches gears to an IPS panel with a 1080p screen resolution, and since then color accuracy has increased substantially. The 15.6 inches display is sharper now but the sRGB gamut at just 70 percent might disappoint you, since the industry averages around 102 percent. This means much less vivid hues.
As for the brightness, the laptop recorded 233 nits on the light meter, which is again less than the average of 253 nits.
Keyboard and TouchPad
When we said that this Inspiron’s keyboard would disappoint you, we weren’t kidding. First of all, the Inspiron has just 1.2 millimeters of travel, so it can hard to distinguish between keys. Not only this, but the actuation force which is the force required to press a key is 79grams. Thus, even though your typing speed might remain the same, but you are now more prone to errors.
Second, in order to make more space for the trackpad, the keyboard might seem a bit far up to you. This may hinder your typing experience. On the other hand, this leads to a spacious touchpad. Though, since it is made up of plastic instead of metal or glass, you might not get the premium feel of a gaming notebook. Nevertheless, it does the job well and is accurate enough supporting multi-touch gestures with ease.
Battery Life
Perhaps, the selling point of the Dell Inspiron15 7000 would be its battery life. With a battery life of 7 hours and 4 minutes, it is way more than most of the gaming laptops out there. Yes, it might not last you a whole work day, but then, it is just quite enough, if you aren’t constantly using your laptop browsing the internet since that is what we tested it on.
Heat
A common issue with gaming laptops is usually that they heat up often, but thankfully this one doesn’t, but rather stays cool.
Price and Configurations
The base-model Inspiron is available for a price tag of $949.99 and is powered by an Intel Core i5-7300HQ CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, a 1080p display, a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q GPU and 6GB of VRAM. What we would advise you is to spend $50 extra and get the model with a 128GB SSD coupled with 1TB of Hard Drive.
There is a range of configurations and it all depends on how much you are willing to spend.