Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop Review

The team at Dell Australia recently sent me the new Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop. The G7 has a corporate styling you’d expect from Dell. The sleek designed laptop with a focus on gaming performance features an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 & an Intel Core i7-8750H. So, this isn’t your regular work laptop.

The Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop is a mid-range gaming laptop with a sports car look. I love the aggressive ventilation grill on the back, which they carried it on the front. Available in Licorice Black and Alpine White with a light electric blue accent.

Visual

The 15.6-inch screen is surrounded by a thick bezel, which I feel is a bit too thick. It dwarfs the screen a little. The LG Full HD IPS display is good with a contrast ratio of 738:1 and the response times are in line with what you expect from a budget gaming laptop. Using the LG screen does mean that the brightness of the screen is a little low. It isn’t a major deal, but when I had my monitor plugged into the Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop I noticed the difference.

Ports

The sides of the Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop feature everything you expect:

 

All the ports are situated in the back half of the laptop, in line with the keyboard.

Keyboard

The keyboard looks stunning in the black and electric blue and with a smallish key size (15mm X 15mm).  I personally find them a great size and lovely to touch type on. Gaming takes a little to get used to though, as the key travel on the Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop is only 1 – 1.1mm. I found that is wasn’t consistent throughout the keyboard, but had I not been looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed.

I use a gaming keyboard at home and have owned gaming laptops before. The Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop’s keyboard takes a little time to get used to, as I previously mentioned. The smallish keys and key travel meant I often found myself incorrectly pressing the wrong keys or found myself drifting over slightly during more intense gaming sessions.

Upgrading

Upgrading the Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop is extremely easy, even easier than my desktop computer. All you need to do to upgrade the RAM and either hard drive entails undoing a single screw and you are inside. No looking for hidden screws or pulling apart the entire machine just a single Phillips head screw.

Once inside, the RAM can be removed and upgraded by hand. Literally, no other tools required. This means hardest thing about upgrading from the supplied 16GB to 32GB RAM is opening the plastic packaging your new RAM comes in.

Upgrading the hard drives are slightly harder, but that been said, the M.2 SSD is held by a single screw. HDD is the hardest, you need to remove the hard drive cable and 4 screws. This couldn’t be simpler. To put how easy it is into perspective, I recently clean my desktop PC and had to remove 5 screws just to clean it. The ease upgradability of the Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop really makes this something special in my eyes.

Gaming

The Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 with Max-Q Design will play all of the top and GPU taxing games. Though I tested them all on the highest setting, after I finish with the testing I went back and played several of the games for fun but lowered the settings down. As the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 with Max-Q Design is a great card but games like The Witcher 3 the highest (Ultra) setting only averaged 37 fps. Yet turn off hair tech and drop it to the high setting, you get a very smooth and respectful 63 fps.

Grand Theft Auto V, a game I brought specially to test on the Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop. I have always wanted to play it and it ran at 46 fps on the very high setting. Which I really found was perfect for me. When I played it afterwards, I dropped the settings to high but then changed it back very high. As though I noticed minor things but overall, I loved the extra details.

The last game I tested on the Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop was Rise of the Tomb Raider, a series I have loved since I first played it in my best mates PS1. This was the first time I was able to play this game and playing at 35 fps on the very high settings, it was beautiful. I haven’t played a Tomb Raider game in years and playing on the Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop made me full in love with the series all over again.

Cooling

As I’ve found with a lot of gaming laptop, cooling is a major factor. The Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop does it extremely well for a mid-range gaming laptop. While streaming twitch at 720p (limited due to my internet connection, not the laptop) or watching YouTube videos on HD the temperature between the ‘G’ and ‘H’ key sits around 31-33 degrees. Which is quite impressive, what impressed me more was that while playing The Witcher 3, the ‘G’ and ‘H’ key sits around 36-37 degrees and 46 on the underneath. Which was a little warm on my lap, but not uncomfortable at all.

Conclusion

Overall, I really loved the Dell G7 15 Gaming Laptop and wished I had one of these through high school and university. It is a great multi-tasking mid-range gaming laptop that effortlessly switches from writing essays to watching videos to playing games. Yes, there are some cons like the screen brightness and the shallowness of the keyboard.

For the price, $2,300, you get a lot for your money, not to mention, JB HiFi currently have it on sale for $2,039. At that price, I think it is a steal.

Specifications

• Display –  15.6” FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS
• CPU – Intel Core i7-8750HQ
• Graphics – Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 with Max-Q Design (6GB GDDR5)
• Memory – 16GB DDR4-2666MHz
• SSD – 128GB SATA SSD
• HDD –  1TB 5,400-RPM
• Networking – 802.11ac 2×2 Wi-Fi, Ethernet jack
• Video Ports – HDMI
• USB Ports – (3) USB 3.1, Thunderbolt 3
• Audio – 2x speakers, headphone jack, microphone jack
• Camera – Integrated Widescreen HD (720p) Webcam with Dual Array Digital Microphone
• Battery – 56-hour battery
• Power Adapter – 180W
• Operating System – Windows 10 Home
• Dimensions (WxDxH) – 15.32 x 10.82 x 0.98 inches
• Weight – 2.8kg (6.3 LBS)

Images: Dell

This review was original posted on goto.game on 12 November 2018