G15 Gaming Laptop Review
The Dell G15 Gaming Laptop, Dell’s budget laptop that is designed for gamers on a lower budget. Well just how good is the highest configuration of this lower-end laptop, well let me tell you.
The highest configuration in my case costed just over £1300 and that was with premium three year guarantee, granted this was only possible in August when I purchased it and only because I am a student at the time of writing this but still, an awesome deal. The I have model is the 1Tb M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive with the i7-11800H, 16GB of memory, spread over two DDR4, 3200MHz and the NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3060 GDDR6 packing 6GB of memory as the graphics card. The 32 GB option is now again available when writing this.
Let’s talk design. The chassis is a thing of beauty, mine is slick carbon grey and I really enjoy how Dell have designed the G15 to look alike to its Alienware laptops, giving their brand that signature look but also saying to budget customers, you are still getting something great here. The unfortunate thing is that it is a fingerprint magnet and requires daily cleaning if your one, who likes to have your machine looking prim and proper all the time. The fan ducts blend into the design and are not an eyesore.
The G15 comes with several ports, ethernet and headphone jack on the left, two USB 2.0 ports, one with power share on the right and finally, the back houses the main power port, a HDMI port, USB 3.2 an a USB-C port capable of acting as a display port. The lack of heavy storage drive makes the laptop lighter than expected, consider its 15.9 inch classification. Though I have had to buy a new laptop bag to accommodate this size.
My experience using the machine got off to a worrying start when out of the box it made a horrible grinding disk noise which I know assume to be the graphics card fan. This sound stopped after a couple hours of use but I also experienced an overactive fan that would kick in even when browsing the web. That has also stopped, which is likely due to the adaptive AI that controls what mode the laptop is to be in when doing specific activities and now the fans barely kick in when playing games like Humankind and Stellaris on the highest graphics settings.
I’m sure your wondering about battery life but remember gaming laptops are not going to last long as they are designed to be extremely powerful and without having a huge clunky chassis to accommodate a ridiculously huge battery, they just cannot act as they do and last long. Saying this, the G15 lasts far longer than expected. Mundane tasks like surfing the web and writing articles can be run off the battery power for around five to six hours, while streaming videos brings that figure down to four hours and graphics intensive gaming drops that further to between two and three hours.
To put it simply, the G15 is more than adequate as a gaming pc alternative, its superb and brings the joy of gaming to a portable form and perhaps importantly without busting the bank on more expensive options like Dell’s Alienware line. I give it a strong 9/10 as the fingerprint thing is slightly annoying but beyond that it is the right laptop for me and so far preforms amazingly, helping to render videos far quicker than before and increases my productivity ten-fold so far. You can watch me review the G15 gaming Laptop below.
Watch the review here
