Dell Inspiron 17 5000 AMD Ryzen 3 and 5 APU laptops released

[HEXUS]

17-inch Full HD machines with optical drives priced between $679 and $999.

Read more.

[cptwhite_uk]

No SSD
3Kg
Tiny battery
$1000 = £1000 ?

I'm sure 90% of people would have preferred a 250Gb SSD for storage, or am I alone in thinking that?

Seem pretty poor to me.

[Biscuit]

Typical uninspiring platform for an AMD laptop basically

[will19565]

could stick a threadripper in those laptops and they would still be slow because of those hard drives

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

These seem priced way too high,and if the US pricing equates to UK pricing with VAT,thats nearly £600 for a 2C/4T Ryzen. Sure its 17" but you can get a 17" laptop with a Core i5 8250U for under £500 from HP,and for around £700 you can get a 15" Asus ROG laptop with a Core i7 7700HQ and a GTX1050 for £700.

[lumireleon]

nice to see AMD back in the game. Lest we forget Vega 3 is faster than anything intel has to offer

[RCaron]

Sad offerings from Dell.

Acer amazingly has a much better build, and seems to have been building higher quality laptops than Dell for the last several years.

Also, the Acer Swift 3 is cheaper, with SSD.

[scaryjim]

Typical uninspiring platform for an AMD laptop basically

TBF Dell do an almost identical series, including the spinning rust storage*, with either 7th or 8th gen core i processors. It's (ironically) an uninspiring platform all round.

One thing that isn't immediately apparent from the article though: the $999 package is actually the $899 laptop plus a heavily discounted support package, so you can basically ignore that. Given the 16GB RAM and 17" 1080p, I don't think $899 is an unreasonable price for the Ryzen 5 model. What I am worried about (and we've discussed this in the Zen chitchat thread last night, as well) is the bottom rung 2200U costing $679 in a laptop with 8GB RAM and a 1TB HDD. That feels a long way out of its market segment - like putting a Pentium or an i3 in it.


* it's worth noting that you can get a version with 8th gen i5 and a 128GB SSD + 1TB spinning rust, but you have to drop to 8GB of RAM and the list price is $999 (although currently discounted to $849). Like I said, genuinely uninspiring platform.

EDIT for crosspost:

... Lest we forget Vega 3 is faster than anything intel has to offer

Sure about that? Vega 8 isn't much faster than Intel's Iris graphics, so I suspect Vega 3 will be a lot slower than Iris. Vega 3 is hugely cut down; it has less than half the shaders of Vega 8, and Vega 8 is not twice as fast as UHD620 in graphically-intensive benchmarks (look at the Sky Diver results from the Swift 3 review). I suspect Vega 3 and UHD620 will actually be fairly closely matched when it comes to real world graphics performance...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Even the HP X360 has a much worse screen than its Intel equivalent. It seems most of the RR laptops are either lacking in some way or overpriced,and the worst thing is the Intel equivalents can be had cheaper in a number of cases.

I honestly can't see how an Intel 4C CPU and a Nvidia card can end up costing the same as a number of these RR laptops!! Surely with RR being an SOC,the need for an extra chipset is gone for a laptop,ie,the competing Intel laptops are two or three chip solutions,requiring more complex motherboards and more elaborate cooling solutions.

Plus the AMD partners(or AMD) have not even released new drivers for the mobile APUs,ie,the latest drivers are months old. Its a joke when you had scenarios like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B6FlUA9PKI

So that is at the end of January,and you read it right,that channel forced Vega 56/64 drivers onto the mobile APU and had a big performance jump!

Apparently you can't get the latest drivers(from last month) for the desktop RR APUs,to run on the mobile ones,and you can't even get them on the AMD website.

I know AMD is not Intel sized,but honestly this is not really helping their case!! RR is a great product,but it seems as usual its the "details" which are holding it back.

[philehidiot]

No SSD
3Kg
Tiny battery
$1000 = £1000 ?

I'm sure 90% of people would have preferred a 250Gb SSD for storage, or am I alone in thinking that?

Seem pretty poor to me.

Nah man, even in 2011 when I bought my Macbook Air, one of the reasons I went for Apple was that I had a list of requirements and one of those was an SSD having seen what it did for my desktop with only a small SSD for the OS, Office and so on. I would never, ever recommend anyone buy a PC (unless they're on a severe budget) without an SSD these days. I think there is an argument for perhaps getting a great deal and then switching the HDD out for an SSD but the performance difference an SSD provides in the day to day stuff that you do most on your PC is massive. No, it won't up your FPS but what it will do is remove 95% of the lag related frustration in the kind of use cases laptops find themselves. If you are spending <£1000 on a gaming laptop then I think you are wasting your money. I've had a gaming laptop and they just don't have the useful lifespan to warrant the investment unless you go all out on them and really spend.

The rest of us PC users need to consider what a laptop does day to day and that's rarely gaming. If you're doing anything remotely demanding on the move then it's going to usually involve large files. Hell, even if you're just using Office, it loads so much faster with an SSD, it responds so much faster, it doesn't induce lag when auto-saving a file whilst you happen to be opening a browser window. The consumer grade SSD is the best thing to happen to the PC market in decades.

[3dcandy]

Even the HP X360 has a much worse screen than its Intel equivalent. It seems most of the RR laptops are either lacking in some way or overpriced,and the worst thing is the Intel equivalents can be had cheaper in a number of cases.

I honestly can't see how an Intel 4C CPU and a Nvidia card can end up costing the same as a number of these RR laptops!! Surely with RR being an SOC,the need for an extra chipset is gone for a laptop,ie,the competing Intel laptops are two or three chip solutions,requiring more complex motherboards and more elaborate cooling solutions.

Plus the AMD partners(or AMD) have not even released new drivers for the mobile APUs,ie,the latest drivers are months old. Its a joke when you had scenarios like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B6FlUA9PKI

So that is at the end of January,and you read it right,that channel forced Vega 56/64 drivers onto the mobile APU and had a big performance jump!

Apparently you can't get the latest drivers(from last month) for the desktop RR APUs,to run on the mobile ones,and you can't even get them on the AMD website.

I know AMD is not Intel sized,but honestly this is not really helping their case!! RR is a great product,but it seems as usual its the "details" which are holding it back.

I'd hazard a guess and say that AMD is not pushing these chips hard at all, thus the lack of driver support etc. etc. and the prices I bet are not that great. Intel doesn't want to lose all its huge sales to AMD so has fought back hard

[cptwhite_uk]

Nah man, even in 2011 when I bought my Macbook Air, one of the reasons I went for Apple was that I had a list of requirements and one of those was an SSD having seen what it did for my desktop with only a small SSD for the OS, Office and so on. I would never, ever recommend anyone buy a PC (unless they're on a severe budget) without an SSD these days. I think there is an argument for perhaps getting a great deal and then switching the HDD out for an SSD but the performance difference an SSD provides in the day to day stuff that you do most on your PC is massive. No, it won't up your FPS but what it will do is remove 95% of the lag related frustration in the kind of use cases laptops find themselves. If you are spending <£1000 on a gaming laptop then I think you are wasting your money. I've had a gaming laptop and they just don't have the useful lifespan to warrant the investment unless you go all out on them and really spend.

The rest of us PC users need to consider what a laptop does day to day and that's rarely gaming. If you're doing anything remotely demanding on the move then it's going to usually involve large files. Hell, even if you're just using Office, it loads so much faster with an SSD, it responds so much faster, it doesn't induce lag when auto-saving a file whilst you happen to be opening a browser window. The consumer grade SSD is the best thing to happen to the PC market in decades.

You're writing like I disagree with you?!

[Glyce]

Optical drive? No SSD? Are we back in 2005?

[scaryjim]

Optical drive? No SSD? Are we back in 2005?

We're not. Dell might be

tbf, Optical Drive and no SSD was standard for mid-range laptops when I bought my current one, which was (iirc) 2013. So they might only be 5 years out of date

For a 17" laptop there no real excuse to leave out an optical drive tbh - it's a huge chassis and plenty of people still use physical media. The lack of an SSD is pretty inexcusable nowadays, mind you - even at retail a 120GB SATA M.2 SSD is < £40, and in a 15" or 17" chassis there shouldn't be too much issue fitting in an M.2 slot as well as a 2.5" drive bay. I can see a case for entry-level laptops coming with either a 128GB SSD or a 1TB HDD, but once you get in the mid-range the only excuse for not having both would be in a small chassis...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I'd hazard a guess and say that AMD is not pushing these chips hard at all, thus the lack of driver support etc. etc. and the prices I bet are not that great. Intel doesn't want to lose all its huge sales to AMD so has fought back hard

Seems utterly weird as most systems sold are prebuilt desktops and laptops,so its in the interest of AMD to try and at least get driver support up to date!!

[scaryjim]

Seems utterly weird as most systems sold are prebuilt desktops and laptops ...

It's even worse when you consider that the bulk of those sales are laptops, too. I know it'll take a while for AMD to pick up the OEM relationships to get lots of good design wins, but poor driver support on launch really isn't going to persuade OEMs that it's a good idea to make AMD laptops, and it's laptops they need to make strides in if they're going to get mainstream market share back!

It's almost like this generation the mobile side is an after-thought. Perhaps they're waiting for the high-density libraries on 7nm to make a real push into mobile... they seem to be using 14nmm LPP as a one-size-fits-all node, so maybe they're having to make lots of compromises in this generation...?