Dell Inspiron 15 5000 (i5 8250, Radeon 530)

[scaryjim]

Introduction

Hello hexites!

This week I took the plunge and finally decided to replace my 5 year old HP Pavilion G6. The Pavilion has done sterling service and has been handling everything I've thrown at it with aplomb. In fact, from a hardware point of view it's still got plenty of oomph for everything I do, but its age is starting to show, with occasional screen corruption and a nasty grating sound from the fan bearings when it first spins up. And the fan spins up a LOT, as it's running a 35W AMD APU in a relatively cheap chassis, so it needs to work hard to keep cool. It will be a sad day when I turn it off for the last time and finally decommission it.

So, after a lot of soul searching, I finally took some advice from - who else - CAT-THE-FIFTH and picked up a shiny new Dell Inspiron 15 5000 from box.co.uk, for tuppence shy of £500. This is a 15.6" laptop with FHD screen, an i5 8250, 8GB DDR4, 1TB HDD and - perhaps surprisingly at this price point - a discrete Radeon 530 GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM. Earlier research suggests that the RAM will probably be single channel, and there should be an M.2 slot free for a future SSD upgrade - more on this later!

A quick note on ordering/delivery - the process was very straight-forward; props to box.co.uk for this. I selected free delivery, but still received the laptop within 2 working days - excellent service. Everything arrived safely, in good condition and as advertised.

[scaryjim]

First Impressions

Having received the laptop yesterday, the first job was to set up Windows, have a quick check over the system, then let it do its updating thing - the supplied OS version was quite old, despite the relatively new hardware, and a full feature update was available to install.

And my first impression? Good LORD a spinning rust disc is horrid when you're doing OS updates!

For general use it's actually fine, and even while it was running the updates I could still use the PC OK (although opening applications took longer than it had any right to), but the actual process of installing the update - particularly the bits where you can't actually do anything - was painfully slow. My Atom tablet with 32GB eMMC took about half the time.

Although there is some bloatware, Dell actually manage to keep the OS image relatively clean - only around 32GB of the hard drive is used after initial set up. McAfee is pre-installed, and I suspect most hexus users would choose to replace that with their own choice of AV/Anti-malware programs. Otherwise there is a minimum of extraneous software. Both Radeon and Intel graphics software is installed, Radeon at version 17.7 (the latest is 18.2) and Intel at version ... well, the control panel says version 22.20, but Intel website reckons the latest version is 15.65, so make of that what you will

Physically, the laptop is a lot slimmer than the old Pavilion. Materials-wise the shell seems to be largely made of plastic, although it has a slightly brushed effect which is definitely reminiscent of brushed aluminium to the touch and gives the finish a premium feel. There is very little flex and a reasonable amount of heft to the machine, so I suspect there's a reasonable amount of metal in the chassis giving rigidity to the slim profile. Monitor bezels are quite large but not overly distracting. The panel appears to be TN (it's described as "Anti-Glare" in Dell's literarure) and looses colour reproduction and clarity very quickly when viewed off-square, but is nice and clear when viewed straight on. The laptop arrived with Windows scaling set to 125%, which effectively reduces the screen real estate to 1536x864 while making icons and text clearer. It's a nicely balanced setting that works well, and I'm pretty sure I could live with it long term. That said, I'm a big fan of screen real estate, so I'm currently back on 100% scaling, and will see how I get on with it.

So, basic takeaways from my first impressions: a nicely constructed laptop which feels well-made without being "premium", a relatively clean if somewhat outdated OS install, a decent screen as long as you view it head on, giving a good overall package that is somewhat let down by needing OS updates out of the box which are painfully slow on the 1TB HDD.

[scaryjim]

reserved - In Use/Benchmarks

[scaryjim]

reserved - It's a Mystery

[hb904460]

I recommended this laptop, sans dedicated gpu, to my sister-in-law over in Poland. She is very happy with it for general web browsing, skype etc. At the current exchange rate it was on offer at just over £430.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Shiny!! Any possibility of a few pictures please??

[scaryjim]

... Any possibility of a few pictures please??

Yep, when I've got time to do a "proper" review. Possibly over Easter weekend, as I'll have had a couple of weeks with the thing by then. Keep your eyes peeled