Dell G3 Gaming Laptop

Nobody likes to compromise, but with gaming laptops, it's inevitable. When you find yourself in the $ 1,000 range, they become even more important, which often prevents them from receiving a recommendation from us.

Yet the Dell Inspiron 15 5000 series has often been the exception, favorite budget game notebook. Now, Dell has revived the product line, changing the name to Dell G series – which includes the Dell G3, G5 and G7. They start as low as $ 750 (currently on sale for $ 680). Our $ 850 configuration of the Dell G3 came pack a Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti and a 128GB SSD.

Cut corners can be a risky business, but our time with the G3 has shown that Dell knows what features are important for the players.

Oh, it's a gaming laptop?

Dell is known for its cutting-edge design in notebooks like the XPS 13 or 15, narrowing the chassis and glasses as a business person. You may have looked at the Dell G7, which comes in a white "Alpine" white color. Unfortunately, not much of this style has found its way to the cheaper G3. Between the lid, the Dell logo, the backlit keys and the keyboard, there are four shades of blue – and that's a bit too much. It also has thick frames around the screen, reinforcing the outdated aesthetics of the laptop.

Still, it's random. It is not wrong with shades of chrome and cheap red color, a trap in which fall many cheap laptops

What's missing in the distinctive style the G3 compensates for in build quality. The plastic frame is reinforced in all the right places. Even the hinge was sturdy, which facilitated the opening and closing of a finger.

The 15-inch version we tested was pretty slender considering the price and the hardware inside. At 5.6 pounds and 0.89 inches thick, it is nowhere near as portable as the Dell XPS 15 or Razer Blade, but it cuts the bulk of the previous iteration. It is mobile enough to throw in your backpack, but not enough so that you do not notice the extra weight.

No frills needed

The keyboard of Dell laptops has always been good, and again, it is a

This is not a gaming keyboard, even though it has some tactile feel that players love. The keys do not feel loose and the bottom action is not sloppy or soft. The layout is good, although we would have preferred to remove the keypad and enlarge the keys. Although we are not the biggest fan of the color of the backlight, it is bright and evenly lit.

The touchpad is not doing as well. This is not glass, so tracking does not seem accurate, which you will notice the most in the detailed work like text selection or moving windows. It supports Windows Precision drivers for fancy multi-touch gestures, but this only highlights the surface of the lower touch pad.

Dell removed the physical buttons this time, although the click is loud and too rigid. It is also wobbly, leading to frequent errors. Players will not be caught dead using the touchpad while still playing, so saving a few dollars here is not the worst idea.

Ports favor the players need Ethernet, HDMI, and a lot of USB for peripherals. Dell even threw in a full-size SD card slot for good measure. What's missing, that's Thunderbolt 3, removing the external GPUs from the table. Even its predecessor had at least one USB-C port, but here you are stuck with USB-A accessories.

The screen is barely good enough

Cheap gaming laptops are known for their bad displays. Unfortunately, Dell continues the trend here. The display is not the worst of its category, but it is disappointing by modern standards. The most glaring problem is that of color, where it displays 62% of the sRGB color space and only 46% of Adobe RGB. The result is a rather dull screen that lacks saturation, and it should not be used for something like photography or graphic design.

In games, the wrong color of the screen is visible, but not annoying. A game like Battlefield 1 depends a lot on the visual quality of its surroundings – and when you go up the graphics, it can be pretty good. On the G3, the heaviness of the screen has an impact on the experience, making the game world darker flat than on a better screen. This is certainly not enough to ruin the gaming experience on the G3, but you have to understand that an affordable gaming laptop forces a compromise in image quality not found on most models sold above $ 1000. The 1080p screen is bright enough, reaching a maximum of 251 nits, and the contrast is better than some expensive gaming laptops like the Alienware 17 or Digital Equinox Storm. The screen also has good viewing angles. We can describe it charitably as functional.

The internal speakers are another aspect of the laptop that will be underutilized by players who prefer to use headphones or high external speakers. What is here is not terrible, but it is not great either.

Excellent performance, less storage

The G3 incorporates the Core i5-8300H processor, a 45-watt Intel chip that is commonly found in low-budget notebooks. one. This is not the most efficient processor in the world, but it's a huge improvement over the 7th generation chip used in the predecessor of the G3. With a greatly increased multi-core score in our Geekbench tests, the G3 can better handle multi-threaded software, including games programmed with quad-core chips.

The strength of the processor is revealing in reality. global use. We encoded a 4K video in Handbrake on the Dell G3 in just three minutes and thirty seconds. It's only a few seconds behind the Core i7-8750H in the Razer Blade or the Equinox Digital Storm, and a minute and a half faster than in the more conventional ultrabooks like the Razer Blade Stealth.

8 GB of RAM, which was a lot of memory to handle the other components included. It's removable, but with one location, your future upgrade options are more limited. An additional slot is available in other configurations, but it will increase your price a bit.

When it comes to storage, Dell offers a wide variety of options. From scratch, you can buy the $ 680 model with only a spacious but slow hybrid disk drive. We have not tested it, but we do not expect it to be as fast as a standard SSD drive. Fortunately, our unit comes with a 128GB Hynix SATA SSD, in addition to the 1TB HDD. The SSD hard drive had an average read speed of 500 megabytes per second and a write speed of 209MB / second. s.

There is no space, nor hard drive like PCIe computers, but it's there that rubber meets the road with budget features. Both disks are accessible and removable, if you ever want to exchange them in the future.

The GTX 1050 Ti is an Interpreter

You may be wondering if you can play games on a $ 800 laptop. And we do not mean scoot playing Rocket League on the middle settings. We mean game really . Fortunately, all the compromises in design, storage and display helped Dell maintain a low price and high performance.

The Nvidia GTX GeForce 1050 Ti is at the heart of this performance. gaming laptop like this one. It can be configured with the Nvidia GTX GeForce 1050 or 1060, but the 1050 Ti handles games and benchmarks well. In 3DMark Fire Strike, the 1050 Ti of the Dell G3 lands between the 1050 and the 1060. But most importantly, the games on the Dell G3 are very fast.

We struggled to get framerate playable in 4K. but if you stay with 1080p, you will be very happy with the results. In Battlefield 1 with maxed parameters, the G3 created 60 frames per second – and so did Fortnite . We were excited to see how responsive the gameplay was in games like these where response time is critical.

The only real obstacle was Deus Ex: Mankind Divided a sadly difficult game. At Ultra, the G3 struggled to jump to 25 FPS, and even with the settings lowered to High, it managed a FPS barely playable at 34 FPS. In demanding games like this, you'll want to upgrade to the GTX 1060 for smoother gameplay.

Better battery life, but not very good

You can not expect a lot of battery life. Even high-end models like the Alienware 17 R5 max under four hours of juice. The Dell G3, with its 56-watt-hour battery, has achieved honorably for what it is and brings an improvement over the previous iteration.

As it is common, the G3 did the best in our video battery test, for 5 hours. minutes with a looped 1080p clip with the screen measured at 100 lux. For our iMacro web browsing, the G3 has been riding for five hours and 18 minutes, which, again, is not that bad compared to gaming laptops.

While this drops significantly when playing games, it's good to know that you can remove it from the wall for more than a few hours at a time. If you need a gaming laptop whose battery is almost all day long, you will need to use a Razer Blade.

Our Take

The Dell G3 Gaming notebook is not perfect, but it is the best of its breed. The compromises that Dell makes to maintain high performance and low prices do not sacrifice the usability of the laptop in the way that matters. If there is one area where the compromise seems excessive, it is the display. We would like to see another low budget gaming laptop coming up the norm, but until now, the G3 is your best option at this price.

Alternatives?

You do not have many options for gaming notebooks at this price, especially not those that are in direct competition with the Dell G3's price. The HP Omen 15t Gaming is getting closer to $ 900, although it's without SSD, and it's a lot more ugly. It's the same with the Asus TUF Gaming FX504

Instead, take a look at the different configurations of the Dell G3. Between the G3, G5 and G7, there is an almost infinite variety of GPU options and storage options. Even the options of just over $ 1,000 offer a strong value for your money

How long will it last?

The Dell G3 comes with a standard one – year warranty, which is not great. That's what we expect from the big manufacturers (who are not Apple). While its components are all up to date, the missing USB-C port makes it a little less durable. Replaceable memory and storage ensure that you will be able to upgrade in the future when you are ready.

Should you buy it?

Yes. For games traveling at less than $ 1000, the Dell G3 is your best option.