Gaming Laptops: A Delightful Experience with Dell, or Not?

It's not far off, uh yeah, that's really the big issue with gaming laptops for me. Oh and the display is fine, it was very smooth with no noticeable ghosting, and it has decent color space coverage, uniformity, and contrast ratio. Although I got very weird color accuracy results, and I will say the colors did look a bit funky - not sure what's going on there.

Now we need to discuss the whole "it being a Dell thing" uh now to put all of this into perspective, the last laptop which I tested was an ASUS Strix device, which over the week and a half that I spent with it because I used it for multiple videos, had one minor issue - it was the fact that it was a huge pain in the butt to uninstall McAfee. That was the only thing everything else worked perfectly.

Whereas I've spent three days with the Dell, and I've made a little list, most of them seem to relate to the GPU. You may have noticed a distinct lack of screen capture in this video - that's because I couldn't get GeForce Experience to capture games, which is a highly unusual problem. I wiped it a couple times but I just couldn't get it working. The only game that it would screen capture was Tarkov for some reason - which really doesn't make any sense to me.

The next problem is that I just generally had a reasonable amount of stutters and stuff on the desktop, just general Windows stutters - which was way more stuttery than the uh the ASUS laptop that I tested before. The next one was MSI Afterburners overlays were acting up - sometimes I'd lose just half of the GPU performance metrics, and then they'd pop back later for the initial testing.

I actually used a different layout because of these issues - which you may have noticed as well. Then the next one was toggling Performance Mode on and off was really fickle for some reason - sometimes in games if you hit Control F9 it would just turn it on or off, sometimes I had to Alt Tab out of games to be able to turn it off because it wouldn't work while gaming, and then sometimes it just didn't work at all.

So yeah that was also quite all over the place. Now a bunch of you may be thinking "David, these are shockingly minor niggles even for you" but that's quite a lot of little software gremlins after just three days of testing - and these are gremlins that I haven't had with any of the other laptops that I've tested on this channel before so clearly this is still a Dell product.

And we've also learned that apparently ELMA is also aroused by laptops, not just desktops, Sony TVs, and older cell phones, and Tidal for some reason. Now I'm not saying that the next generation of laptop hardware that's being released now isn't going to offer better performance - there seems to be quite a big jump in terms of CPU performance going to this next generation.

But come on that hardware configuration is realistically as much performance as you need from a gaming laptop, like that was that was quite impressive. So if you're looking for a bargain in a world full of scalp monsters, these non-next-gen laptops may be one of your only bets.

That being said I'm not sure if I'd buy that Dell - luckily there are a whole bunch of other laptops on sale not just on Micro Center site, but with Micro Center specifically there is a Lenovo Legion with a Ryzen 7 5800H in it - 16 gigs of RAM and an RTX 360 for the same price as this laptop. So I think that is definitely a better bet.

Uh yeah if you want a deal now is a good time to get it, in terms of gaming laptops, and with that we've learned many things today - Dell laptops are still Dell products so you should probably be careful. Actually on that note let me know in the comment section down below what experience you've had with the Dell laptop if you love yours or how you've had problems with it - I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

Thank you for watching if you enjoyed the video like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one. Consider watching another video - a suggestion will pop up in a second, and until the next video thank you for watching bye.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou know what i'm i'm so sick of gaming on this piece of crap i i keep getting potato juice in my eyes and it's just not fun anymore i really hope the new rtx 3d series graphics cards are in stock soon so that i can buy something just better dude stop being a baby why don't you just buy a gaming laptop they're all on a hell of a sale now anyway oh that actually makes complete sense there is a whole bunch of exciting laptop hardware just around the corner which makes now potentially a very good time to buy a current gen gaming laptop no you're not going to be getting the fancy new hardware release ep but like i mentioned before they're all on hell of sale now anyway so i asked microcentre to send over a laptop that's currently very heavily discounted on their website to see if it's any good because well there is a bit of a caveat to that now if you do want to check out microcenter i have some promos you can check out in the description below they do have the distinct advantage of not being newegg which is very good but anyway with that let's have a look at the laptop in question oh whoa this power brick's as big as a medium-sized rotisserie chicken in comparison this is the 230 watt power brick that comes with a razor blade and yeah that's a whole lot extra girth for an extra 10 watts this cadaver grey beauty is in fact a dell laptop which long time viewers of the channel may know could be problematic although maybe their laptops are better than their desktops it's part of what we're gonna find out today now the chassis is entirely made of plastic it's not the worst plastic but the laptop's definitely not as well built as that recent asus laptop i had a look at which had a nice mixture of materials despite that it is reassuringly weighty which makes me think there's a decent cooling solution in here in terms of i o placement the laptop commits the cardinal sin of having right side usb ports which means once you plug anything in there it is immediately in the way of your mouse and irritating the laptop passes the one hand open test and the display isn't that flexy which is nice once you open the laptop you're greeted by a numpad which will be really exciting for boring people that are very into xl also the trackpad would have been considered too small and plasticky back in 1872. anyway now that i'm done slandering mcconaughey let's get into the real reason we're all here the sexy gaming hardware in this g five in terms of the cpu we have an intel i7 11 800h 16 gigs of ram which finally round of applause it's been ages since we've had that as a stock configuration in a system and we have an rtx 3060. all that for the current sale price of 8 200 us dollars before tax which i think is pretty good especially considering that it comes with the better 165 hertz display and if there's one thing the dell can do well other than make terrible products it's put good displays in things so that's quite exciting but anyway with that i think now is a good time to rip apart the laptop and see how easy it is to upgrade its undercarriage now the thing that's quite promising in terms of upgradability for this laptop is the fact that the panel that you have to remove is just the bottom panel it doesn't stretch around uh interfering with the side i o and stuff so hopefully taking off this back panel feels a little less like drop kicking a puppy hey look at that that was nice and easy oh we've got an alienware motherboard now in terms of upgradeability it's a bit of a mixed bag although mostly positive you can see that we have just non solder down sticks of ram it is a dual 8 gig kit which is good for performance here we have an m.2 slot and we actually have an additional slot available if you want to put more storage in here although it does look suspiciously like we are going to have to buy an accessory to mount it with we also have a removable battery which is always nice to see now my main concern about this laptop's undercarriage is the fact that we can't really see the cooling solution because the cpu and the gpu are mounted on the other side of the motherboard and that means that if you do want to re-paste the cooling solution you are going to have to remove the entire motherboard which is definitely not for the faint of heart but other than that this is a pretty reasonable laptop undercarriage but with that let's power it up and see what kind of bloatware we're working with wow what a cool mouse pad wink wink in terms of vd we have um well there's mcafee on it which is already minus 10 points right there but other than that i i guess we're good now in terms of gaming experience it is a laptop which means it's hot and loud wow the temperatures are kind of crazy we started off running at 4.4 gigahertz with the cpu temps hitting 100 degrees celsius that's slowed down a bit and now the temperatures are looking a bit more reasonable having said that the gaming performance is good uh we are averaging about 110 frames per second and this is with battlefield 5 running at 1080p high settings uh in directx 12. so now i've converted it into desktop mode which i did by plugging a monitor into it i have also propped it up a bit which i definitely didn't do by just leaning it on a graphics card currently we're running escape from tarkov this is at 1080p medium-ish settings but it is with like ssr on and stuff uh so yeah you may need to drop the settings a bit to get a higher frame rate but it feels pretty good it may just be running at about 60-ish frames per second but the whole input lag situation is under control which is important for a game like escape from tarkov so yeah very usable with that let's have a look at a couple more benchmarks that is a very usable gaming experience we were getting about 120 frames per second in a lot of the games at 1080p high settings and even a more demanding game like cyberpunk still gave us a solid 60 frames per second and we didn't have to do any upgrading to the system to get that kind of gaming result which is that's that's quite rare on this channel now moving over to some negatives which are very predictable laptop negatives uh the temperatures are quite spicy even if you lift the laptop off the table a little bit uh they were still quite hot the gpu wasn't too bad actually but the cpu would get quite hot and then there's the other major problem with gaming laptops which is the noise the first test is with the laptop off the table a little bit running not in performance mode yeah unless you're using close backed headphones to game that noise is going to be irritating and everyone else in your apartment is going to hate your gaming as well so that's something to bear in mind the next test is with the laptop running in performance mode okay now it's getting nice and noisy it's not quite razor blade level noisy but it's it's not far off uh yeah that really is the big issue with gaming laptops for me oh and the display is fine it was very smooth with no noticeable ghosting and it has decent color space coverage uniformity and contrast ratio although i got very weird color accuracy results and i will say the colors did look a bit funky not sure what's going on there now we need to discuss the whole it being a dell thing uh now to put all of this into perspective the last laptop which i tested was an asus strix device which over the week and a half ish that i spent with it because i used it for multiple videos i had one minor issue with it and it was the fact that it was a huge pain in the butt to uninstall mcafee that was the only thing everything else worked perfectly whereas i've spent three days with the dell and i've made a little list most of them seem to relate to the gpu you may have noticed a distinct lack of screen capture in this video and that's because i couldn't get geforce experience to capture games which is a highly unusual problem i ddu wiped it a couple times but i just couldn't get it working the only game that it would screen capture was tarkov for some reason which really doesn't make any sense to me the next problem is that i just generally had a reasonable amount of stutters and stuff on the desktop just general windows stutters which is it was way more stuttery than the uh the asus laptop that i tested before the next one was msi afterburners overlays were acting up uh sometimes i'd lose just half of the gpu performance metrics and then they'd pop back later for the initial testing i actually used a different layout because of these issues which you may have noticed as well and then the next one was toggling performance mode on and off was really fickle for some reason sometimes in games if you hit control f9 it would just turn it on or off sometimes i had to alt tab out of games to be able to turn it off because it wouldn't work while gaming and then sometimes it just didn't work at all so yeah that was also quite all over the place now a bunch of you may be thinking david these are shockingly minor niggles even for you but that's quite a lot of little software gremlins after just three days of testing and these are gremlins that i haven't had with any of the other laptops that i've tested on this channel before so clearly this is still a dell product and we've also learned that apparently elma is also aroused by laptops and not just desktops and sony tvs and older cell phones and tidal for some reason now i'm not saying that the next generation of laptop hardware that's being released now isn't going to offer better performance there seems to be quite a big jump in terms of cpu performance going to this next generation but come on that hardware configuration is realistically as much performance as you need from a gaming laptop like that was that was quite impressive so if you're looking for a bargain in a world full of scalp monsters these non-next-gen laptops may be one of your only bets that being said i'm not sure if i'd buy that doll luckily there are a whole bunch of other laptops on sale not just on micro center site a bunch of other websites as well but with micro center specifically there is a lenovo legion with a ryzen 7 5800 h in it 16 gigs of ram and an rtx 360 for the same price as this laptop so i think that is definitely a better bet uh yeah if you want a deal now is a good time to get it in terms of gaming laptops and with that we've learned many things today dell laptops are still dell products so you should probably be careful actually on that note let me know in the comment section down below what experience you've had with the dell laptop if you love yours or how you've had problems with it i'd be interested to hear what you have to say thank you for watching if you enjoyed the video like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one consider watching another video a suggestion will pop up in a second and until the next video thank you for watching byeyou know what i'm i'm so sick of gaming on this piece of crap i i keep getting potato juice in my eyes and it's just not fun anymore i really hope the new rtx 3d series graphics cards are in stock soon so that i can buy something just better dude stop being a baby why don't you just buy a gaming laptop they're all on a hell of a sale now anyway oh that actually makes complete sense there is a whole bunch of exciting laptop hardware just around the corner which makes now potentially a very good time to buy a current gen gaming laptop no you're not going to be getting the fancy new hardware release ep but like i mentioned before they're all on hell of sale now anyway so i asked microcentre to send over a laptop that's currently very heavily discounted on their website to see if it's any good because well there is a bit of a caveat to that now if you do want to check out microcenter i have some promos you can check out in the description below they do have the distinct advantage of not being newegg which is very good but anyway with that let's have a look at the laptop in question oh whoa this power brick's as big as a medium-sized rotisserie chicken in comparison this is the 230 watt power brick that comes with a razor blade and yeah that's a whole lot extra girth for an extra 10 watts this cadaver grey beauty is in fact a dell laptop which long time viewers of the channel may know could be problematic although maybe their laptops are better than their desktops it's part of what we're gonna find out today now the chassis is entirely made of plastic it's not the worst plastic but the laptop's definitely not as well built as that recent asus laptop i had a look at which had a nice mixture of materials despite that it is reassuringly weighty which makes me think there's a decent cooling solution in here in terms of i o placement the laptop commits the cardinal sin of having right side usb ports which means once you plug anything in there it is immediately in the way of your mouse and irritating the laptop passes the one hand open test and the display isn't that flexy which is nice once you open the laptop you're greeted by a numpad which will be really exciting for boring people that are very into xl also the trackpad would have been considered too small and plasticky back in 1872. anyway now that i'm done slandering mcconaughey let's get into the real reason we're all here the sexy gaming hardware in this g five in terms of the cpu we have an intel i7 11 800h 16 gigs of ram which finally round of applause it's been ages since we've had that as a stock configuration in a system and we have an rtx 3060. all that for the current sale price of 8 200 us dollars before tax which i think is pretty good especially considering that it comes with the better 165 hertz display and if there's one thing the dell can do well other than make terrible products it's put good displays in things so that's quite exciting but anyway with that i think now is a good time to rip apart the laptop and see how easy it is to upgrade its undercarriage now the thing that's quite promising in terms of upgradability for this laptop is the fact that the panel that you have to remove is just the bottom panel it doesn't stretch around uh interfering with the side i o and stuff so hopefully taking off this back panel feels a little less like drop kicking a puppy hey look at that that was nice and easy oh we've got an alienware motherboard now in terms of upgradeability it's a bit of a mixed bag although mostly positive you can see that we have just non solder down sticks of ram it is a dual 8 gig kit which is good for performance here we have an m.2 slot and we actually have an additional slot available if you want to put more storage in here although it does look suspiciously like we are going to have to buy an accessory to mount it with we also have a removable battery which is always nice to see now my main concern about this laptop's undercarriage is the fact that we can't really see the cooling solution because the cpu and the gpu are mounted on the other side of the motherboard and that means that if you do want to re-paste the cooling solution you are going to have to remove the entire motherboard which is definitely not for the faint of heart but other than that this is a pretty reasonable laptop undercarriage but with that let's power it up and see what kind of bloatware we're working with wow what a cool mouse pad wink wink in terms of vd we have um well there's mcafee on it which is already minus 10 points right there but other than that i i guess we're good now in terms of gaming experience it is a laptop which means it's hot and loud wow the temperatures are kind of crazy we started off running at 4.4 gigahertz with the cpu temps hitting 100 degrees celsius that's slowed down a bit and now the temperatures are looking a bit more reasonable having said that the gaming performance is good uh we are averaging about 110 frames per second and this is with battlefield 5 running at 1080p high settings uh in directx 12. so now i've converted it into desktop mode which i did by plugging a monitor into it i have also propped it up a bit which i definitely didn't do by just leaning it on a graphics card currently we're running escape from tarkov this is at 1080p medium-ish settings but it is with like ssr on and stuff uh so yeah you may need to drop the settings a bit to get a higher frame rate but it feels pretty good it may just be running at about 60-ish frames per second but the whole input lag situation is under control which is important for a game like escape from tarkov so yeah very usable with that let's have a look at a couple more benchmarks that is a very usable gaming experience we were getting about 120 frames per second in a lot of the games at 1080p high settings and even a more demanding game like cyberpunk still gave us a solid 60 frames per second and we didn't have to do any upgrading to the system to get that kind of gaming result which is that's that's quite rare on this channel now moving over to some negatives which are very predictable laptop negatives uh the temperatures are quite spicy even if you lift the laptop off the table a little bit uh they were still quite hot the gpu wasn't too bad actually but the cpu would get quite hot and then there's the other major problem with gaming laptops which is the noise the first test is with the laptop off the table a little bit running not in performance mode yeah unless you're using close backed headphones to game that noise is going to be irritating and everyone else in your apartment is going to hate your gaming as well so that's something to bear in mind the next test is with the laptop running in performance mode okay now it's getting nice and noisy it's not quite razor blade level noisy but it's it's not far off uh yeah that really is the big issue with gaming laptops for me oh and the display is fine it was very smooth with no noticeable ghosting and it has decent color space coverage uniformity and contrast ratio although i got very weird color accuracy results and i will say the colors did look a bit funky not sure what's going on there now we need to discuss the whole it being a dell thing uh now to put all of this into perspective the last laptop which i tested was an asus strix device which over the week and a half ish that i spent with it because i used it for multiple videos i had one minor issue with it and it was the fact that it was a huge pain in the butt to uninstall mcafee that was the only thing everything else worked perfectly whereas i've spent three days with the dell and i've made a little list most of them seem to relate to the gpu you may have noticed a distinct lack of screen capture in this video and that's because i couldn't get geforce experience to capture games which is a highly unusual problem i ddu wiped it a couple times but i just couldn't get it working the only game that it would screen capture was tarkov for some reason which really doesn't make any sense to me the next problem is that i just generally had a reasonable amount of stutters and stuff on the desktop just general windows stutters which is it was way more stuttery than the uh the asus laptop that i tested before the next one was msi afterburners overlays were acting up uh sometimes i'd lose just half of the gpu performance metrics and then they'd pop back later for the initial testing i actually used a different layout because of these issues which you may have noticed as well and then the next one was toggling performance mode on and off was really fickle for some reason sometimes in games if you hit control f9 it would just turn it on or off sometimes i had to alt tab out of games to be able to turn it off because it wouldn't work while gaming and then sometimes it just didn't work at all so yeah that was also quite all over the place now a bunch of you may be thinking david these are shockingly minor niggles even for you but that's quite a lot of little software gremlins after just three days of testing and these are gremlins that i haven't had with any of the other laptops that i've tested on this channel before so clearly this is still a dell product and we've also learned that apparently elma is also aroused by laptops and not just desktops and sony tvs and older cell phones and tidal for some reason now i'm not saying that the next generation of laptop hardware that's being released now isn't going to offer better performance there seems to be quite a big jump in terms of cpu performance going to this next generation but come on that hardware configuration is realistically as much performance as you need from a gaming laptop like that was that was quite impressive so if you're looking for a bargain in a world full of scalp monsters these non-next-gen laptops may be one of your only bets that being said i'm not sure if i'd buy that doll luckily there are a whole bunch of other laptops on sale not just on micro center site a bunch of other websites as well but with micro center specifically there is a lenovo legion with a ryzen 7 5800 h in it 16 gigs of ram and an rtx 360 for the same price as this laptop so i think that is definitely a better bet uh yeah if you want a deal now is a good time to get it in terms of gaming laptops and with that we've learned many things today dell laptops are still dell products so you should probably be careful actually on that note let me know in the comment section down below what experience you've had with the dell laptop if you love yours or how you've had problems with it i'd be interested to hear what you have to say thank you for watching if you enjoyed the video like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one consider watching another video a suggestion will pop up in a second and until the next video thank you for watching bye