I bought the cheapest gaming laptop I could find for just $220 USD!
But can it actually run games, or is it worth spending more money on something better?
This is Dell’s Inspiron Gaming 15 7000 gaming laptop, and with a 7th gen Intel quad core
CPU and Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti graphics, this thing used to go for $900 brand new back in
2017.
So I got it for about a quarter of that price on eBay.
2017 takes us back to the days of chunkier bezels and bigger laptops!
The design definitely looks a bit dated, but hey if it can play modern games on a tight
budget who cares.
We’ll check out performance in games soon!
Speaking of chunky, it’s got a 2.5” drive bay with only a 120 gig SSD, not even enough
to install call of duty!
Fortunately there’s also a spare M.2 slot for a faster NVMe SSD, not all older laptops
are so lucky.
I also seem to have lucked out with the RAM, as there are already two memory sticks for
dual channel, which gives more FPS in games compared to one stick.
I was concerned the older battery might not hold a charge too well anymore, but it actually
lasted for around 7 and a half hours in my usual YouTube video playback test, which is
actually better compared to a number of modern more expensive Intel laptops that have bigger
batteries - not bad.
That said, it’s missing modern features that we take for granted these days, like
As for the ports that this laptop does have, the left just has the power input, a USB 3
Type-A port and SD card slot.
The right side has a 3.5mm audio combo jack, two more USB 3 Type-A ports, HDMI 2.0 output
and gigabit ethernet.
So no Type-C as mentioned, but at least the Type-A isn’t the older and slower USB 2.0.
Although we confirmed that the HDMI port can run an external screen at 4K 60Hz, unfortunately
it connects to the Intel integrated graphics rather than the Nvidia discrete graphics.
So this both means that it’s not possible to bypass optimus and get a speed boost in
games by connecting an external screen, and even if we do connect a nice external screen,
G-Sync is not possible.
The speeds from the 2.5” SSD weren’t too bad for a SATA drive, but just 120 gigs is
pretty pathetic.
Though as we’ve got that M.2 slot we can improve speeds by installing an M.2 NVMe SSD,
like this 2TB drive that I upgraded with.
The 1080p screen looks pretty bad.
With just 52% of sRGB color gamut coverage and a maximum brightness of 179 nits.
Anything under 300 really isn’t bright enough for me.
Even inside it just looks dim and washed out.
It’s only 60Hz, so not ideal for fast paced gaming, especially with an average grey-to-grey
response time of 22ms.
That being said, it’s actually not too much worse compared to cheaper gaming laptops from
the last couple of years that have faster 120Hz or 144Hz refresh rates.
While you could of course improve the way things look by connecting an external screen
instead of using this one, I think that the underlying hardware is still going to be a
limit.
When we look at how long it takes between a mouse click and when a gunshot fires on
screen in CS:GO, this laptop took more than twice as long as the slowest result I’ve
ever measured.
Sure some of this would be the 22ms screen response time, but not all of it.
As other newer laptops that had similar screen response times are much faster here, so this
older hardware is just slower to respond in games, which may be an issue if you plan on
playing competitively rather than casually.
Obviously if you’re playing older games like CS:GO, then even this older hardware
is still going to be capable of hitting high enough FPS.
With all settings on minimum our quad core CPU and GTX 1050 Ti graphics were still capable
of more than 100 FPS.
More modern first person shooter games like Fortnite and Apex Legends weren’t performing
too badly either, at least at lower setting levels, achieving near 100 FPS, however performance
dips substantially at higher settings levels, as the 1050 Ti starts to struggle.
More resource heavy games like Spider Man and Cyberpunk 2077 were much more difficult
for this older hardware to run, even with FSR set to quality mode.
We could of course lower the FSR mode or set the screen's resolution to 720p to boost FPS
higher, but it just wouldn’t look as nice, it’s a tradeoff.
And forget ray tracing, as this hardware is not capable of it.
Ray tracing and other modern features like DLSS only work with Nvidia’s RTX graphics,
so our older GTX 1050 Ti here is simply out of luck.
Our cheaper laptop doesn’t stack up too well when compared against the more modern
competition, but it is also the oldest laptop I’ve tested in this game, so that’s to
be expected.
The cheapest gaming laptop you can buy brand new right now is MSI’s GF63 for around $500
USD, so more than double the money to get about double the FPS with the newer GTX 1650
graphics.
However the difference in other games like Control is smaller, so it will depend on the
game as to whether or not you’ll benefit from spending more money on newer hardware.
We are looking at higher game settings in these comparisons, as we saw earlier lower
settings even in modern games could still hit higher frame rates.
Then on the other hand there are games like Halo Infinite, which struggled to even load,
taking more than 5 minutes before we could start playing.
When it finally loaded it was barely hitting 30 FPS at minimum settings with 5 FPS for
the 1% low, so noticeable stuttering, an unusable experience at 1080p.
If you’re planning on playing older less demanding games or eSports titles and you
don’t care about having a laptop that looks a little older, then it’s absolutely possible
to save money on a cheaper second hand laptop like this.
That said, I really think that it’s worth saving up just a little more money than the
$200 I spent on this.
Preferably for something better than the GTX 1050 Ti.
If you do need help picking out your next gaming laptop then come and check out this
video over here next.
I’ll walk you through all the important points so you don’t waste your money!