so this is the Dell G5 15 SE the SE stands for special edition it's actually
where the most heavily requested notebooks that we were asked to check
out and there's a good reason for that dell has managed to deliver an
affordable gaming laptop with AMD all over it that's right you're getting a
really fast Ryzen CPU and a Navi based graphics card now there is a lot
to like about the G5 15 SE I mean it's pretty affordable it comes with great
specs and let's not forget you can actually buy one right now unlike some
of the other indie notebooks but I've also got some concerns as well and some
of those will make you think twice before pulling the trigger on something
like this so as always I'll make sure leave timestamps in the description down
below also you can hover over the timeline to get to a particular segment
then you're interested in and yeah let's start talking about the G5 15 SE right
after this it's true what they say about the coarser 8 100 we've got what are
called hardware for cool temperatures a cool design that stands out with plenty
of good i/o its whisper quiet with an efficient fan and occupies as much space
on my desk as my plant the coarser a 100 up to 16 cores with a 20 atti
it does not disappoint check it out below all right so let's start with
pricing this laptop starts at eight hundred and eighty dollars us that's
right it's less than nine hundred dollars and for that you get a Ryzen 5 4600H
with six cores and twelve threads eight gigabytes of RAM in dual channel
at 32 hundred megahertz a 256 gigabyte nvme SSD and rx 5600 and GPU and a 1080p
60 Hertz display the sample that we have over
here comes with a faster eight core 16 thread Verizon 740 m 2h CPU twice the
memory and storage the GPU remains the same however the display does get a bump
to 144 Hertz and the price Delta between this and the base model is 320 dollars
but with all the sales Dell usually has I wouldn't be surprised to see it go for
less Dell is also offering the g5 with Intel CPUs and gtx 660ti graphics for
about the same price and yeah as you can see had Intel tax is significant which
is really unfortunate now when you look at the competition
there is the asus tough 815 for the same price as our G5 15 SE you get more
storage and in RTX 2060 but remember the a-15
really didn't have a great screen as a matter of fact it was a pretty terrible
display there's also the upcoming HP omen 15 and the Acer nitro 5 both of
those notebooks are priced similarly to this Dell notebook so let's start with
the design and build quality and honestly guys it feels cheap Dells use
of glossy plastic materials on the outside says it all when you flip the
notebook the bottom looks like my XPS 15 alpha 2 X notebook from 5 years ago
remember the classic Dell gray joke from decades ago well it's back again
interestingly to make it stand out a bit dell has coated the front panel with air
dicent accents that show up different colors depending on the lighting
conditions or the angle that you look at it I'm gonna let you guys be the judge
on that I should also mention that the top lid scratches easily I mean our
sample has only been about a month old and it looks pretty I mean the scratch
marks are really really visible which is really unfortunate so maybe two or three
years down the road don't expect it to look like the day you bought it also
check this out guys like this bottom panel sort of creates a squeaky noise
when you're when you're pressing it or when you're holding in in that mode it's
like I said it's just really really unfortunate and the hinge design is
really poor I mean I'm gonna I'm gonna open this for you guys well I'm on
camera so you can but I think you probably heard that I'm just gonna open
it so you guys can hear how it squeaks I'm gonna be silent
like I don't know if you can hear that or pick that up but it's actually very
noticeable and the display also Wombles a lot especially if you have those in
your lab it's I think this is a really poor hinge design in my opinion it's
also pretty thick coming in at 0.85 inches and it weighs a tad more than
five pounds so it's a little bit thinner but heavier than the a-15 the included
power adapter is ginormous guys seriously this is one of the biggest
adapters we've ever come across in the last year it's rated at 240 watts which
is about the same size as my blade 15 but that one is significantly smaller
but here's a shot compared to my regular photography lens and my pixel for Excel
it's really that big you'll certainly need to find room in your bag to lug
this thing around the interior space is decent you get a full-size keyboard and
from our Legion seminar video a lot of you preferred standard layouts so this
may or may not be your cup of tea I also notice that the key caps were smaller
compared to other notebooks that we've tested I have pretty big hands and I
constantly found myself making numerous typos which was frustrating so it might
not be ideal for hardcore typist if you're willing to pass that the keys do
offer a fantastic travel distance with good feedback it's right on par with the
a-15 which is awesome the LED backlighting is RGB it doesn't get that
bright and oddly enough Dell doesn't include brightness settings so it's
either on or off you'll need to use the command center for that and to be honest
with you guys I would prefer a much better piece of software from Dell than
this the trackpad is respectable it is a pretty smooth surface with support for
Windows position drivers but over time as you start accumulating finger grease
it just starts to become really weird and sometimes unresponsive it's also
aligned slightly with the spacebar meaning that there's little to no room
to place your left palm comfortably unlike the tough a 15 we just slightly
off centered and that makes navigation easier this is what the webcam looks
like and quite frankly I'm not impressed with the color coming out of the sensor
because it just you know the skin tones are another accurate boost the shadows
all the way up and yeah it's one of the worst looking webcams that I've come
across on a notebook however the microphone does sound pretty good
so it should be fine for casual business meetings the speakers are bottom facing
unfortunately they don't sound that great you're not gonna get any bass and
the trebles do sound a bit harsh I think the tough a-15 sounds way way
better than this notebook in my opinion so yeah bottom facing speakers absolute
no-go port selection is okay on this notebook and basically it's on par with
the other budget-friendly devices on the left hand side you get power in mini
display port HDMI 2.0 a USB 3.0 gen one foggy bits per second type a port land
jack and a Type C Gen 2 port which also functions as DP switching over to the
right you get a Kensington lock 2 USB 2.0 type a ports that's right
USB 2.0 ports an audio jack and a full-size SD card reader which is really
interesting because this notebook is catered towards gamers but not creators
but if you happen to be both of them then this is of course a bonus feature
just keep in mind that it's not a UHS 3 card reader so it's not the fastest one
available with some of the other notebooks that are more creative focused
one thing we've started to notice on a lot of these AMD notebooks is the fact
that all you manufacturers sort of limit the number of high bandwidth connections
particularly with USB so in this case you only get a single type C port which
supports 10 gigabits per second and a single type A which supports of a
gigabits per second and the rest is just super slow speed and you're getting two
USB ports which is really unfortunate because when you look at the Intel
counterparts they do come with the fastest protocol that's out there so
that to me is very frustrating and I hope all your manufacturers sort of
revamp that in the future moving on to the display it's 15.6 inch is 1080p at
144 Hertz and as we're in our display analysis test it covers 95% srgb 73 %
Adobe RGB and 74% DC @ b3 so it's way way color accurate than something like
the tough a 15 which is just significantly worse compared to the Dell
honestly I really wish that the TUF had a similar display like what's found on
the Dell but this will definitely be an awesome addition for content creation if
you're looking to edit photos this will definitely get the job done it's also a
pretty bright display not the brightest I'd only get
as far as 300 nits and the fact that it's a matte display makes it even
better so you don't have to worry about crazy reflections when you're viewing
this in direct sunlight the gaming experience was fantastic on this
notebook I think you're really in for a treat and I think it's partly due to the
combination of that higher fresher display but also how color accurate it
is I actually did side by side tests comparing this to the tough notebook and
the difference was just night and day you really in for a treat with the g5 15
SE upgrade ability is pretty straightforward on this laptop you have
access to two RAM sticks right over here maximum supported memory is 32 gigabytes
the primary m2 drive is located right over here it's a really fast drive in
fact it's one of the fastest that we've seen on a gaming notebook within this
price range I believe Dell is using the Samsung PM 9 91 nvme SSD there's an
additional m2 drive for expansion which is nice but check this out for some odd
reason you'll notice a little engraving beneath that which says you can add a 7
millimeter hard drive or a tuneup inch drive as well but that's not really the
case in fact Dell does not include any brackets or the necessary connectors for
installation we even tried to place a drive to see if it would fit but turns
out it conflicts with that second m2 slot and it makes a direct contact with
the PCB now Dell does offer the option to upgrade the battery size to 68 one
hours but that can only be done with the highest config that comes with a one
terabyte drive so you're gonna have to pay a little bit more to get that option
it doesn't really come with the lowering configs which is just so bizarre I
honestly feel like layout could have been a little bit more efficient but
yeah to me that was just super odd speaking of the battery our sample comes
with a 3-cell 51 watt hour unit and it's not that great in fact the bravo 15
which has roughly the same battery size lasted way longer than this notebook it
could be due to a faster GPU or smart shift not optimizing workloads between
the CPU and the GPU but yeah pretty disappointing in my opinion switching
gears to our heavy load test we got about an hour worth of use from this
thing now moving on to performance and one of the most important features of
this notebook isn't its design or even the specs but rather the addition of
AMD's smart shave technology Dell is actually the first to include this
and it could really be a game-changer but I also have a few concerns about it
as well and look we'll make a separate video on smart shift but from a high
level what it essentially does is it treats the GPU and the CPU as a single
virtual entity and when it comes to distributing power and thermal Headroom
for certain workloads like rendering or gaming then using application specific
learning algorithms smart shift will increase the power going towards
whatever component is most critical for example in gaming the GPUs resources are
used to most so it'll get more power resources that should technically
allowed to boost further and for longer than in a system without smart shift but
that also means the CPU would be given a lot less power than normal the same goes
for rendering where the CPU would be able to stretch its legs since the GPU
isn't really needed that much while the CPU and GPU are now aware of what
they're doing and can balance performance based on workloads a lot of
it actually depends on how good Ami's smart shift algorithm actually is
because it's still a new piece of technology that's still being built out
and we've experienced a few hiccups for instance the integrated GPU was being
detected instead of a discreet graphics card and vice versa another thing that
you need to be aware of is that smart shift is always on there's no way to
turn it off or modify it in fact there are some performance settings built into
alien where's a command center like high-performance and balanced but they
absolutely don't do anything it's smart shift doing pretty much all the tasks
100% on this laptop now that could cause an issue for people who are willing to
sacrifice acoustics for better temperatures and performance we already
saw with notebooks like the Legion 7i that giving users control over how they
experience a gaming laptop can be really beneficial
hopefully AMD adds a few more modes but for the time being this notebook does
have the option to run its fans at full speed by simply hitting function plus
the G key or the f7 key but who wants their fans running at full speed all the
time either way I'll be checking out to see how that mode impacts performance a
bit later on and before I get too far into performance I do have to talk about
some of the issues that encountered with this notebook to be honest with you guys
there were a lot when I received this notebook about a month ago
I honestly felt bad for early adopters there was an odd issue with steam where
the app ended up enabling the integrated graphics every few seconds
even when I was gaming that caused massive gameplay stutters as smart
disabled the discrete card for an instant to enable the onboard GPU I also
couldn't get Red Dead Redemption - or Warhammer to total war to start and even
premier ended up oddly using the integrated graphics rather than the more
powerful one temperatures also got crazy hot - it all felt really unpolished but
then things have changed in a big way a new Dell BIOS update and aimed a driver
rolled out this week and completely wiped out every one of those problems so
yeah the rise in notebook ecosystem and specifically smart shift are still going
through some growing pains and we had to retest all of our titles before putting
together this video so let's take a look at how this thing actually does on a
daily basis I wanted to kick things off with the acoustic performance since the
g5 15 SEC is actually one of the quietest notebooks that we've tested but remember
this since low fan speeds do come with some sacrifices and with this system
there's just no way around that by changing performance modes exterior
temperatures were pretty well managed too but that's to be expected with such
a thick boi chassis loading up a real world my render shows the CPU speeds and
temperatures starting off really strong but gradually ever so slowly things
start to change so as I mentioned earlier this is the
quietest or one of the quietest indie notebooks that we've tested but it also
is one of the hottest running with that risin 7 hitting almost a hundred degrees
by the end of the test that impacted clock speeds - and those were barely
above 3.4 gigahertz at the end that's about where the bravo 15 ended up but a
bit slower than the tough a 15 while it's really hard to see if smart shift
is actually working as we make our way through these benchmarks you'll notice a
few things first and foremost is in terms of raw CP performance this Dell
laptop is better than the Bravo 15 and it's one of the fastest notebooks that
we've tested not as quick as the 815 but Delta notebook is also much quieter this
is pretty much why people are begging to get these rise in CPUs inside higher-end
systems moving on to GPU based rendering benchmarks the g5 is good but not all
that great even with latest updates and videos GPUs
have an edge then with something like WinRAR it does pretty good - which goes
to show that the SSD dell installed is pretty good switching gears to gaming
and this is where things get pretty interesting but it also looks like smart
shift is gonna impact this in a big way you see these are some of the lower CPU
clock speeds that we've seen with a gaming laptop but according to AMD
there's a reason for this the algorithm just doesn't think that higher speeds
are necessary and the system should be putting more emphasis on GP performance
dan doesn't stop temperatures from climbing to high levels again though I
mean look a notebook CPU operating at just 2 gigahertz should never get up to
over 90 degrees what this tells us is the rx 5600 M is pushing its heat
through the cooling system and onto the processor which makes sense since
according to our readings our notebook was sucking down over 90 watts at full
load on the positive side the GPU is running at an average clock speed of
about 1.3 5 gigahertz which is run in line with Andy's game clock spec it does
get mighty hot though topping out at just over 90 degrees Celsius with both
the CPU and GPU hitting about 90 during gaming while the system remains so quiet
you see it feels like smart shift is prioritizing noise over temperatures and
that could be an issue for performance other than in Call of Duty the RT X 2060
equipped on the top K 15 beats the g5 s rx 5600 M every single time in many
cases it isn't even remotely close and remember according to AMD the 5600 M is
supposed to be a 2060 competitor but that's super far from the truth here it
could be that smart shift is implementing such low CPU clocks and
that's ultimately bottlenecking the GPU but there is no way to find out for
certain or at least until we get a notebook with an arcs 4600 M that
doesn't have smart shift either way this is a super disappointing result but as
promised here are a few more tests with Dells fan override that pushes rpms to a
hundred percent well in Autodesk Maya it certainly helped increase clock speeds
by a good 200 megahertz even though the temperatures were reduced by only a few
degrees and the reason for this is pretty interesting
basically the rise in 740 808 took advantage of the extra thermal Headroom
bumped up its input power and delivered increased frequencies and that allowed
the g5 see to almost match the a-15 and shaved
a full minute off its rendering time in gaming things get pretty interesting
even with much much lower temperatures smart chip doesn't allow the CPU any
additional clock speed Headroom so it looks like all of the resources are
sticking with an Rx at 5600 M so let's check that out here there's lower
temperatures too and that actually does lead to much improved frequencies that
are on average 125 to 250 megahertz higher than the default setting in this
case we actually saw the arcs 5600 I'm consuming a bit over a hundred watts
every now and then which does prove that a cooler operating environment did lead
to more available input power and guess what while it takes that much juice the
AMD GPU can actually match the our TX 2060
but while consuming about 20 watts more and to me that's just unsustainable
without the fans running at max speed so there you have it guys and honestly my
thoughts on this del G 515 se are kind of all over the place because for one it
offers great value with decent gaming frame rates respectable productivity
scores a really good quality display and with a new BIOS update this laptop does
run quieter but on the other hand there is a reason why I wouldn't recommend
this thing because the build quality and design leaves a lot to be desired
the trackpad position is really at a cram location it's honestly I don't even
know who designed this thing the component temperatures are pretty high
battery life is pretty short too because it's a smaller battery and most
importantly you're only getting a single at least there isn't a single type a USB
port that supports a higher protocol like a 10 gigabits per second standard
which is really unfortunate and honestly I know this might be a little bit more
controversial but if the top 8 15 had a better display then we would ultimately
have a winner right there I am a bit disappointed since AMD Nova buyers are
constantly being asked to make sacrifices they shouldn't have to make
and the del G 515 se is just no different it's got impressive
performance in many areas but in 2020 there's so much more we'd expect from
portable devices than just chart-topping benchmarks now if you can find this
notebook for a really good deal given how frequent
Dell sales are then this could be a great option or you could just wait out
to see what the next round of em you know books could offer so on that note
thank you so much watching hope you were able to take away something from this
video stay safe spin responsibly and I will talk to you
guys in the next video