Dell’s G15 gaming laptop is both kind of impressive and kind of disappointing,
but it’s possible to fix most of the problems that I’ve got with it,
making this a review you’re not going to want to miss!
The G15 that I bought has an 8 core Ryzen 7 5800H processor, Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics,
16 gigs of memory and a 15.6” 1080p 120Hz screen.
There are two different finishes, phantom grey with speckles, which I’ve got here,
or spectre green with speckles, and you can see the speckled finish if you look close.
Despite the all plastic design, I thought the build quality was decent,
it’s much nicer feeling compared to previous Dell G series gaming laptops.
The laptop alone weighs 2.6kg or 5.8lb, then 3.7kg or 8.1lb with the large 240 watt power
brick and cables, but the lower spec 3050 and 3050 Ti models have a smaller 180 watt brick.
The size is pretty typical for a 15” gaming laptop,
and the 3060 model I’ve got here is 2mm thicker than those 3050 versions.
My G15 has a 15.6” 1080p 120Hz panel, but there’s also a better 165Hz option.
You’ve got the option of using optimus for better battery life, but you can also disable it through
the BIOS for better performance in games, but there’s no software support for changing
this at this time. The setting also teases advanced optimus apparently coming in future.
My lower end 120Hz screen has FreeSync, but that’s about all that can be said
for it. The color gamut is extremely low. Games still looked fine enough,
but definitely look elsewhere if you’re doing any color work like photo editing.
The screen is at least just able to get above 300 nits at maximum brightness,
though the spec sheet says 250 nits so I might have gotten lucky in the panel lottery.
It’s one of the slower screens when compared against other gaming laptops I’ve tested with
a 22ms response time, similar to some other 60Hz options. I’m not particularly
sensitive to low response time, but even I noticed blur in games when moving around,
and this is the first issue I’ve got with the G15.
It’s also on the slower side in terms of total system latency, which is the
total amount of time measured between a mouse click and gun shot fire in CS:GO.
Generally a MUX switch helps lower this, but the result was still relatively poor.
Now it is also worth noting that Dell offers the G15 with a faster 165Hz screen. Their website
claims that it has a 3ms response time, but the spec sheet lists it as a maximum of 13ms,
so in any case it should still be better than this one and this better panel also has better color
gamut and better brightness, but it draws more power too so I would expect less battery life.
I’m not gonna lie, using the 120Hz screen in many games wasn’t great. Now that’s not to say
that 120Hz in general is bad or anything and I’m just being a refresh rate snob,
the problem is that 22ms response time. A 120Hz screen should have a response time
closer to 8ms for transitions to actually occur within the refresh window. Now at least you
can solve this problem with money, because the higher tier G15’s come with that 165Hz screen,
but if you’re shopping for the cheaper 120Hz models then just be aware of that.
Backlight bleed was a bit patchy,
but this is a worst case scenario and I thought it looked fine during normal use.
There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the middle, no IR for Windows Hello though.
This is what the camera and microphone look and sound like, this is what it sounds
while I’m typing on the keyboard and this is what it sounds like if I enable full performance mode.
Once enabled it takes a good 30 seconds or so for the fans to actually reach full speed,
but you can still hear me ok over the fan noise.
My keyboard has one zone of orange backlighting, the keys still have orange accenting even with
the lighting off, but there is also a 4 zone RGB option too. All keys and secondary functions are
lit up, and there are two levels of key brightness which can be controlled with the F5 shortcut key.
I had no problems with typing, the only thing I didn’t like was the small arrow keys.
By default the keyboard backlighting times out after 10 seconds and turns off,
but you can adjust this between these levels while on wall power or battery power through the BIOS.
The power button doesn’t light up for some reason, usually this is a
tell tale sign that it’s a fingerprint scanner, but that’s not the case here.
There are also air vents at the back above the keyboard, we’ll check thermals soon.
The precision touchpad is plastic, it worked alright but felt a little small.
Mine was a little loose, but no more so than other laptops at this price point.
The left has an air exhaust vent, 2.5 gigabit ethernet port,
a 3.5mm audio combo jack and battery charge status LED.
The right has two USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports, there’s an air exhaust vent on this side too,
and a G logo towards the back. It’s important to note that this seems to only be for the RTX
3060 model, the 3050 and 3050 Ti versions apparently have older and slower USB 2.0,
so that’s something to be aware of if you get a lower spec model.
The back has two air exhaust vents towards the corners, then from left to right there’s a USB
3.2 Gen2 Type-C port with DisplayPort 1.4 support, a third USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A port, HDMI 2.1 output,
and power input on the right. The power plug also lights up blue, not important, just kinda cool.
Alright quick rant time, Dell, you’ve got to list the port versions on your website.
Is this HDMI 2.1 or 2.0? Gigabit or 2.5 gigabit ethernet? USB 3.2 Gen1
or Gen2? These things matter and affect people’s buying decisions. Fortunately I
was able to get all of this information by digging through the Dell setup guide PDF,
but that’s not something a potential customer is going to do - just list it on the website!
Now both the HDMI and Type-C ports connect directly to the Nvidia graphics, bypassing
the integrated graphics and optimus, however the Type-C port does not support Type-C charging.
The front has no indentation to help with opening the lid, but I still found it easy to do.
There’s some flex to the interior, which is to be expected from an all plastic machine,
but in general I thought it was solid enough during normal use.
Likewise there’s a bit of flex to the plastic lid, and while doing this
I noticed that the rubber feet underneath aren’t too grippy, it’s not too hard to
slide around on my desk with little effort, but again it was fine during normal use.
Underneath is clean and we’ve just got some air exhaust vents towards the back,
and we can see here that it’s actually more open than it first appears.
Getting inside requires unscrewing 8 Phillips head screws, but the 2 at the
back and 2 down the front in the middle are the only ones that actually come out,
the rest stay in the panel and help it lift up, making it easy to pull off without tools.
Once inside we’ve got the battery down the front, two M.2 storage slots above on the left and right,
Wi-Fi 6 card on the left above the SSD and two memory slots to the right of that.
The Wi-Fi performance was excellent, so there’s no real need to upgrade the Wi-Fi
card. This is one of the better results that I’ve recorded so far from any laptop.
Although my G15 came with 16 gigs of memory in dual channel, it’s the slower stuff with x16
banks, so I’ll swap this out later and see what sort of a performance improvement this gives us,
but all testing in this video was done with the stock RAM to represent how you’d actually buy it.
This is the second problem I’ve got with Dell’s G15, but at the same time I understand that I
can’t really hate on Dell too much for this, as they’re not the only ones doing it. It simply
seems to be that lots of different companies have to resort to using this slower memory because
it’s just all they can buy in bulk quantities in our great 2021 year of supply shortages.
It kind of sucks but I suppose it is what it is, and like the screen,
this is something that you can improve with more money, just upgrade the RAM. I know
that’s not ideal, but at least you can boost the performance with a memory upgrade if you want.
The two speakers are found underneath on the left and right sides towards
the front. They sound average for a gaming laptop, not too bad with some minor bass,
but a bit muffled at higher volume, and the latencymon results look good.
My G15 has the larger 6-cell 86Wh battery inside,
but the Dell website also has a smaller 3-Cell 56Wh option, so expect less run time with that.
The battery life from Dell’s G15 with the larger battery was extremely impressive,
this is the best result I’ve ever recorded in any laptop. The YouTube playback test is close to 12
and a half hours, but of course expect worse if you have optimus off. As mentioned earlier the
lower 120Hz screen uses less power, so also expect lower results with the 165Hz panel,
but regardless this is still great from an 86Wh battery in a gaming laptop.
The Dell Power Manager software also lets you customize when the laptop
should start and stop charging to help improve battery lifespan,
and there are a number of built in preset options to choose from too.
Let’s check out thermals next. The cooler is on the other side of the motherboard, but this is
what it looks like in Dell’s documentation, so a couple of shared heat pipes between CPU and GPU.
Alienware’s Command Center software is extremely basic on the G15, bordering on useless.
It’s the same software used on the higher end Alienware models, but with most of the features
not present. The only really useful thing we have in here is some level of fan control.
The software cannot be used to change performance modes,
that’s done by pressing the G key, which is the F9 shortcut. This enables G mode,
or high performance mode, which does display in the software with a blue G, but you can’t
actually enable or disable it through the software, despite requiring the software to run.
The software is just clunky feeling, when you open it after starting Windows it takes 30-60 seconds
before you can even start using it. The control panel software on pretty much any other gaming
laptop opens way faster than this, and I found that while the software was still starting up
sometimes you can’t enable G mode and sometimes G mode still wouldn’t enable until you load the
software up first. I guess some background task wasn’t loading up properly or something.
The idle results down the bottom are warmer compared to most other laptops,
but it’s not a problem in practice. I’ve run stress tests with both the
CPU and GPU loaded up to represent a worst case, as well as playing an actual game.
The RTX 3060 graphics was thermal throttling at 86 degrees Celsius,
so during these highlighted tests. The CPU temperature gets hotter both under stress
test and when playing the game with G mode enabled, and it reaches its thermal throttle
limit of 100 degrees Celsius. The cooling pad I test with, linked in the description below,
was able to lower temperatures by a reasonable amount in the game, and while it stopped the
GPU thermal throttling in the stress test, it wasn’t enough to drop the CPU down from
100 degrees though, but keep in mind this is meant to be a worst case scenario, most people
aren’t fully loading up CPU and GPU for extended periods of time, most games won’t act like this.
These are the clock speeds from the same tests, and although the CPU was
thermal throttling with G mode enabled, adding the cooling pad is able to boost
CPU performance by 200MHz across all 8 cores, as it allows it to throttle a bit less. Interestingly
the cooling pad only lets the GPU clockspeed increase by 20MHz or so in the stress test
despite this removing thermal throttling and lowering the temperature by 7 degrees.
The RTX 3060 graphics has a 125 watt power limit, but that’s with dynamic boost when the processor
isn’t being smashed. Even in the stress test the 3060 was still able to run above 110 watts,
despite technically hitting thermal throttling in some cases, so performance is likely going
to be good, just at the expense of hotter internal temperatures in classic Dell style.
Here’s how CPU only performance looks in Cinebench R23, so the GPU is idle now. Enabling G mode in a
processor only workload like this only gives us a little boost, it’s nothing really significant.
It’s not amazing when compared against others, on the lower side for a Ryzen 7
5800H when compared to other laptops that I’ve tested. The Lenovo legion 5 pro and non pro are
both more than 1000 points higher in multicore, though single core differences are negligible.
Things turn around when running on battery power,
Dell’s G15 is now the best 5800H result I’ve recorded when unplugged with hardly
any performance loss at all. Combined with the excellent battery life noted earlier, it seems
to offer both good run time but also optionally higher performance on battery when needed.
The keyboard felt cool to the touch when idling, low 30 degrees Celsius is pretty normal stuff.
The back is warmer but you don’t need to touch there. With the stress tests running it’s warmer,
but the keyboard definitely didn’t feel hot at all. It’s a little warmer with G
mode enabled, as we saw earlier this increases the internal temperatures,
which also boosts the fan noise, let’s have a listen.
I couldn’t hear the fans at all while it was idling, but there was a very subtle coil whine
present, but only with optimus disabled and the fans silent. It’s not too loud with the
stress tests running without G mode, then with G mode enabled it’s only a little louder and
ends up being quieter compared to a lot of gaming laptops I’ve tested.
Now let’s find out how well this configuration of Dell’s G15 gaming
laptop compares against others in games.
Cyberpunk 2077 was tested the same on all laptops, and I’ve got Dell’s G15 highlighted in red. It’s
doing quite well for a 3060 laptop, only being beaten by the Lenovo Legion 5 just above it which
has a slightly higher maximum GPU power limit. It’s worth noting that results here are with
stock RAM, so both the Dell G15 and Legion 5 have their slower x16 memory that they shipped
with. Both are more than 10% higher than other 3060 laptops with lower power limits below,
and above 60 FPS at high settings in this test is a decent result.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game’s benchmark, and this time the 3060
laptops were closer together. The HP Omen 15 with lower tier CPU and lower wattage 3060 was
actually a few frames ahead, despite not having a MUX switch and being tested with optimus enabled,
but it did have faster x8 memory. What I found interesting was the Dell G5 special edition from
last year with the Radeon 5600M was so close to the 3060s in this test, make sure you’re
subscribed for when I get the newer 6600M, as I’m going to compare that with the 3060 in depth.
Control was tested running through the same part of the game on all laptops,
and the Dell G15 was back to being one of the better 3060 results. This is a GPU heavy game,
so that’s probably why it’s only just slightly behind the higher wattage Legion 5. The 5600M
in last year’s Dell is way behind in this game now at less than half the frame rate,
while the 3070 in the HP Omen 15 is only like 3 FPS ahead,
though that one does limit the GPU power to 100 watts, plus it’s stuck with optimus.
So for the most part, the gaming performance coming out of Dell’s G15 is actually pretty good,
and this is likely thanks to the combination of MUX switch and higher wattage RTX 3060 graphics,
but as mentioned earlier, that x16 memory that it comes with is definitely holding it back a bit,
so let’s change to some x8 memory and see what sort of a speed boost we can get.
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider we’re looking at an 8% boost to average FPS at max settings with
the RAM upgrade. The difference will of course depend on the game, setting preset and resolution,
but this illustrates that we can definitely get an improvement with this simple change,
to the point where it’s now ahead of the 3070 in the Omen 15 just below
it. The downside is of course the additional costs associated with buying better memory,
but you could try and offset this by selling your original sticks.
I’ve also tested this G15 in 13 different games at all setting levels if you want to
get an even better understanding of how well it performs in games.
Here are the 3DMark results for those that find them useful, now for some creator tests.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark,
and Dell’s G15 is highlighted in red. It’s one of the better results for an RTX 3060 laptop,
presumably due to the higher power limit, but like the games, the Legion 5 was slightly ahead.
The G15 was again just behind the Legion 5 above it in Adobe Photoshop,
scoring basically the same and honestly within margin of error,
a decent result and very similar to a lot of other similarly specced laptops.
I’m getting sick of repeating myself, but the G15 was again just behind the
Legion 5 in DaVinci Resolve too with the difference being within margin of
error. It’s one of the better 3060 results, which is expected as this test generally
depends on GPU power and it’s also one of the higher powered 3060s I’ve tested.
I’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads.
The 512gb NVMe M.2 SSD that came in my G15 was doing great for the
reads and while lower comparatively on the writes
it’s still not bad at all. Both M.2 storage slots support 4 lanes of PCIe Gen3.
There are a few useful options in the BIOS that I wish could also be adjusted through software,
such as flip to boot and the keyboard backlight illumination period mentioned earlier,
and of course enabling or disabling hybrid mode aka optimus, and it’s got TPM 2.0.
I booted an Ubuntu 21 live CD to test Linux support. The touchpad, keyboard, speakers,
Wi-Fi, ethernet and camera all worked. Keyboard brightness adjustment and speaker volume key
shortcuts still worked, but not screen brightness shortcuts. The G key also didn’t work by default,
and I didn’t see Linux listed as officially supported on this model, Dell usually has
great Ubuntu support, at least in their XPS and business lineup, so not sure if this will change.
Let’s discuss pricing and availability next. This will of course change over time and
Dell does often run sales, so check updates down in the description below.
At the time of recording, the Dell G15 with Ryzen 7 processor, RTX 3060 graphics and 16 gigs of
memory is $1480 USD, but this one has the higher tier 165Hz screen, which is better than what I’ve
tested here. There are also much cheaper options with RTX 3050 series graphics and the slower 120Hz
screen that my model has, but if possible you might want to avoid those. The 4 gigs of VRAM can
be a limitation to the point where even a GTX 1660 Ti from a couple of years ago performs better.
Nvidia’s 3050 series isn’t too bad at the lower end if it’s all you can get, but just expect to
be stuck with low to medium settings due to the VRAM limits, and ideally in terms of both better
value and higher performance you might be better off looking at last gen options like the 1660 Ti.
Anyway Dell’s G15 seems to be priced pretty reasonably considering Lenovo’s Legion 5 with
similar specs is about $80 more. I will be comparing Dell’s G15 against Lenovo’s Legion
5 in a future dedicated video, so make sure you’re subscribed to the channel for that!
Overall I think Dell’s new G15 is a nice improvement over their older G series laptops.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s by no means a premium gaming laptop or anything, but it’s starting
to get harder to tell as the design and build quality is decent considering it’s all plastic.
As with many other laptops though, cost cutting measures include the slower x16
RAM and slower 120Hz screen, but at least both can be upgraded if you’re willing to spend more money.
As with previous G series laptops, Dell likes to run them hot right up to 100 degrees Celsius.
While technically still within spec for an AMD processor, this is still higher than most other
gaming laptops I’ve tested, but at least the exterior area where you actually touch was
still fine. Generally higher temperatures means higher power limits and higher performance,
but other laptops like the Legion 5 are able to perform better without getting quite as hot.
Honestly I think the main reason the Dell G15 is competitive is because they added
the MUX switch. Without this, the gaming performance would probably be a step lower,
so that’s definitely a welcome addition.
If you bought it with the faster screen option then there’s not too much to complain about,
except perhaps that x16 memory, but again at least you can upgrade that,
but even if you don’t as we’ve seen in this video it still does run games quite well.
So if you fix up the screen and the memory then the main issues that I’ve got with it
are that it runs on the hotter side and the software wasn’t great, but at least in terms
of thermals there are steps you can do to improve things like using a cooling pad.
So basically as an overall platform I think the G15 is pretty decent,
but it can also be disappointing depending on the screen and memory configuration, but hey I suppose
nothing in life is perfect, and at least the G15 does offer us some pretty serious battery life!
Check out this video next if you want to get a better understanding of how well the
Dell G15 performs in 13 different games at all setting levels. Make sure you’re
subscribed for my upcoming comparison between Dell’s G15 and Lenovo’s Legion 5, and come and
join me in Discord and get behind the scenes videos by supporting the channel on Patreon.