The Dell G7 is a well priced gaming laptop from their new G series, so let’s take a
look at what you get and help you decide if it’s the laptop you should consider buying.
Let’s start with the specs, as there are few different options available here.
I’ve got the highest end G7 with the i9-8950HK CPU, so not only do we get 4.8GHz single core
boost speeds out of the box, it can also be overclocked, but it’s also available with
the i7-8750H or i5-8300H CPUs.
In this unit there’s 16GB of DDR4 memory running at 2,666MHz in dual channel, but it’s
also available with 8GB in single or dual channel configurations.
There are a number of different drive configurations on offer, but I’ve got a 128GB M.2 SATA
SSD and 1TB hard drive installed here.
For the graphics there’s an Nvidia 1060 Max-Q which powers the 15.6 inch 1080p 60Hz
IPS panel, and we’ll see how this performs soon in the benchmarks, but it’s also worth
noting that it’s available with 1050 or 1050Ti graphics too.
For the network connectivity there’s a gigabit ethernet port, support for 802.11ac WiFi,
as well as Bluetooth version 5.0.
The plastic lid and metallic interior are both a matte black with blue accenting, and
overall the body of the laptop felt nice and solid, but it’s also available in white
too.
There are no sharp edges and the build quality feels pretty good.
The dimensions of the laptop are 38.9cm in width, 27.4cm in depth, and 2.5cm in height,
so not exactly thin for a laptop with Max-Q graphics, but hopefully that extra space will
help keep the i9 CPU cool.
The starting weight for the lowest specced model is listed at 2.63kg, and mine weighed
a bit over 2.8kg.
With the 180 watt power brick and cable for charging, the total weight increases to 3.5kg,
so a bit heavier than many other 15 inch laptops I’ve looked at.
As mentioned the screen here is a 15.6 inch 60Hz 1080p IPS panel, no G-Sync available
here though.
Some of you asked me to investigate overclocking the panel, as apparently that’s possible
with some of the G7’s.
After some research it appears to be possible with the AUO panel, however I’ve got an
LG panel in mine so I wasn’t able to test it out.
The viewing angles on the screen were pretty good, it looked great at just about any angle
thanks to the IPS panel.
The screen doesn’t get too bright, around 248 nits when at 100% brightness with a 700:1
contrast ratio.
I’ve also measured the current colour gamut using the Spyder 5 Pro, and my results returned
59% of sRGB, 42% of NTSC and 44% of AdobeRGB, so lower results compared to most other laptops
I’ve tested, fine for gaming but for content creation you might want to look elsewhere.
I’ve performed my usual backlight bleed test on the display, which involves having
the laptop show a black screen in a dark room to help emphasize any bleeding.
I then take a long exposure photo to display any bleed, so this is a worst case scenario
test.
There appears to be some extremely minor bleed here, but I couldn’t actually see this with
my own eyes, it looked perfectly fine to me in a dark room, but this will of course vary
between laptops.
There was a bit more screen flex than I expected, but it’s probably just a result of the large
hinge being found in the middle of the lid.
Opening the laptop with one finger was also possible, demonstrating a fairly even weight
distribution.
Above the display in the center is a 720p camera.
The camera doesn’t look too bad with decent lighting, and the microphone is alright too,
but you’ll be able to judge both for yourself.
The keyboard has blue backlighting which can be adjusted in two levels or turned off using
a physical button.
The keys are blue even with the lighting off and were still easily viewable.
Overall the keyboard was alright to type with, there’s a fair bit of spacing between the
keys though which made the keys feel a little small, I guess I just felt a little less accurate
while typing.
My only minor issue otherwise was the small arrow keys.
The key presses were a little clicky but quiet, here’s how they sound to try and give you
an idea.
There was almost no keyboard flex while pushing down fairly hard, the whole body was really
solid.
The power button is found towards the top right of the keyboard, and it’s got a fingerprint
sensor built in, which I found to work really well, it seemed pretty accurate and was quick.
The touchpad also worked pretty well, it was fairly smooth with physical left and right
buttons as well as a blue trimming matching the rest of the design.
As for the I/O on the left there’s a Noble lock slot, the power input, gigabit ethernet,
USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A port, and SD card slot.
On the right there’s a 3.5mm audio combo jack, two more USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports,
USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C port with 4 lanes of Thunderbolt 3 support, and HDMI 2.0 port.
The back has some large blue air exhaust vents towards the left and right sides, with a little
G7 badge, while the front has a similar design with two speakers found towards the left and
right.
The speakers sound alright for laptop speakers, there’s a tiny bit of bass and they sound
quite clear even at high volumes.
Up on the lid there’s a blue Dell logo in the center, the same blue found on the keyboard,
around the touchpad, and on the air exhaust vents.
Fingerprints show up on both the lid and interior but they aren’t too obvious on the matte
finish, and they’re fairly easy to wipe off as it’s a smooth surface.
Underneath there’s some air intakes towards the back to keep everything cool, as well
as some rubber feet that run along the back and front and do a good job at stopping the
laptop from easily moving around while in use.
The bottom panel can be opened up easily with a phillips head screwdriver, there’s just
one screw to remove so it’s pretty easy to open up.
Inside we can see that it’s easy to access the components, the 2.5” drive bay and single
M.2 slot are found on the left along with the WiFi card, while the two RAM slots are
found towards the center, so nice and simple upgradeability.
Powering the laptop is a 4 cell 56 Watt hour battery, and with a full charge and just watching
YouTube videos with the screen on half brightness, keyboard lighting off and background apps
disabled, I was able to use it for 4 hours and 33 minutes, a pretty good result.
The laptop was using the Intel integrated graphics in this test thanks to Nvidia Optimus.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for 1 hour and 26 minutes, and it sat at 30 FPS the whole time without
dipping.
Overall the battery life seemed fair, I’ve had worse 15 inch laptops and considering
we’ve got the i9 CPU here I can’t complain.
Thermal testing was completed with an ambient room temperature of 18 degrees celcius, it’s
cold here as it’s winter in Australia, so expect warmer temperatures in a warmer environment.
At idle both the CPU and GPU were on the warmer side in the mid 40s.
While playing PUBG at default settings the temperatures rise as shown by the green bar,
and they’re not too hot.
If we apply a -0.150v undervolt to the CPU the temperatures drop back a bit, as shown
in the yellow, and we’ll see how this affected clock speeds in the next graph.
For the overclock settings all CPU cores were set to 5GHz, while the GPU core clock was
boosted by 150MHz and 100MHz on the memory.
The full load stress test was tested with Aida64 and the Heaven benchmark running at
the same time with the fans running at default speeds, I wasn’t able to max out the fans
manually so haven’t tested that.
Even with the undervolting applied the CPU and GPU temperatures stayed around the same,
however the clock speeds do change.
These are the average clock speeds for the same temperature tests just shown.
We can see why the temperatures just shown didn’t really change with the CPU overclock
applied, we’re not actually increasing the CPU clock speeds while overclocked, and this
was due to power limit throttling which was taking place in all of these tests, and is
why we never reached the full 4.3GHz all core turbo speed of the i9-8950HK CPU.
Undervolting did help improve this a little, but as the stock boost speeds aren’t being
hit we had no chance of seeing our overclock being reached.
The overclock and higher boost speeds will be more useful in different workloads, but
when fully maxed out or even while playing PUBG we weren’t really seeing notable differences,
but it will vary between workload.
These are the clock speeds I got while just running CPU only stress tests without any
GPU load.
Power limit throttling was always present in this test, even while undervolted, so applying
the overclock essentially did nothing as it was already power limited prior to overclocking.
Intel XTU said it was sitting on a 45 Watt TDP and I wasn’t able to change this by
modifying the values in XTU, so I’m guessing it’s defined at a lower level and can’t
be changed.
At the start of the stress test for the first 10 seconds or so it was running with a 70
Watt TDP at about 4.3GHz on all cores at 90 degrees, so it seems like it can only handle
short boosts before being power limit throttled which by extension drops the temperature.
Likewise here are some GPU only tests in the Heaven benchmark, we’re getting a little
boost with the 150MHz overclock applied, which takes the Max-Q 1060 just above the specified
boost range for the non-max-q version.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, at idle the
body of the laptop is sitting in the low 30s, so fairly cool.
While gaming this increases to the low 40s in the middle and peaks in the mid 40s up
towards the back.
The stress test was a little higher, mid 40s in the center and higher 40s towards the back,
granted you don’t rest your hands at the back so the hotter temperature there isn’t
really an issue, overall I’d describe the keyboard as warm but not uncomfortable.
As for the fan noise produced by the laptop, I’ll let you have a listen to some of these
tests.
At idle it was completely silent, which probably explains the slightly warm idle temperatures,
while gaming was just slightly quieter than full load, but even under full load it was
noticeably quieter than most other gaming laptops I’ve tested.
I’ll also note that there was no noticeable coil whine while testing in my unit.
Finally let’s take a look at some benchmarks, we’ll first cover some real world gaming
benchmarks followed by tests with various benchmarking tools.
All tests were run at 1080p with the latest Nvidia drivers and Windows updates to date
installed, no overclocking has been applied at this point, these results are at stock
speeds.
Fortnite was running well at all setting levels, even at epic settings I didn’t notice any
issues, I was able to average above 60 FPS and the 1% low wasn’t too far behind this.
Overwatch was tested playing with the bots, and again it was running very well, no issues
at all even at epic settings with the 1% low result above the refresh rate of the 60Hz
display.
PUBG was tested using the replay feature, the 1% lows drop down a bit compared to the
averages at all settings which seems to just be typical of how the game runs, but it played
very well for me at high settings or below.
CS:GO was tested using the Ulletical benchmark, and we’ve got pretty decent average frame
rates and even the 1% lows aren’t too bad for this test, they drop a lot from the smokes,
nowhere near as bad in actual game play though.
Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the built in benchmark, and even maxed out the results
here are quite nice, this game runs well on basically anything and you shouldn’t have
any issues with it on the G7.
Far Cry 5 was also tested with the built in benchmark, and again pretty nice results,
averaging above 60 FPS at ultra settings with the 1% low not that far behind.
Assassin’s Creed Origins was another that was tested with the built in benchmark, and
again fairly decent results for this test.
Dota 2 was tested using a fairly intensive replay, so this should be a worst case scenario,
realistically you’ll probably get better results than this while actually playing,
and we’re seeing decent results here.
Testing Battlefield 1 in the first campaign mission ran well for me even with ultra settings,
the 1% lows drop a bit but I didn’t really notice any drops, they’re still quite high.
Rise of the tomb raider was tested with the built in benchmark, and again no issues at
all, over 60 FPS averages even at max settings.
Ghost Recon was also tested with the built in benchmark and is a more demanding game,
it doesn’t score too well at ultra settings but it’s going quite well at any other setting
level.
Watchdogs 2 is also on the more demanding side, but I don’t think it needs a high
frame rate to enjoy, I found it to run really smoothly at very high settings or below.
I’ve got a few more games covered in the dedicated gaming benchmark video if you’re
interested.
Now onto the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine,
as well as Firestrike, Timespy, and VRMark from 3DMark, just pause the video if you want
a detailed look at these results.
I’ve said for a long time that the Nvidia 1060 is a great option for 60 FPS gaming with
good settings in modern games, and based on my own testing the Max-Q variant that we’ve
got here is only about 10% slower than the regular 1060, so we’re still able to get
some pretty nice results in games, but again keep in mind the 1060 Max-Q is available in
the higher end G7 laptops, expect lower results with the 1050 or 1050Ti options.
As for overclocking it was possible to overclock both the i9-8950HK CPU as well as the 1060
max-Q graphics.
I’ve only retested a few games as I wasn’t seeing much of a difference.
The same -0.150v undervolt to the CPU was applied, and for the overclock all cores were
set to 5GHz, as we saw earlier it doesn’t really matter if this is stable or not as
we don’t seem to hit it anyway due to power limit throttling, while the GPU was overclocked
by 150MHz on the core and 100MHz on the memory, as before.
PUBG was tested again using the replay feature, and at ultra settings we’re just seeing
a little 5% boost to the average frame rates and an 11% increase to the 1% lows.
Far Cry 5 was tested using the built in benchmark, and again just a little increase in frame
rates, around 5% of an improvement at ultra settings.
Rainbow Six Siege was again tested with the built in benchmark, and at ultra settings
there was around a 4% improvement to the average frame rates.
I’ve got some Cinebench CPU benchmarks here, and we can see that we get a nice boost in
performance with the undervolt applied, as mentioned earlier power limit throttling was
present in all tests, even CPU only stress tests such as this.
For the same reason the overclock speeds under full load are never reached, so the overclock
speeds don’t differ much compared to stock, but the single core speeds do increase as
the overclock actually helps there, but when you consider the i7-8750H CPU can pass 1200
points in this test if there are no thermal or power limits it makes me feel like the
i9 isn’t really helping much in multicore tasks.
In Crystal Disk Mark the 128GB M.2 SATA SSD was getting above 500MB/s in sequential reads
but just 200MB/s in sequential writes, it’s also worth remembering the laptop does support
faster NVMe storage too.
Here are the speeds for the 1TB 5,400RPM hard drive that was installed, fairly average for
this type of disk.
I’ve also tested the SD card slot using a V90 rated card, so the card shouldn’t
be the bottleneck and these speeds are on the lower side.
As for the price the G7 with these maxed out specs comes in at around $2,800 AUD here in
Australia at the time of recording, or about $1,600 USD in the US, but this will differ
based on the selected configuration, as this is the top end model in the G7 series, the
entry level model with i5-8300H CPU and 1050 graphics starts at just $850 USD, you can
check updated pricing with the links in the description.
Overall I think the price is pretty good, which seems typical with Dell’s gaming laptops,
it’s not too much more than the older Dell 7577 and yet has a better CPU in all instances,
even the lowest end option i5-8300H outperforms the older i7-7700HQ, otherwise for the most
part it’s pretty similar, and if you’ve already got a 7000 series laptop there’s
no real point in upgrading unless you really need the extra CPU cores.
I’ll be comparing the G7 against the G5 in a future video, so subscribe if you want
to check that one out.
So what did you guys think of the G7 gaming laptop from Dell?
For the price it looks like a competitive option.
With these specs there are no issues at all playing modern games with decent frame rates
at good settings, and you’ve got the option of future expansion with an external GPU enclosure
thanks to the Thunderbolt port.
The screen quality isn’t ideal for creators but is perfectly fine for gaming, it is a
gaming laptop after all.
The battery life was fairly decent, and the temperatures don’t get very high either,
but that seems to be due to power limit throttling that was taking place with the i9 CPU.
Personally I’d probably look at the i7-8750H model over this i9 model even without testing
it and save the money, as it doesn’t seem to handle full multicore workloads too well,
you’ll only see a benefit in less threaded applications such as single core workloads
where the higher boost speeds will actually be hit, or otherwise in short bursts, but
as mentioned that’s something you can easily change in the configuration while ordering,
otherwise I think the G7 is a pretty nice laptop.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, and leave a like to let me know
if you found the review useful.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this
one.