Hey guys, Jarrod here and today we’re going to check out the Inspiron 7577 from Dell and
find out how well it performs through a number of benchmarks to help you decide if it’s
a laptop you should consider.
Inside the box we’ve got the laptop itself, warranty information, and power brick and
cable.
Dell offer this laptop in a few different hardware configurations, so I’ll first cover
the specs we’re dealing with here.
There’s an Intel 7700HQ quad core Kabylake CPU which runs at 2.8GHz and can turbo up
to 3.8Ghz.
I’ve got 16GB of DDR4 memory running at 2,400MHz here, but the two slots can support
up to 32GB.
For storage there’s a 256GB Toshiba NVMe M.2 SSD and a 1TB Seagate 5,400RPM 2.5”
hard drive installed.
For the graphics there’s an Nvidia 1060 with Max-Q in combination with a 15.6 inch
60Hz IPS 1080p display, and we’ll see how this performs later in the benchmarks.
As for network connectivity there’s a gigabit ethernet port on the left which needs to be
pulled down to access, and an Intel dual band Wireless-AC 8265 card for 2.4 and 5GHz WiFi
with support for Bluetooth 4.2.
The laptop has a matte black look to it on the lid with a red Dell logo, while inside
it’s a matte grey metal with some red accents around the touchpad, matching the keyboard
colour.
The physical dimensions of the laptop are 38.9cm in width, 27.47cm in depth, and 2.49cm
in height.
The weight of the laptop will of course differ based on the hardware installed, and Dell
list the starting weight at 2.65KG in the 1050 model.
While testing this one I found that it weighed just a little more at 2.8KG, and when including
the power brick and power cable for charging the total increases to just under 3.5kg, so
it’s a little on the heavier side for a similarly specced 15 inch laptop.
As mentioned the screen is a 15.6 inch 60Hz 1080p IPS panel.
It looks great on all angles, I don’t notice any colour shift up or down, or side to side.
The screen is also anti-glare with a matte finish, which I personally prefer as it helps
reduce reflections.
I’ve also had a go at measuring the colours produced by the screen for the first time
using the Spyder 5, and my results returned 65% of sRGB and 48% of AdobeRGB, so a little
on the low side for content creators.
I’ve performed my usual backlight bleed test on the display, which involves having
the laptop show a completely black screen in a dark room to help emphasize any bleeding
around the edges.
I then take a long exposure photo with my camera to help display any bleed, so basically
this is a worst case scenario test.
We can see there’s some minor bleed along the top in the center towards the right, and
a tiny amount down the bottom left, although I wasn’t personally able to notice this
while using the laptop under normal lighting conditions.
This can of course vary from laptop to laptop.
While moving the display there was a little flex, but overall I’d say it felt fairly
solid, and this is probably owing to the hinge mechanism which attaches to the base of the
laptop in the middle rather than the sides, and the base of the laptop is heavy enough
to allow for one finger opening.
Above the display is a 720p camera which is capable of 30 FPS video.
The keyboard was nice to type with, the buttons weren’t overly clicky but I found them a
little small in general, although I got used to them.
The only issue I had was with the smaller arrow keys.
All keys light up red which matches the other red accents around the laptop, and the brightness
of the lighting can be adjusted between two different levels.
No RGB here unfortunately, so it’s either red backlighting or off.
There was almost no keyboard flex at all here even while pushing down fairly hard thanks
to that solid metal body, it feels extremely sturdy which I’d say is what’s contributing
to the weight.
The keyboard is also apparently spill resistant, although I didn’t test that one out.
The touchpad has a light matte texture to it, and will click down when pressing anywhere
rather than just the left and right button areas.
I also found this area to do a pretty good job at hiding fingerprints, at least compared
to the black matte lid where they were more obvious, but nothing a quick wipe couldn’t
fix.
As for the available I/O starting on the left side we’ve got a Noble lock slot, power
input, ethernet port, USB 3.1 gen 1 Type-A port, and SD card reader.
On the right there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack, two more USB 3.1 gen 1 Type-A ports, a USB
3.1 gen 2 Type-C port with Thunderbolt 3 support, and a HDMI 2.0 port.
The front grill features the speakers towards the left and right sides, and they sound pretty
good for laptop speakers.
There’s a distinct lack of bass, but they sound clear even at loud volumes.
The back has the same grill pattern with some air exhaust vents, and overall I kind of like
the design.
Underneath was very clean, just a couple of air intakes towards the back and two long
rubber feet which extend most of the way along the base and help prevent the laptop from
moving around on flat surfaces, and also rise it up slightly to help let cool air in.
Powering the laptop is a 56 Watt hour 4 cell battery, and initially I was thinking it wasn’t
going to be enough but it turned out to be plenty, especially compared to some other
laptops at this size I’ve recently reviewed.
With a full charge and doing basic tasks such as browsing the Internet and watching YouTube
with the screen on around half brightness, keyboard lighting off and background apps
disabled, I was able to use it for exactly 5 hours.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for an hour and 23 minutes, quite impressive and likely a result of the
lower powered Max-Q 1060.
During normal use with an ambient room temperature of 22 degrees celsius, the CPU idled at 36
degrees celsius while the GPU idled at 40 degrees celsius, and here are the external
temperatures of the laptop where you’ll actually be putting your hands.
While benchmarking for half an hour with the same room temperature, the CPU reached a maximum
of 91 degrees celsius, while the GPU peaked at 70.The CPU got a fairly warm while the
GPU kept fairly cool in comparison.
We can see that the center of the keyboard area towards the back has warmed up a bit
more, although this wasn’t really an issue in practice as your hands don’t sit rest
there however the keyboard did feel a little warm.
In terms of noise it ran quieter than other similarly specced laptops thanks to the Max-Q
graphics.
At idle it sat at the 37 decibel mark and I could barely hear it, this is what it sounded
like.
While running my benchmarks and gaming it went to up 49 decibels, and here’s what
that sounded like.
Most of the other laptops at this size that I’ve benchmarked typically range from 52
decibels and higher, so I think we’re seeing the cooler and quieter Max-Q 1060 at work
here.
I also didn’t notice any coil whine while testing.
Last but not least let’s check out some benchmarks, we’ll first cover some real
world gaming benchmarks followed by tests with various benchmarking tools.
I’ve been saying for a while that the 1060 is a sweet spot for 1080p 60 FPS gaming at
good settings, so I was really interested to see what the cut down Max-Q version had
to offer.
In Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds we’re almost averaging 60 FPS at ultra settings,
but the 1% lows do drop down quite a bit.
Personally I had a good experience using medium or lower settings which were able to keep
the 1% lows around 60 FPS.
Shadow of war was fairly similar, requiring around high or lower settings to sustain the
60 FPS average, and interestingly there was very little difference between ultra and very
high settings.
Battlefield 1 performed well on all levels of settings, even on ultra the 1% lows were
only just under 60 FPS so you should be able to play this one at max settings no problems.
In the Witcher 3 the averages were quite good but there were some dips as seen by the 1%
lows, so you’d probably want to run on high or lower settings with this one, which is
fine the game still looks great.
I’ve found Watchdogs 2 to be fairly resource intensive for laptops, and while we’re not
really getting high frame rates here I’d argue this game doesn’t really need that.
Even at max settings it still looked and felt alright, with the 1% lows and even averages
not really differing all that much, so might as well have it looking nice!
As for rise of the tomb raider in general we’re usually seeing slightly better performance
in DirectX 11 compared to 12, and a 60 FPS average at max settings is pretty nice.
Ashes of the singularity also generally favoured directx 11 here in all but the lower settings
where vulkan and directx 12 had a slight edge.
Doom once again sat close to the 60 FPS mark, even for the 1% lows, it played great even
at max settings.
Ghost recon is another of those demanding games, you’ll probably need to drop the
settings down quite a bit in this one in order to get a decent frame rate.
Considering we’ve got a 60Hz screen in the laptop I think the 1060 with max-q is a great
match here, as we can see in many of these games we can play at decent settings around
the 60 FPS mark.
Now onto the benchmarking tools, while a useful indicator note that these results are less
practical compared to the real world gaming results previously shown.
This is how the laptop performed in Heaven benchmark with the tessellation set to extreme,
and anti-aliasing set to x8, and this is how Valley benchmark performed with anti-aliasing
on x8 at various graphics settings.
For the last graphics benchmarks I ran Fire Strike and Time Spy from 3DMark and got scores
of 8,386 and 3,220 respectively.
In Crystal Disk Mark the 256GB PCIe SSD performed around 2750 MB/s in sequential reads and 400
MB/s in sequential writes.
The read speeds were pretty amazing and made opening programs feel nice and snappy, the
writes were a lot slower in comparison but still decent.
The 1TB hard drive gets just under 80MB/s in both sequential read speeds writes, which
is about all you’ll get from a mechanical 5,400 RPM drive.
In this exact configuration the laptop can be picked up from Dell for $2,499 AUD here
in Australia, or $1,349 USD internationally, however it is the highest end configuration
for the new Inspiron 15 7000 series, so you can save some money by reducing the specs.
So what did you guys think of the Dell Inspiron 7577 gaming laptop?
Overall I’m pretty impressed, compared to other laptops I’ve checked out recently
it’s got great battery life, and the whole thing just feels solid, it’s been built
really well, although both of these factors also mean that it weighs a little more.
This surprised me as I expected a laptop with max-q graphics to be lighter as less cooling
is required, but it looks like the weight has at least been put to good use.
As mentioned it also performs well in games, the 1060 is a great option for 60 FPS 1080p
gaming and overall it runs fairly cool and quiet compared to non max-q versions that
I’ve tested.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, or simply leave a like or dislike
on the video to let me know what you thought.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this
one.