Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming Review: Great Battery Life, Strong Performance, Affordable Price

Now that we’ve wrapped up the standard benchmark suites, we’ll take a look at how the system handled itself in game tests.

Bioshock Infinite DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Based on Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, BioShock Infinite takes you (as former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt) to the mysterious, flying city of Columbia. You find yourself helping Elizabeth, who soon turns out to have unusual powers. The game offers a first person shooter (FPS) style view but the storyline is as compelling as the battles and Bioshock Infinite has won awards and praise for its story and art design.


The Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming produced a reasonable 72.24 frames per second, which is very playable, but it didn’t keep up with some systems sporting GTX 980Ms (and another with a GTX 970M). Those systems sported beef Core i7 processors too, which likely helped them in this older title as well.

Middle Earth: Shadow Of Mordor Performance Glorious Orc-Slaying Vengeance

Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at the lowest quality settings. So, to maximize the eye-candy on this high-end laptop, we ran the game’s High quality benchmark routine at a couple of resolutions, topping out at the native resolution of the Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming’s panel. All the game's graphics-related options were enabled, along with FXAA and Camera Blur...


In this case, the Inspiron 15 7000 landed about where we expected it to, behind the GeForce GTX 1060-bearing laptops. Although Dell's gamer isn’t going to hit any benchmark ceilings, it’s clearly able to handle modern titles.

Rise Of The Tomb Raider DirectX 12 Performance

Rise of the Tomb Raider has hit the PC lining it up in our gun sights for graphics, gameplay and performance analysis. The game launched on the Xbox family of consoles a few months back and has since been ported to PC thanks to NIXXES Software. It’s a competent console to PC port updated with many graphics settings and effects to tweak and dial to your particular tastes and system capabilities. Some of the rendering and effects features include, Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, Dynamic Foliage, Bloom shader effects, Tessellation and several more. We also ran the game's benchmark in its DX12 code path mode.


The laptop held its own here, squeaking past the Alienware 13 R3 at 1920x1080. Once we dialed the resolution back a bit, the laptop became more competitive.