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

In the following benchmarks we employ two very different battery life tests--Battery Eater Pro and a custom 1080p HD video loop test--to prove out battery life with our test group of machines and the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming. In all tests, Windows 10 Quiet Hours have been enabled and displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. For the average notebook this is somewhere between a 45 - 60% brightness setting.

Since notebook displays significantly affect power consumption and battery life, it's important to ensure a level playing field with respect to brightness of the display for battery testing. However, since many notebook displays vary in brightness at each respective brightness setting in Windows, this calibration with the meter is also critical to ensure all displays are set to as near identical brightness as possible before testing.

Battery Life Testing Heavy-Duty Workload And Light-Duty Battery Life Performance Tests

Battery Eater Pro provides a heavy load on the laptop and generally runs through its battery life much faster than our custom video loop test. Our video benchmark helps you get a sense of how long the laptop will handle ordinary tasks while on battery power; Battery Eater Pro presents a worst-case scenario.


Gaming laptops generally have terrible battery life, but among them, the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming may just be King. The laptop took 138 minutes to wind down in our brutal Battery Eater Pro test, which is a solid run in this category. It also hung around for a marathon 7 hours and 40 minutes in our HD video loop test. As a gamer, you’ll be tethered to your power cord most of the time when gaming, but it’s nice to know you can watch several movies on a flight with a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming laptop at your disposal. Kudos to Dell for absolutely crushing it here! 

Acoustics: This Dell laptop is virtually silent when idle, but it has a noticeable hum when under load. The sound isn't shrill or a whine, but it could be noticeable for background noise-sensitive gamers. If you're the type to wear a headset, you have nothing to worry about but regardless, we wouldn't describe the machine as "loud" per se, when stressed.