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

Performance summary: The Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming lived up to its name, by providing solid scores in our benchmarks and good frame rates in our in-game tests. The Rise Of The Tomb Raider benchmark is a punishing test, but the laptop pulled off a frame rate of more than 56 fps at 1920 x 1080. Landing near the top of the chart in the PCMark benchmark is no small feat either, particularly for a system priced well below many of its competitors.

On top of its strong benchmark performance, the Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming has surprisingly long battery life. Gaming laptops are notorious for burning through a charge quickly, but the Inspiron 15 provides hours of play, thanks to its strong batter and power friendly Kaby Lake processor and Pascal-based NVIDIA GPU.

The Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming has plenty of personality too. The Beijing Red model we tested comes off as both classy and tough. It’s also on the small side for a gaming laptop, making it a little easier to manage when you’re on the go. Perhaps more important than the Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming’s looks is that it is easy to open when you want to upgrade or troubleshoot. The one-screw bottom panel makes accessing the system's internals very quick and easy. And having unobstructed access to the memory and storage is the sort of feature that gamers love, but that too often goes unmentioned.

We could see the Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming laptop winning over college students who want a more professional look than some gaming notebooks provide, but don’t want to give up the gaming power of a discrete graphics card by going with a mainstream, everyday laptop. In fact, this Dell machine makes a good home-use system for the same reason.

It’s not unusual for Dell (or other laptop makers, for that matter) to create a sizeable hardware gap between the lowest-priced economy model and the other models in a particular laptop line. In this case, the difference between the entry-level Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming and the next step up (which would be the $849 version we tested) are substantial. If we were buying an Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming, frankly, we’d scratch the lowest-priced model off the list and start comparing the model we tested to the even pricier versions.