NEW 2015 Dell Inspiron 15 - 7559, i7 6700HQ/GTX960M owners thread

d_brennen · 23 Dec 2015 at 15:14

Anyone else got this sweet machine? I was looking for a "gaming" laptop for ages to replace my 3 year old Samsung. Had resigned myself to spending £1k plus and dealing with a clunky, ugly machine. Problem is, I am not the gamer I once was and maximum FPS/details aren't really top of my list, so was worried it would be a waste.

Enter the Inspiron 15 7559. Scouring the net for ideas, this machine stood out for several reasons, chiefly being the price, which seems like a bargain.

Spec:
i7 6700HQ, 8GB RAM (singe 8GB DDR3L stick included, spare slot), 1TB + 8GB hybrid drive (not all that terrible!), GTX 960M 4GB, FHD screen (but with panel lottery

), sub woofer (mostly useless), 3 x USB3 (excellent for charging stuff!, usual HDMI/ethernet/SD card reader, backlit KB, no optical!

List price is £749 but can easily be had for ~£700, with a little wrangling or purchase from a third party seller.

Looks wise, this thing is, IMO, a cut above the crowd in this bracket of performance. You can keep the gimmicky bling of typical "gaming" laptops, this machine looks quite professional. The only giveaways are the mean looking vents and red accents to the trim/heatsinks. Even the backlit keyboard is nice and subtle.

Haven't really done any gaming (thanks, Christmas :mad:

) but from a very brief play around with Far Cry 3, BF3 and Heaven 4.0, it seams to munch the kind of games I like with good settings and frame rate. Battery life when pootling about Windows and browsing seems excellent, I've been using it for 3 hours or so today and it's reporting 3 more hours in the tank. Not run it down fully yet though.

After a bit of general use, my biggest bug bear with this machine is the touch pad and panel lottery. The pad is very big, Apple style big, but it's a bit inconsistent with sensitivity and the built in buttons are a bit pants. No probs for gaming, as I use a BT mouse, but still an annoyance in Windows. Perhaps a later driver will help this, we'll see. Second annoyance with the model would be the panel lottery. Dell seems to be shipping units with one of two panels, an LG one which is lovely and a BOE one which, from posts on notebookreview, varies from meh to awful. I lucked out for a change and got an excellent looking LGD04B9.

I know one other user here has one on the way (mine was a week+ earlier than expected!) so I thought a thread would be in order to discuss model specific issues and whatnot

d_brennen · 24 Dec 2015 at 00:20

Warranty is with Dell regardless

d_brennen · 26 Dec 2015 at 16:49

With regards to the RAM, mine came with Micron DDR3L-1600 / PC12800

M2 slots are just breakouts for SATA controllers IIRC, I'd go with the 128GB @ £65 personally, Well, actually I am holding off for a nice 256GB M2 card, maybe next month. Nice to have a fast boot SSD and 1TB HDD in a laptop this size

d_brennen · 26 Dec 2015 at 23:26

Just buy the 8GB

As long as its the low voltage variety (as in DDR3L) and at least 1280 , it'll work!

d_brennen · 27 Dec 2015 at 19:53

You can send it back under DSR as many times as needed until you get the right one... Not ideal but it's been done. Seems the quality of the BOE screen is quite variable, some are quite good, some very yellowy in whites

d_brennen · 27 Dec 2015 at 22:14

There is a place where I hear you can save on laptops, but obviously check to see if OCUK offer the product and if they can be price competitive first

d_brennen · 28 Dec 2015 at 23:35

no_1_dave said:
I don't like Dell bloat so I'm tempted to just format the old HDD and do a fresh install on the new SSD

There wan't much Dell bloat tbh, just the AV and Dell registration thingy/Dropbox 20GB offer, sorted in 2 minutes

d_brennen · 30 Dec 2015 at 10:09

no_1_dave said:
YEAAAAA!!!!!!!!!
I have the LG panel

Scweeeet

You'll enjoy it, I am sure

If it's not already updated, you need to get the latest Intel WiFi driver (no need for the ProSet tool), touchpad driver (the one mine shipped with was pants) and nVidia GeForce Experience (that'll keep the video driver up to date)

I've updated the system BIOS too, but for no reason than there was a newer one.

d_brennen · 30 Dec 2015 at 10:11

Smudge said:
I agree, but for the money there isn't anything close. I did see an asus laptop with thunderbolt 3 and maybe even DDR4 support for around £800, but I think it had a lesser GPU / vram, CPU.

Yeah, next thing close is like £800 - 850. How Dell put this package together, I don't know. Some of the materials used show it's low cost nature, but it's by no means a cheap feeling product.

Oh aaand I'm at work, on my Jack Jones with my Dell and a 200Mb leased line... Work bandwidth misappropriation is rife today

d_brennen · 31 Dec 2015 at 19:25

Oddly Dell update updated a few things for me, like the touchpad driver (it shipped without scrolling working for example) but not the video driver or wifi. The wifi kept disconnecting randomly. Googling the adaptor brought up the Intel page with latest version and its rock solid now.

Tomb Raider and BF3 (with some settings adjusted to suite, mostly high) run perfect, very happy with it so far and I only see 65ish C on the GPU. Someone on here posted about a laptop they have with this GPU (Asus iirc) being noisy and hitting the high 80s, so its impressive.

CPU wise this thing is a monster, roughly 2500k performance in a potable machine is mind blowing and it's faster than my i5 4970 (iirc) work machine, which admittedly is Windows 7.

Plus it looks and feels darn cool

I'd leave the install on the hdd in case you need to rma it in the future, just create a DATA folder for Steam games etc :cool:

d_brennen · 1 Jan 2016 at 11:31

cyprio42 said:
Hi
Would this play Fallout 4 with nice graphics etc.
Ta

Don't have the game but a quick scan on youtube suggests it can. Search for Fallout 4 GTX 960M. This laptop has the latest mobile i7 CPU where many game demos on YT are i5 variants as well

d_brennen · 3 Jan 2016 at 18:06

wez68 said:
Hi all ,new member here ,any chance of somebody posting some pictures of their Dell ,also what is the opinion of the screen quality especially the LG model .
Im seriously looking at picking one of these up ,and would love to hear your opinions.

Here you go

Bit short on time but the LG screen is fab

d_brennen · 3 Jan 2016 at 20:40

Evo8 said:
How do you identify if the screen is LG or not?

In Device Manager, click Monitors, double click Generic PnP Monitor > Details tab > click the drop down to Hardware IDs and it will say MOTITORS\...

no_1_dave said:
http://www.hwinfo.com/

Or that

HWInfo is a useful program to have

d_brennen · 4 Jan 2016 at 23:14

Getting at the fans is very easy, removing the fans/heatsink assembly is a teardown through. While it's 'only' ~2.7KG, it's not exactly an ultra portable. My workmate was very impressed with the level of noise this makes while under load, in a fairly quiet office, a good trade off in my opinion for a few mm in thickness

d_brennen · 8 Jan 2016 at 09:13

Playing Crysis 3 last night, Nvidia Experience does a fair job of optimising recent games. After 2 hours or so the highest temperature reported on the GPU was 67c.

d_brennen · 12 Jan 2016 at 06:37

4k is obscene at 15.6" imo and several reviews say they same. Many Windows apps can't scale well and iirc its glossy, which is a turn off for me anyway.

RoBoT said:
I'd also like to know about the 4K screen and also, does it have a DDR4 controller or just DDR3? it says comes with DDR3 but if there's a DDR4 controller then we can exceed the 16GB.....

DDR3L, 16GB max, which is plenty for this spec.

d_brennen · 12 Jan 2016 at 21:32

Ingala said:
Been considering getting this laptop. Would I be able to maxout Dota 2 with its specs, would I also able to stream Dota 2 with maxed out settings?

Pretty sure it'll eat it for breakfast even at 1080 and streaming

d_brennen · 13 Jan 2016 at 17:00

If it's a UK machine, it'll probably be black/red despite the pictures, make sure to ask the retailer before buying or expect to be disappointed. I really like the colour though

R.E. The other question, what to do with it new - remove the crappy AV it comes with and put something good on there like Sophos home, there is a little Dell bloat too and a dropbox offer. It can all be easily removed from add/remove programs in the control panel.

d_brennen · 13 Jan 2016 at 21:16

True, previously I've gone "bare back" for years at a time with no issues as well

Where I work we use Sophos Enterprise and I've been quite impressed with how it does and the home version barely bothers you, has a minimal web based interface, unlike AVG and Avast which try to nag you into purchasing something by bamboozlement lol

Anyhoo...

d_brennen · 15 Jan 2016 at 20:23

All that matters is that you're happy with it

Some people on notebookreview forums said the BOE screen was variable quality in white/blacks and had some problems with colour reproduction but you know what enthusiasts are like...

Upgraded mine to 16GB this morning and got all my isos together, next week it's SSD time and an upgrade to 10 Pro (for HyperV mostly)

*NEW* 2015 Dell Inspiron 15 - 7559, i7 6700HQ/GTX960M owners thread

NEW 2015 Dell Inspiron 15 - 7559, i7 6700HQ/GTX960M owners thread