Apologies for the long winded nature of this post. I certainly haven't written about every aspect of this laptop and will likely add to my ramblings as I spend more time with this machine (48hrs and counting). Oh and lastly, excuse the pictures, I took them with my phone. Forgot to bring my camera to the office, doh!
So, I need to get this off my chest before I start. I bloody loved my XPS M1530 that I had and the benchmarks its set for me means its replacement, the Inspiron 15R SE best be something special like the name suggests.
In reality all this means is I’m a bit bitter being forced to change my laptop – GPU started to flake out on me and after some research found I would have to do a reflow – and also will just make me extra picky about things, so bear that in mind when I might start rant about what seem to be very insignificant points (and indeed will be to a majority of people).
On to the key specs:
• Ivy Bridge i5-3210M @ 2.5ghz
• Radeon 7730M 2GB
• Full 1080p screen
• 1TB HDD
• 8192MB (2x4096) 1600MHz DDR3
All of the above for the list price of £779 which I applied a 10% voucher that was kicking about and also some cashback from Quidco made the total to a pretty nice £670 all in. Considering this was roughly what I paid for my XPS 5/6 years ago that makes a happy me and means I will judge both laptops at the same level.
Aesthetics
In true Dell fashion the design of the Inspiron 15R SE is fairly unassuming and well, a bit safe really which may sound like a negative but in reality it’s much preferred to something like an Alienware with all its flashy lights and neon grills. No thank you! Compared to the old XPS it’s categorically not as good looking but you would expect that.
Build quality is decent with little flex in the chasis and materials as expected. One falling point is that in the specs it did say an aluminium bevel around the edge. It’s definitely not aluminium, just silver plastic, slightly disappointing but only because it was advertised as aluminium.
Keyboards are important right? Well, Dell have got it right for the most part on this machine with its chiclet style and a pretty standard layout. One thing I’m personally pleased about is the omission of a numberpad. Note to manufacturers leave these to 17” models please! Ta. It’s not all roses and sunshine with the keyboard, despite the positives the problem I have with it is there is a slight flex most noticeably in the middle of the keyboard and also a very annoying rattle from the capslock key, all you can hear is a bloody rattle as I press any key new the capslock, ARGH! Another thing which has been raised with people who have wanted to buy this laptop is that all models are/were (not sure if Dell has updated this) advertised with a backlit keyboard. Great I thought but this is definitely not the case and a rep on the Notebook Review has clarified that it’s an option only available on the top spec models.
Nothing really to note about the trackpad. It works, has a large useable surface and has multi touch features such as pinch to zoom and two finger scrolling. I miss sliding along the edge to scroll but I’m sure I will get used to this.
Screen
After much deliberation I went for the 1080p screen and I’m glad I did. Having only spent just over 24hrs with this machine it already looks very odd going back to the 1280x800 screen on my old XPS. One of my worries about having a high res screen was that text would be difficult to read and cause strain on my eyes seeing as I use this machine at work and at home. I’m happy to report all is good (so far) on the glossy 1080p panel. Actually did I say glossy? Well that’s what it says on Dells website but as far as I can see it looks far closer to matte than it does glossy!
Only bad thing I can say about the screen so far is the colour reproduction doesn’t exactly blow my socks off. I will attempt to fiddle with this and see if it’s any better. A minor bump so far but definitely not a deal breaker as everything looked great when I fired up League of Legends last night.
Performance
I made it a bit of a mission to find the best bang for buck here as I got quite the bargain with my old XPS back in the day which I certainly wanted to replicate. The spec speaks for itself I think. Ivy bridge, 1080p screen and a mid-high end graphics card for less than £700? Yep seems alright to me
. A similar spec can be had for about the same (excluding OS) through a certain Clevo reseller I have been going on about on these forums for the last few weeks but I decided against going with them as there were just a few niggling points about the Clevo based machine I felt would spoil the package for me. I had to forgo the extra oomph of the 650M graphics card to go with the Dell but I can accept that.
Everything seems pretty zippy for me thus far (bearing in mind this is quite a massive step from a old C2D processor to the latest Ivy Bridge!) and don’t feel like I’m held back too much by the 5400rpm mechanical drive supplied in this machine. I have two options really with the hard drive. I can either chuck in a SSD or there is a mSATA (so I’ve been told, I haven’t actually confired this yet haha) which you can get a 30GB drive for around £45 just to whip the OS on. Nice option and one which I may make use of even though the speeds are inferior to the real deals (about 280mb/s read from what I’ve seen).
Benchmarks
Bit out of the loop on this one so I’m open to suggestions on what to bench here. It certainly won’t be exhaustive but I’m happy to do a few.
In the meantime here are my 3D Mark 11 scores:
Score
P1638 3DMarks
Graphics Score
1481
Physics Score
3950
Combined Score
1514
Link: http://3dmark.com/3dm11/3707523
3DMark 06
Score
9027 3DMarks
SM2.0 Score
3609
HDR/SM3.0 Score
3613
CPU Score
3608
Link: http://3dmark.com/3dm06/16736171
I also fired up the demo to Divinity 2 last night for a quick blast. Had details set to medium and it was more than playable at native resolution. The odd bit of slowdown but was still an enjoyable experience. Looked pretty nice too
League of Legends runs flawlessly at native resolution with everything maxed out apart from shadows. Vsync is on and it holds a steady 60fps and not seen it drop below 50 yet.
Wrap up
For the little time I’ve had with this machine so far I’m happy with the purchase so far. It ticks major boxes in the performance and build quality boxes. Battery life seems to be half decent. I watched a movie and sat on Youtube for about 3 hours yesterday and still had some juice left (at half brightness). Also I’m pleasantly surprised by the lack of noise from this machine, I can barely hear the fan whirling away and the heat from the bottom isn’t exactly going to scorch your sack if your just doing menial tasks.
In honesty that's all I can be bothered with writing for the time being, I think it's easier just to respond to questions
Enjoy.
Some more ropey pictures found here: http://imageshack.us/g/850/imag0021mq.jpg/
So, I need to get this off my chest before I start. I bloody loved my XPS M1530 that I had and the benchmarks its set for me means its replacement, the Inspiron 15R SE best be something special like the name suggests.
In reality all this means is I’m a bit bitter being forced to change my laptop – GPU started to flake out on me and after some research found I would have to do a reflow – and also will just make me extra picky about things, so bear that in mind when I might start rant about what seem to be very insignificant points (and indeed will be to a majority of people).
On to the key specs:
• Ivy Bridge i5-3210M @ 2.5ghz
• Radeon 7730M 2GB
• Full 1080p screen
• 1TB HDD
• 8192MB (2x4096) 1600MHz DDR3
All of the above for the list price of £779 which I applied a 10% voucher that was kicking about and also some cashback from Quidco made the total to a pretty nice £670 all in. Considering this was roughly what I paid for my XPS 5/6 years ago that makes a happy me and means I will judge both laptops at the same level.
Aesthetics
In true Dell fashion the design of the Inspiron 15R SE is fairly unassuming and well, a bit safe really which may sound like a negative but in reality it’s much preferred to something like an Alienware with all its flashy lights and neon grills. No thank you! Compared to the old XPS it’s categorically not as good looking but you would expect that.
Build quality is decent with little flex in the chasis and materials as expected. One falling point is that in the specs it did say an aluminium bevel around the edge. It’s definitely not aluminium, just silver plastic, slightly disappointing but only because it was advertised as aluminium.
Keyboards are important right? Well, Dell have got it right for the most part on this machine with its chiclet style and a pretty standard layout. One thing I’m personally pleased about is the omission of a numberpad. Note to manufacturers leave these to 17” models please! Ta. It’s not all roses and sunshine with the keyboard, despite the positives the problem I have with it is there is a slight flex most noticeably in the middle of the keyboard and also a very annoying rattle from the capslock key, all you can hear is a bloody rattle as I press any key new the capslock, ARGH! Another thing which has been raised with people who have wanted to buy this laptop is that all models are/were (not sure if Dell has updated this) advertised with a backlit keyboard. Great I thought but this is definitely not the case and a rep on the Notebook Review has clarified that it’s an option only available on the top spec models.
Nothing really to note about the trackpad. It works, has a large useable surface and has multi touch features such as pinch to zoom and two finger scrolling. I miss sliding along the edge to scroll but I’m sure I will get used to this.
Screen
After much deliberation I went for the 1080p screen and I’m glad I did. Having only spent just over 24hrs with this machine it already looks very odd going back to the 1280x800 screen on my old XPS. One of my worries about having a high res screen was that text would be difficult to read and cause strain on my eyes seeing as I use this machine at work and at home. I’m happy to report all is good (so far) on the glossy 1080p panel. Actually did I say glossy? Well that’s what it says on Dells website but as far as I can see it looks far closer to matte than it does glossy!
Only bad thing I can say about the screen so far is the colour reproduction doesn’t exactly blow my socks off. I will attempt to fiddle with this and see if it’s any better. A minor bump so far but definitely not a deal breaker as everything looked great when I fired up League of Legends last night.
Performance
I made it a bit of a mission to find the best bang for buck here as I got quite the bargain with my old XPS back in the day which I certainly wanted to replicate. The spec speaks for itself I think. Ivy bridge, 1080p screen and a mid-high end graphics card for less than £700? Yep seems alright to me
. A similar spec can be had for about the same (excluding OS) through a certain Clevo reseller I have been going on about on these forums for the last few weeks but I decided against going with them as there were just a few niggling points about the Clevo based machine I felt would spoil the package for me. I had to forgo the extra oomph of the 650M graphics card to go with the Dell but I can accept that.Everything seems pretty zippy for me thus far (bearing in mind this is quite a massive step from a old C2D processor to the latest Ivy Bridge!) and don’t feel like I’m held back too much by the 5400rpm mechanical drive supplied in this machine. I have two options really with the hard drive. I can either chuck in a SSD or there is a mSATA (so I’ve been told, I haven’t actually confired this yet haha) which you can get a 30GB drive for around £45 just to whip the OS on. Nice option and one which I may make use of even though the speeds are inferior to the real deals (about 280mb/s read from what I’ve seen).
Benchmarks
Bit out of the loop on this one so I’m open to suggestions on what to bench here. It certainly won’t be exhaustive but I’m happy to do a few.
In the meantime here are my 3D Mark 11 scores:
Score
P1638 3DMarks
Graphics Score
1481
Physics Score
3950
Combined Score
1514
Link: http://3dmark.com/3dm11/3707523
3DMark 06
Score
9027 3DMarks
SM2.0 Score
3609
HDR/SM3.0 Score
3613
CPU Score
3608
Link: http://3dmark.com/3dm06/16736171
I also fired up the demo to Divinity 2 last night for a quick blast. Had details set to medium and it was more than playable at native resolution. The odd bit of slowdown but was still an enjoyable experience. Looked pretty nice too
League of Legends runs flawlessly at native resolution with everything maxed out apart from shadows. Vsync is on and it holds a steady 60fps and not seen it drop below 50 yet.
Wrap up
For the little time I’ve had with this machine so far I’m happy with the purchase so far. It ticks major boxes in the performance and build quality boxes. Battery life seems to be half decent. I watched a movie and sat on Youtube for about 3 hours yesterday and still had some juice left (at half brightness). Also I’m pleasantly surprised by the lack of noise from this machine, I can barely hear the fan whirling away and the heat from the bottom isn’t exactly going to scorch your sack if your just doing menial tasks.
In honesty that's all I can be bothered with writing for the time being, I think it's easier just to respond to questions
Enjoy.Some more ropey pictures found here: http://imageshack.us/g/850/imag0021mq.jpg/
