Gadgetory

hey guys this is Dave Judy and this is my review of the dell inspiron 7000 with a 15-inch 4k screen now adele has a huge spread of notebooks but their Inspiron line is normally in the middle of the road so it's not super expensive it's not super cheap but they usually don't put their high end tech into this line so when they offered a 4k screen at this price point I was pretty interested so for 1350 you get a 4k screen Broadwell i7 and 16 gigs of ram which is pretty sweet right so I picked one up right away I've been using it for three weeks now here's my review now before I begin I know a lot of you guys don't care but the packaging on this thing is pretty bad I know right anyways here's a review visually the top of the notebook looks and even feels like aluminum it has a nice smooth finish to it but it's definitely plastic the logo in the middle is also black plastic the bottom of the notebook is also made of that metallic gray plastic it really does look like aluminum but once you pop it off and look at it underneath it's really obvious that is plastic there are a handful of star-shaped screws that I actually removed before filming the shot which is really nice because you can access the internals of the notebook pretty easily the intake vents are very prominent and it gives it nice venting the rubber feet that run along the length of the notebook feel cheap to me I could easily peel off a corner and that kind of worries me for long-term use the hard drive the Dell puts in here is a 5400 rpm one terabyte drive and the user experience is really bad with this stock drive so you can have Dell install an SSD for a hundred bucks or you can put your own in but I can't stress enough do not use the stock drive you will hate this notebook the battering the RAM chips are also removable but I think 16 gigs is the most ram this computer supports but at least you can replace them if you need so in terms of the weight the Inspiron 7000 with the 15-inch 4k screen is 4.65 pounds which is a little bit heavier than a 15-inch MacBook Pro and it's dimensions are also a little bit bigger as well it's not a massive increase in weight in size but it is noticeable and I found that my backpack which was designed for 15-inch notebooks doesn't actually hold the Inspiron very con probably it fits but it's a bit of a stretch obviously this will be different for every kind of case or bag but I think for a 15 inch notebook it is on the bigger end of things it's also a little bit thicker but I wouldn't call it a thick notebook by any means you can still hold it very comfortably on the left side of the notebook we have a hole for an AC adapter an HDMI port a USB 3 and a headphone jack so the HDMI port does not support 4k 60 Hertz output so if you want to use an external 4k display you're gonna have to run it at 30 Hertz which is chopping on the right side of the notebook we have an SD card slot two more USBs and a lock slot and the SD slot actually lets you put the whole card into the slot unlike some of the newer and smaller notebooks so that's kind of cool and I know a lot of older notebooks could do this but I found it really cool so whatever leave me alone you can't open the lid of the notebook one-handed now I'm not sure if it's a hinge thing that will loosen up over time but in my three weeks of using it and I opened it and closed it pretty frequently and never loosened up and want to film this to show you guys I actually noticed that there was quite a bit of play on the screen itself when it was closed there's a lot of flex on the top of the notebook as well it could be just from the fact that it's plastic but I don't feel very confident in its durability and there is a lot of flex on the screen as well it so it kind of worries me that there's this much flex to the top of the notebook and the screen and just for comparison here's a MacBook I know it's metal and more expensive but there's much less torsional on that lid when I wiggle it around there's an LED light up front it lights up when it's charging and it lights up orange when it's low on batteries and you're going to see a lot of that orange but we'll get into that later the trackpad feels really cheap it's plastic it doesn't track well and quite frankly I hate it I tried to get used to it but even after using it for three weeks I definitely disliked the trackpad on this notebook there's very little flex to the keyboard which was actually surprising but there's nothing particularly good or bad about this keyboard the 4k touchscreen is nice the colors of a very faint yellow hue to them but other than that it's pretty good I found the screen to be a little dim at times but for indoor use it's more than sufficient now if you look at the right side of the screen you see that mark there that's actually a scuff from the screen getting pressed against the bevel under the direction keys on the keyboard I think the durability struggle on this notebook is real now we have the same our problem as I demonstrated on my razor blade review and since the screen on the inspiron 7000 isn't super bright it's even more noticeable so the difference between the two screens seems trivial in this shot but that coating on the macbook makes a huge difference when it comes to real use anti glare the fans aren't too loud with low to mid 20s when it's idling and it's mid to high 30s when the fans kick in at full the temperatures are actually pretty cool I'm not going to show the thermal footage again but you can see the comparison in the razor blade review okay let's talk performance even though this is a Broadwell i7 chip it is very important to understand if this is a 2 chord chip and not a 4 chord chip like you often see on higher-end notebooks so for any applications that can take advantage of multi-core processing which is a lot of them performance hurts a 4k screen has a lot of pixels to push out it's actually four times the number of pixels of a 1080p screen so you need some serious hardware to use the screen to its full potential 4k video playback off the drive runs ok there's no skipped frames but tracking is rough and there's also some really annoying video driver issues that make 4k YouTube videos stutter this was really annoying for the review but I imagine Dell will resolve this shortly now I also tried editing and rendering some 4k videos in Premiere and it's just awful a 2 core CPU is really mediocre at consuming 4k content and it's quite bad at creating 4k content like really really bad so it makes you wonder why there's even a 4k screen on this thing ok I want to quickly talk about battery life now it's kind of hard for me to do this part of the review because the dell inspiron has a 4k screen and it only cost 1350 and I can't help but draw comparisons to my MacBook Pro which cost a little bit over 2000 and it does not have a 4k screen so that being said you have to keep in mind that in order for Dell to sell this notebook for 1350 they got to cut some corners somewhere and battery life is one of them so I'm just going to say it the dell inspiron 7000 with a 15-inch 4k screen has a really bad battery life it lasts three hours the advertised for but realistically with average to light use you're going to get three so when you're playing games at 1080p you're going to get like a little bit less than an hour maybe 45 minutes to an hour if you're playing if you're doing like regular internet browsing really like browsing three hours if you're watching movie straight from your drive two hours so I played a bunch of games I'd watched quite a few movies on this just to kind of see the 4k screen in action and I was always surprised because I mean three hours feels like a notebook from the 1990s as I walked the valley of the shadow of death I take a look at my life every Allah that's touching maps so if you're interested in this notebook and you plan on traveling a lot but you don't have access to a lot of outlets I would be hesitant about picking it up just because of how poor the battery life is okay I'm not gonna lie the very first thing I did when I got this computer was install counter-strike on it just to see how games would run in 4k on this thing the video drivers are pretty immature and I was a total pain in the ass to get things set up properly but the bottom line is this if you want to play games at 4k you're going to have a really bad time this thing gets like 15 to 20 frames per second at low settings so it's not worth playing in 4k but all the games that I played at 1080p they were in pretty decent it's not amazing I mean it runs at you know 50 to 70 frames per second depending on the game at medium to low settings so if you want to play games casually you can do it okay so my final thoughts on this thing the Inspiron 7000 with that 4k screen I think it looks really good on paper I mean it's tough not to get excited about a notebook with these kind of specs for 1350 but after using it for three weeks I have to say I'm not too sure who this notebook is really for you can't do 4k gaming on it you certainly can't do proper 4k video editing on it and there's issues of durability there's issues with a really short battery life so who is it really for I mean if I had to recommend it to someone it would probably be a student that doesn't plan on bringing this to class and you just kind of leave it in your dorm the whole time and just use it to watch 4k YouTube videos but our 4k YouTube video is that important to you and there's also the issue of requiring an SSD so you're gonna have to spend another 100 or 150 bucks to put a solid-state drive into this thing but to me the biggest problem is that two core CPU you really limit the potential of that 4k screen by forcing that 2 core CPU on to everyone who purchases his notebook so that's the end of this review I actually spent a very long time reviewing this note because the first one that Dell sent me didn't have an AMD video card in it and didn't realize until the very end of the review after I toured to crap that it was missing hardware so I hope you guys liked this review I spent way too long on it if you guys liked it please give me a thumbs up and subscribe if you can really appreciate it it's been nice I'll see you guys next time