Be it a desktop or laptop, PC gaming can put a serious dent in your wallet with beefy rigs from the likes of Acer, ASUS, etc. costing upwards of ₹3 lakh. However, Dell is here to tell you that you don’t have to peek outside your budget to get the right rig for gaming. The company is hoping to disrupt the trend with the new G7 15 (7588) gaming laptop. (I’ll be referring to this laptop as simply “G7” for the rest of this review for my own sanity.)

Before I start telling you about my experience with the Dell G7 gaming laptop, let’s take a look at the specs –

Design and Build Quality

If you have a thing for RGB lighting, ostentatious logos, a flashy red and black design, then I’ll suggest you look someplace else because the Dell G7 looks clean and simple. As you can see, I have the white variant of the laptop called “Alpine White” with me for the review, but you can also get a black variant called Licorice Black.

As a part of accented decorations, the hinge and the frame of the vents on the back side of the laptop have been painted silver. I am also a huge fan of the matte texture of the deck inside as it keeps smudges and fingerprints at bay. Oh, and the ‘G7’ logo on the vent at the back? Well, that looks like it belongs to a sports car, and adds to the racing motif, which looks awesome, in my opinion.

The build quality of the Dell G7 is also solid. At 2.86 kilograms and 15.3 x 10.8 x 0.9 inches, it is safe to call it a chunky laptop. Thanks to the Max-Q design, it is not as thick as most other gaming laptops in the market, but I can definitely feel the weight toting this thing back and forth to the office on my long commute.

Display

At this point, it’s clear that Dell has paid a lot of attention to the design and the build quality. Where Dell hasn’t done such a good job is with the display. The 15.6-inch IPS 1080p display looks just decent at best. First off, the lack of a 120Hz display for this price is a bit of a letdown. The anti-glare coating helps with the reflections, but it maxes out at 250 nits, which is pretty low for multimedia consumption. The Dell G7 has a 15.6-inch FHD Display

Don’t get me wrong, it is not a bad display by any means, but I feel like Dell, of all companies, could have done a better job considering the fact that they have delivered some stunning panels in the past. The Dell G7 falls short in this regard.

The Dell G7 has a good port selection as well. On the left, you have a Noble lock security slot, power port, an Ethernet port, USB 3.1 2nd Gen port, and a 2-in-1 memory card reader. Moving over to the right side, you get a 3.5mm headphone jack, two USB 3.1 ports, a Thunderbolt 3 with Type-C port, and HDMI 2.0 output. Port Selection on Dell G7 (Left Side)

As soon as you open the lid of the G7, you’ll see full-sized typing deck inside. It’s a chiclet-style keyboard with decently spaced matte-black keys. The gamer in me hates these keys, but as a writer, I appreciate the key travel and snappy action. The power button, on the other hand, rests separately on the top. I hate the fact it lacks any kind of lighting, but it houses a fingerprint sensor for Windows Hello authentication, so there’s that.

While we are at it, let me tell you that I absolutely hate the lighting on this keyboard. It has a blue LED backlight with only two illumination levels. Look, I am glad that they didn’t go with red color lights as it would have looked hideous, but I am not a huge fan of the blue light either. Blue LED Backlight on the Keyboard

Touchpad

Thankfully, the touchpad on the G7 is awesome. The best part is that’s it’s a Precision touchpad, so the tracking is reliable and smooth. I know most gamers buying this laptop will splurge on a gaming mouse anyway, but it is hard not to acknowledge the big and smooth surface that this touchpad offers. Dell G7 Touchpad

Audio

Rounding out the Dell G7’s hardware is the dual front-firing speaker system that sits just below the palm rest facing you. The speakers get decently loud without much distortion, and they managed to fill my room with some crisp and clear music when played on full volume. However, I found the speakers on Dell Inspiron 7567 to be much better thanks to the sub-woofers. The Dell G7 has a dual front-firing speakers

The Dell G7’s webcam looks, well, just like any other webcam on a gaming laptop. You shouldn’t have any issues getting through a video chat or two, but I wouldn’t recommend using this camera for live streaming.

Performance

As soon as I saw the “Powered by Core i9” sticker on the laptop deck, I was really excited to put it through its paces in the real world. Now, having used this laptop as my daily driver for the past week, I am happy to report that the performance from the six-core Intel CPU is right where it should be. Soul Calibur 6

The Dell G7, in my opinion, came up with decent results when it comes to benchmarks. It clocked 132.21 FPS in Cinebench R15’s OpenGL test, scored 3,872 in 3DMark Time Spy, and 5,241 in PCMark 10.

The G7 continued to impress on Geekbench 4 in which it hit 5,415 in the single-core score, and 22,769 in multi-core score. In VRMark, the laptop managed to score 5,782 at its base clock speed of 2.90GHz.

Next up, to test the rendering performance, I rendered the BMW Benchmark from the Blender demo archive. The laptop managed to complete the rendering process in 698 seconds.

The results, as you can see, are better than most budget gaming laptops. In fact, in some cases, it is at par with some high-end gaming machines like Alienware 17 R5 that we reviewed a few months back. However, it is worth pointing out that the fans kicked in pretty quickly, and that’s when I realized that the exhaust fans get pretty loud.

The Dell G7, as mentioned earlier, is armed with a GTX 1060 Max-Q GPU with 6GB of VRAM. The Max-Q design, in case you don’t know, keeps the GTX 1060 GPU from putting out the best performance, but don’t let that stray away from this laptop. It is more than capable of playing games on high settings.

As you can see, I was comfortably clocking over 60FPS on most demanding titles even on High settings. Games like Project Cars 2, Metro Last Light, etc. were easily rendering frames above 100 FPS while being on high graphics settings. Even the relatively newer titles like Far Cry 5, Soul Calibur 6 were rendering good frames.

The internals of the Dell G7 are very easy to get into. Just pop out a single screw and you are in. I wish more devices allowed me to peek the internals so easily. Inside, you’ll see a dual fan setup that manages to keep the laptop cool even under heavy loads. At no point did the laptop show any sign of throttling. Yes, the exhaust fan gets noisy on load, but you can crank up the volume of your game or put on a pair of headphones, and forget about it. Plus, they’re really good at keeping your system cool. Also, unlike a majority of budget gaming laptops, the fans are not chained together. This means the laptop won’t suffer from a bad heat dissipation as seen on some other laptops like the Acer Nitro 5 Spin.

Even under heavy load, the temperature remained well under 70 degrees across the board, which is acceptable for a laptop that packs some serious power.

By now, you must be wondering how a 56Whr, 4-Cell battery inside the Dell G7 fares with a powerful processor and a discrete GPU? Well, I wouldn’t say it’s an unforgiving battery eater, but it’s not winning any awards in my books.

I was able to get about 5 hours of screen time on the max brightness with my workload. It does charge fairly quickly, so topping it up shouldn’t be an issue, in my opinion. Look, as a gamer, you are not going to sit far away from a power outlet. So, the fact that you can squeeze out around five hours of non-gaming productivity work on a single charge is decent.

Pros

  • Excellent build quality
  • Great trackpad with Windows Precision drivers
  • Powerful CPU
  • Cooling and port selection

Cons

  • Average battery life
  • Slow display
  • Poor keyboard backlight

Buy Dell G7 15 from Dell Store: (₹1,32,390)

With a price tag of ₹1,32,390, the Dell G7 15 is one of the most affordable, if not the most affordable, Core i9-powered laptops. For comparison, the Core-i9 powered Alienware 17 R5 will set you back ₹3,36,000, whereas a Core-i9 powered MSI GT75 Titan will cost you ₹3,35,000 (Rs 2,98,900 for the Core i7 model).

It also excels at gaming performance for a lot less than many other laptops.  Of course, the high-end rigs are going to produce good frame rates on graphically taxing games, but the Dell G7 is a solid performer and it will definitely please the budget-conscious gamer in you, and then some.