I’ve been looking for a new laptop that can actually run Overwatch decently at 1080 at least, and additionally I do a good bit of audio mixing and editing that I’ve run into memory limitations on at 8GB RAM.
Dell Inspiron 15 7577
I can get an open box one of the Dell one for $900 right now, so it’s actually just $50 more.
A lot of the big specs look similar, other than one having a 4K screen that I don’t know is meaningful on this size of screen and not sure if it’s a good one or not.
You’re right about UHD not being meaningful on a 15.6" screen (~282 PPI).
I’ve got 2560x1440 on my 14" laptop (~210 PPI) and that’s already quite meaningless. Would have preferred to have it with 1920x1080 instead but couldn’t get that.
However it isn’t really a drawback having UHD as you can run games at 1920x1080 and have each pixel take up exactly 2x2 pixels so it’ll look just fine. I don’t have that option with 2560x1440 as it would get me a tiny 1280x720 resolution that’s barely useful these days.
The specs are pretty much the same, only difference I can spot is the SSD being 256 GB in the Acer and 128 GB in the Dell. Not a huge difference and if you fancy later on you can always get another SSD and throw it in the Dell to replace the HDD.
I would pick a Dell over an Acer, I believe you’ll get a higher quality product.
I have the Dell 7577 with a GTX1050Ti. For the money it’s not bad, and is nice to use.
The screen is good enough - it’s not as good as the screen on my sons older Alienware 15. Same for the speakers, they are ok but nothing special.
I have big hands and despite the small keys I find the keyboard very precise, I make fewer typos on it than either the Alienware or my MS Surface Book.
In terms of performance in Windows for daily work, its lovely to use, most of the time I have it docked to a TB3 port driving a 1440p monitor and with 32GB RAM it runs my lab VM’s and everything else no problem. I recommend seeing if you can under-volt the CPU - mine runs quieter since I did that with less need for the fans to kick in. My next upgrade will be to replace the 1TB HDD with a decent sized SSD. Mine came with 256GB boot SSD. I also disabled all the Dell management software, it’s not needed and just gets in the way.
Went to microcenter to check out both of them first hand yesterday. The model on the floor for the Dell was only the 1080 screen model, not the 4K, but comparing those showed that the brightness was about the same, or at least we couldn’t see much difference, with the Dell looking perhaps slightly better.
Other things of note, the Acer one showed it was a full GTX 1060 in device manager, while the Dell one showed GTX 1060 Max-Q, which I had kinda expected for both. I had heard complaints about the Acer Helios 300 though where they seemed to have different iterations with either the Max-Q or full and didn’t make a distinction transparent, so I guess that could end up being luck of the draw? Regardless, from what I understand it’s not a significant difference, with a tradeoff of a little power for a little bit more efficiency.
Ended up getting the Dell 7577 with the 4K monitor though since there ended up being another open box deal at microsoft for it that dropped the price to $800, and my wife like the design of the Dell better anyway.
The 4K screen looks a bit brighter, so that’s a plus, but while we were checking it out at home we found some backlight bleed (not terrible, but very noticeable on dark screens) and some dimness in white in some edges as well. Was able to talk to Dell about it and seems like it’s covered in the manufacturer warranty, so they gave us a paid slip to FedEx it too them to fix it and get it back to us in about a week or so. Seemed nice otherwise, and for the price it’s really good, so I don’t mind too much this extra step if it comes back in good shape.
The Acer hase actually had some good reviews by users. But Dell is actually trying now… ITs a toss up. Whichever has the better GPU is what you should go for.
Well, to followup what I said before, we’ve now sent the laptop in twice, since the first time it came back actually worse than the original with still some backlight bleed and some new dead pixels (looks like they replaced the panel with a worse one and didn’t check), and after sending it in again we got it back today and it still has a huge amount of backlight bleed (pretty much the entire bottom of the screen has bleed, as well as all corners and some other points). It also came back without the panel casing being fully snapped in.
So… dell support has been a problem and they don’t seem to be doing good QC on this one. This is all covered under warrenty but that doesn’t mean much if they don’t actually fix the thing when it’s sent to them and it’s been nearly a month now with this. It’s supposed to be a premium screen or something too which is supposed to meet the high standards we are trying to hold this “gaming” laptop too, where the screen was one of the major selling points.
Updating again for reference purposes. It’s possible we should have just gone with the Acer Predator Helios 300.
Since my last update, we still don’t have a working laptop. After the last time, they approved an on site tech to replace the screen (and it took a while to get them to approve, and many headaches of back and forth requesting information, them canceling tickets, not getting calls back when promised and not getting emails confirming information, etc). The replacement still had backlight bleed, and we had the tech stick around to confirm (and everything recorded). This time we at least got to higher up support and a more direct number to call and get things resolved. After a bit they told us they would just send us a replacement from the factory (I asked if someone could actually look at the thing to QC it, but was told that wouldn’t be necessary).
Well, wait a while later for it to get here from China and I start testing it out (recorded opening and everything): Backlight bleed not as bad (wife still noticed a bit, but was willing to live with it at this point as it was better than any iteration before). Great? Well, while setting up I found pretty quickly that 3 of the keys (ended up being 4) on the keyboard don’t work.
After a bit with support guy again, he confirmed it was a hardware problem and would put through to have another onsite tech come out and replace the keyboard in the next week. Today, I’m told they don’t have the part available so it won’t be till April early April. So, over 2 months and many repairs and replacements and we still don’t have a functioning laptop (and that’s going through 2 different laptops now) for this 7577.
Not recommended, I’ll tell you that much.
Plan at this point is to just ask for a refund. This has been something like 4 attempts for them to get us something working that have failed now, and taken almost 2 months (will be 2 months by the time we get the next attempt at repair done).
In hindsight, what we probably should have done was just gone right back ot microcenter with the thing and gotten our money back immediately.