The plastic on the chassis's base feels a lot more solid than the lid, which gives the impression that the lids plastic casing might pop clean off if you dropped it at just the right angle. The Dell laptop does what it's supposed to do: It runs all the games that are found in our database smoothly. The combination of the Core i7-8750Hprocessor and the GeForce RTX 2060 graphics unit will make sure of this for the next years coming. Should the GPU no longer be able to meet the requirements, the possibility of using an external GPU through the Thunderbolt 3 port is available. On the Grand Theft Auto V benchmark, the Dell G5 15 SE got 56 fps, which didn't make it past the 62-fps category average (it once again flew by the 45-fps budget gaming average). The Omen 15 (60 fps) and Legion Y545 (62 fps) did slightly better, while the Zephyrus G14 (115 fps) excelled. As for specs, the number of options can be bewildering. However, most configs including our review rig come with an Intel six-core Core i7-8750H CPU. It’s an 8th rather than 9th gen chip, but that’s of zero consequence. It’s all the CPU you’re ever going to need in a laptop.

The Dell G5 15 SE has some of the longest battery life we’ve seen in a gaming laptop. Surprise, surprise, it’s all thanks to AMD. After it continuously surfed the web over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness, the G5 15's battery lasted 7 hours and 14 minutes, which crushed the 4:50 mainstream gaming laptop average. The Omen 15 (3:05) and Legion Y545 (3:38) were basically dead on arrival, while the only competitor left standing was the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (11:32), which can also thank AMD. Dell G5 15 SE (2020) webcam The Dell G5 15 SE (2020) is a great mainstream gaming laptop thanks to its wild CPU performance, awesome battery life and bright 15.6-inch display. However, its GPU could certainly have been stronger, and no one wants a chunky chassis or shrill speakers. Meanwhile, read and write speeds are a little sluggish, coming in at 549MB/sec and 260MB/sec respectively. This means that the Dell G5 might be slow reading data compared to other gaming laptops – but for the price, you can’t feel too hard done by. The 128GB SSD and 1TB SATA storage at least mean you’ll be able to install a generous number of games before having to go on a Steam cull. inch, QHD, 2560 x 1440, 240 Hz, anti-glare, non-touch, DCI-P3 99%, 400 nits, wide-viewing angle (WVA)You might be wondering how Dell has managed to cram in such impressive specs into this budget-friendly gaming laptop. Turns out, there’s no magic formula – there have simply been cuts in other areas, most significantly the screen. Multimedia, Budget Multimedia, Gaming, Budget Gaming, Lightweight Gaming, Business, Budget Office, Workstation, Subnotebooks, Ultrabooks, Chromebooks Cinebench R15 | Cinebench R10 | Cinebench R20 | Geekbench 3 | Geekbench 4.4 | Mozilla Kraken 1.1 | Octane V2 | JetStream 1.1 Cinebench R15 There’s only so much numbers can tell you about a screen, however. In reality, the G5’s display does a decent job for gaming. Don’t expect dazzling colours or a Retina-sharp display, but it isn’t so poor that you’ll grimace at the visuals. For top-notch pixel action, you could always plug the G5 into a secondary monitor.

inch, FHD, 1920 x 1080, 165 Hz, anti-glare, non-touch, 100% sRGB, 300 nits, wide-viewing angle (WVA) CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 4800H (8-cores/16-threads, 12MB cache, 2.90GHz base frequency, boostable up to 4.29GHz) The port count is another highlight. With three USB A ports, a USB-C with Thunderbolt 3 port, HDMI, Mini DisplayPort, LAN and an SD card reader, you really do have all your bases covered. It’s also worth noting that most of these ports plus the power connector are at the rear of the chassis, ensuring a minimum of cable clutter. Specs appealThe RGB lighting consists of four zones, including the numpad. You can configure the lighting in the FX tab of the Alienware Command Center app with effects like Rainbow Wave, Breathing and Spectrum. While I wish the individual keys were RGB-lit, the lighting is pleasantly bright.

The laptop gets 45fps on average during our Total War: Three Kingdoms battlefield benchmark on ultra settings, which isn't awful, but its not great either. Meanwhile, the GPU pushes out 42fps on average during our Metro: Exodus benchmark on ultra settings. The palmrests and touchpad are cooler than skin temperature with a maximum of 28.8 °C / 83.8 F and are therefore cool to the touch. Dell is always coming up with interesting variations of its different lines of laptops and the Dell G5 15 SE (2020) is a prime example.The 3DMark: Fire Strike benchmark results show that the Dell G5 is much more competitive with its GPU performance. A 9569 score isn’t significantly behind the Asus ROG Strix GL504 Hero II’s result of 10,115. This isn’t too surprising: this Dell G5 houses Nvidia’s GTX 1060 GPU. At 301 nits of brightness, the Dell G5 15 SE’s screen surpassed the 290-nit category average. It just barely beat the 300 nits from the Legion Y545, but wasn’t bright enough to match the Zephyrus G14 and the Omen 15, which hit 323 nits and 320 nits, respectively. Conversely, the Dell G5 15 SE’s baseline 60Hz panel dropped to 231 nits of brightness, which is dimmer than the 268-nit budget gaming laptop average. Dell G5 15 SE (2020) keyboard and touchpad We didn't see any GPU performance gains thanks to SmartShift, so there might still be a few kinks AMD needs to work out, but we can't know that until we see other laptops with the technology.

The G5 churned out even worse results for photography colour gamuts, proving that this isn’t a multi-talented machine – although I didn’t expect so given the G5’s (relatively) low price. On the plus side, the Dell G5 15 SE's battery life is fantastic for a gaming laptop. While other gaming laptops are dying out before they even finish a movie on Netflix, this one will keep on keeping on for several hours of video or everyday, general use. You can even get a few hours of moderate gaming out of it if you keep your settings tuned for battery life or balance rather than going all-in on performance. This also makes the Dell G5 a decent laptop for watching Netflix on the go – as long as you’re happy to lug around the 2.61kg lump, of course. According to our colorimeter, the Dell G5 15 SE’s display nailed 108% of the sRGB color gamut, sliding past the 106% mainstream gaming laptop average. It also beat the HP Omen 15’s 102% and the Legion Y545’s 99%, but couldn’t quite keep up with the 117% from the Zephyrus G14. Meanwhile, Dell G5 15 SE’s baseline 60Hz panel covered 63% of the sRGB color gamut, which is duller than the budget gaming laptop average (72%).Gaming laptops aren't known for their battery life, so we were pleasantly surprised with the G5 15 SE's battery performance. In our PCMark 10 battery test, it lasted an average 7 hours and 3 minutes on a full charge and in our movie test, it went for 5 hours and 45 minutes, blowing way past the Aorus 5 which didn't even finish a single playthrough. That's not to say its all junk, though. The pre-installed Alienware Command Center software gives you the ability to customize the keyboard lighting, fine tune the system's performance for specific games, and look over various system statistics, which is genuinely useful. On the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark (Highest, 1080p), the Dell G5 15 SE averaged 45 fps, falling short of the 47-fps mainstream gaming laptop average (beating the 42-fps budget gaming average). It matched the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti in the Omen 15 (45 fps), while the RTX 2060 GPU in Zephyrus G14 nailed 49 fps and the Legion Y545’s own GTX 1660 Ti got 50 fps. Graphics wise, we’re talking Nvidia RTX 2060, which is the entry-level GPU in Nvidia’s latest ray-tracing capable Turing generation of graphics chips, but very powerful in outright terms. It’s paired with a 15.6-inch 1080p display based on IPS panel technology. Dell optionally offers 144Hz refresh support, but our review rig is limited to 60Hz. The average temperature for the upper side under maximal load is 38.7 °C / 102 F, compared to the average of 33.9 °C / 93 F for the devices in the class Gaming.