DELL VOSTRO 15
£442 inc VAT • dell.co.uk
Dell is known as the cut-price Windows brand, and within its business line-up sits the Vostro series of budget laptops. The Vostro 15 was updated early this year and can now be found with the latest fifthgeneration Intel Core processors, an unusual feature in entry models.
Build and design
The Vostro is another no-nonsense design, all black plastic with matt textured finish. It’s a large laptop by modern standards, with a large footprint spreading 378x259mm, but weighing 2.4kg and its 25mm thickness means it’s not a complete brick either. Like many 15in models, Dell has found space to include a DVD RW drive.
Pick up the laptop and you can feel the whole chassis flex a little, but otherwise it feels tough enough to survive the battering meted out to commodity Windows appliances. The 40Wh battery is removable, and access for service and upgrades is very good. A thirdwidth plastic bottom cover lifts to reveal hard disk, wireless card, CMOS battery and SO-DIMM slots. Our sample had 4GB memory in one slot, with another empty slot available.
It may run with the latest Intel chip but costs have been cut elsewhere. The 500GB WD disk is a noisy example of the breed, there is no HDMI output, and quality of the matt low-resolution display is poor. It has restricted viewing angles and about the worst colour accuracy, contrast ratio and gamut on test.
Elsewhere ports are limited to three USB ports (including one USB 3.0), ethernet and SD card slot. The keyboard and trackpad are not so bad, the regular Scrabble-style keyboard working well with a clean responsive action, while the buttonless trackpad followed
Build Features Performance
Value
Overall
our fingertip directions with little extraneous jumps despite the buttonless design that hides left/right switches under the panel.
Various processor options are listed – our sample had a 2.2GHz Intel Core i5 that includes Turbo Boost and Hyper Threading Technology, yet still keeps the overall price below £500 at time of press. And that’s with the dearer Windows 8.1 Pro OS, too.
Wi-Fi should be more versatile than most budget models, a recent 11ac single-stream adaptor from Intel.
Performance
Synthetic benchmark results for the Dell Vostro were the best in this group, peaking with 5177 multi-core points in Geekbench 3 (and 2624 single-core, beating the multi-core results of Celeron chips).
PCMark 8 Home unit returned an accelerated score of 2732 points, and business credentials were underlined by a decent 3734 points in the Business test from the same suite.
Usable graphics performance from the Intel HD Graphics 5500 meant some light gaming is feasible: we averaged 25 fps in Batman at 1366x768 Low detail, rising to 29fps at 720p.
Despite the 14nm processor that’s designed to cut power consumption, and a reasonable 40Wh battery, we saw less than four hours unplugged runtime in our wireless video test. VERDICT: Battery life was disappointing and screen quality is poor. Application performance measure well but it often felt slow to respond in actual use. Corners have been cut, but overall the Dell Vostro is a workable machine that leads with the latest Intel silicon.