Dell G5 15
Is Dell’s latest G5 a bright light or a whitewash?
PRICE $ 3,099 dell.com
Dell’s white Special Edition G5 15 has one of the most innovative gaming laptop chassis designs we’ve seen in the last few years. While it doesn’t compete on footprint or overall thickness, it embraces a boxier aesthetic by riffing on last year’s DeLorean-inspired G5 vent design and adds a little flair by throwing some ultramarine blue thermal-management components behind a perspex undercarriage vent.
There’s a bit of back and forth in this unit, which seems torn between wanting to be one of the most premium devices available and trying to meet market demands. See while the G5 15 unit we tested had just a Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU, it had also been fitted with a pair of 512GB NVMe drives in a RAID 0 configuration for 2700+MB/s read and write speeds. We were supportive of this feature on MSI’s $4,800 GS75, but it’s a little silly to think that you’d pay for this extravagant speed bump on the G5 15 when you could get the ROG Zephyrus S GX531 with an RTX 2070 for less.
The CPU performed within 5% of the average across all the general work and direct processing benchmarks and while it was generally about 15% lower than the average framerates in the roundup on graphical tasks, we did pit it against more powerful 2070s and 2080s. This translates to framerate averages of 56 and 41.33 on games like The Division 2 and Ghost Recon: Wildlands using Ultra 1080p settings, respectively.
Dell has somehow managed to squeeze 5 hours and 14 minutes out of a generous 90Wh battery when under PCMark’s Home battery life benchmark load, a result so surprising we had to run it twice.