LAPTOP | £1,249 from Dell www.snipca.com/47391
Game for anything
Dell’s G15 Gaming Laptop has a striking appearance. Its angular, blocky and hefty design will take up a lot more space than many of the sleek, lightweight laptops we’ve reviewed recently. That capacious build is put to good use, however, with a large, crystal-clear 15.6in screen, a keyboard with a numeric keypad, and a large touchpad. The keyboard is backlit with LEDs, but these are a set colour and aren’t individually adjustable.
Inside there’s a 13th-generation Intel processor. Our review unit was fitted with a 14-core i7-13650HX chip, though you can choose a 10-core i5-13450HX option if you prefer. We wouldn’t recommend it, though, because the i7 model also comes with 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and, perhaps most importantly, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card – the power behind its gaming prowess. The i5 version offers an RTX 3050 card, which doesn’t come close in terms of performance.
There are some obvious compromises with the design. The keyboard has little travel and a soft, mushy feel. It’s nice to have a numeric keypad, but the keys are smaller than the main keyboard and therefore feels cramped.
The touchpad is moderately sized but is offset to the left so that it’s located under the centre of the main keyboard. That makes moving your right hand from the touchpad to the numeric keypad more of a stretch and you can’t reach it by twisting your wrist.
It also gets a bit noisy when running games or other resource-hungry programs. Its two fans suck air from under the base and vent it from the grille next to the hinge and can become noisy when running at top speed.
The screen is sharp and detailed thanks to its 2560x1440-pixel resolution. It has an impressive refresh rate of 240Hz, a 2-millisecond response time, and is superb at reproducing colours accurately. It’s also bright enough to be used in most lighting conditions.
Most importantly for a gaming PC, this can run modern games well, with frame rates exceeding 100fps with the graphical settings turned up. If you’re looking for a laptop that will be suitable for running Microsoft Flight Simulator at its best, this is an excellent choice.
Don’t expect to run this laptop off its battery very often, however. It’s not unusual for gaming laptops to fare badly in battery tests, but this was particularly poor, lasting only two hours 35 minutes in general use.
SPECIFICATIONS
14-core Intel Core i7-13650HX processor • 16GB RAM
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card • 15.6in 2,560x1,440-pixel screen • 1TB SSD
