CPU and General Performance

Now that we've taken a look at the raw specifications of the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming, let's see how that translates to performance.

In the Cinebench rendering test, you can see the multi-threaded advantages of the true quad-core CPU in the Inspiron 15, as opposed to the dual-core HyperThreaded processors in both the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 and the MacBook Pro.

Single threaded performance is neck and neck, as we would expect from similar Intel CPUs from adjacent generations (Skylake and Kaby Lake).

We see a like result with our handbrake testing, in which we transcode a 4K video file to 1080P. The quad-core Core i5-7300HQ pulls ahead of the competitors in the CPU encoding test. When Intel QuickSync is enabled to offload some of the encoding work to the integrated GPUs, the gap is narrowed, but the Inspiron 15 is still the fastest.

PCMark 8 is a benchmarking suite that aims to emulate several different usage scenarios ranging from basic productivity to mixed workloads with light gaming and to applications for creative professionals like photo and video editing. While the "conventional" tests are running applications as you'd expect, the "accelerated" versions add OpenCL acceleration and use the available GPU devices for some operations.

Our PCMark results show a couple of interesting stories. In general, we see the continued trend of quad-core domination tends to ring true throughout these tests. However, in the "Home" tests we see a much more even playing field. This consists of light computational tasks like web browsing, word processing, and video chatting. These aren't generally tasks that take use of multiple threads, so we are seeing the close single-threaded performance here again.

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