Battery Life, Expandability, and Pricing

Battery Life

In our PC Perspective Wi-Fi Web Browsing test, the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming faired well. With a screen brightness of 180 lux across all of the notebooks, the Dell notebook managed to last for 7 hours and 42 minutes. The large, 72Wh battery helps keep the quad-core CPU and dedicated NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti from taking a large chunk out of the battery life.

Expandability

One of Dell's biggest points of pride with last year's Inspiron 15 Gaming was the fact that it was highly expandable when compared to other notebooks. Dell has maintained this feature with their newest revision.

Removing a single screw on the bottom of the machine allows you to pop off the bottom panel and reveals a well laid out array of hardware. You have an accessible M.2 port, empty 2.5" drive bay, and RAM slots, just about all you could ask for on a notebook. Keep in mind that depending on your given configuration of the Inspiron 15, it may not ship with the SATA ribbon cable for the additional drive bay (ours did not), but you can find this part elsewhere on the internet for around $15.

I love that Dell has taken the upgradability path seriously and obviously made it a priority. You can even see that all of the screws in the internal chassis are labeled with the screw size. I really love this attention to detail and the ability to fix any components that may have gone awry on this machine.

I honestly find it difficult to find faults with this latest iteration of the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming. The build concern issues that I had with the previous model have been addressed, and I think the industrial design changes help round out this great notebook.

For users who are interested in the ability to game with their notebook, even if it's just occasionally, I think the $850 price tag is difficult to beat for a machine of this caliber.

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