Dell G7 15 laptop review: A solid portable computer for gamers

DELL’S new gaming laptop packs most of the functionality and power of a full-sized desktop into something you can take with you.

WHILE PCs offer one of the best gaming experiences available, they’re not very portable. Between the tower, the monitor, the keyboard, mouse and peripherals, shifting a desktop gaming PC any further than from your office to the lounge may require blocking off time in a diary — and maybe a coffee break as well.

Laptops, however, are designed to be carried around — work, school, public transport, aircraft, friend’s houses, wherever the owner finds themselves and wants to do some computer stuff.

While laptops are generally excellent for work stuff and general internet use, even a mid-range one struggles when you fire up a game with the sort of 3D graphics commonly found in most AAA releases nowadays.

Fortunately, there’s a way to combine both uses — gaming and portability — via the concept of the gaming laptop, which packs all the features of a decent gaming desktop into a laptop.

They’ve been around for a few years now with several manufacturers offering them, and as tech advances, so do the laptop features. The Dell G7 15 is one of the latest members of the gaming laptop group, which also includes the company’s recently released G3 and G5 units.

The build quality on the review G7 15 unit I tried out was very good and had a pleasingly solid case, featuring a 15-inch screen with 1080 pixel resolution and an illuminated blue LED keyboard.

The Dell G7 15 is one of the latest members of the gaming laptop group.

The G7 comes with two hard drives — a 256Gb solid state drive (SSD) with the operating system (which loads very quickly indeed) and a 1TB hard drive for general storage, Wi-Fi, three USB ports (four if you include USB-C), a memory card reader, and an HDMI port — all pretty standard stuff on a decent laptop nowadays.

From a gaming perspective, the processor on the review unit was an I7-8750H with 15Gb RAM and critically, it’s also running a 6Gb Nvidia GTX 1060 graphics card, which is more than grunty enough for modern gaming and will basically give you a decent and portable gaming rig.

The downside is the price — about $2300, and more if you want to add an I9 processor or 4K screen.

The SSD meant Windows loaded pretty much straight away — press the button to turn it on and few seconds later you’re in and ready to go.

The laptop I reviewed was in Alpine White — there is also a black option — and accentuated with a pleasing blue, particularly on the keyboard. As someone who spends a lot of time working and gaming in lowlight environments, the illuminated keyboard was particularly welcome and certainly made things easier.

The gaming-friendly design is also apparent in the large wristspace the keyboard offers, as well as the sharp LED antiglare display.

But the real test, of course, is whether it can run modern games. Yes, it can — provided you’re near a power point.

I tested the system with a number of games including The Crew 2, Wolfenstein II: Shadow Of The Colossus, Hitman, and Shogun 2: Total War. It quite happily ran all of them at 1080 pixel resolution with frame rates in the 50-60fps region, or even higher in some cases.

To get that performance I had to go into the windows settings and divert all power to the engines, in the form of selecting “performance” rather than “battery life”. With the slider at the halfway point, the games became sluggish or needed to have most of their graphics features turned down to remain playable, although the other usual computer stuff like the browser and media player functioned just fine.

If you’re going to game, you’ll need to keep the unit plugged into a power point while you do it.

The Dell G7 15 has a 56W hour battery, which in theory will run for about four hours assuming “basic computer stuff”, but if you start gaming that figure is going to plummet.

In short, if you’re going to game, you’ll need to keep the unit plugged into a power point while you do it, because the battery isn’t going to last long enough to be useful at the power settings needed to run games decently.

The G7 15 is also a bit on the heavy side — weighing in at just over 2.5kg. If most of your travel is land-based, this isn’t too much of an issue — but the weight does mean there’s not going to be a lot else in your carry-on bag for flights, especially once you factor in the AC adaptor, mouse, headphones and so on.

The headphone jack is on the right hand side of the unit, which doesn’t seem like an ideal placement because you’ve also got your mouse plugged in or set up there, so the cables can start getting in each other’s way.

Overall though, the G7 15 is a solidly built unit that does just what it promises — it plays modern games and generally offers the functionality of a gaming desktop in a portable and useful package.

If you travel around a lot, or are in a position where you need to do slightly more than send emails, type Word documents or use social media, then it’s got a lot to offer, packing most of the functionality and power of a full-size desktop into something you can take on the road.