The Dell G3 15 ($783.99 as tested) is the very definition of an entry-level gaming laptop: simple design, modest performance, and a low price. It elevates its game somewhat with a 120Hz full HD display, which its GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics chip can leverage in online multiplayer games, but it can’t quite push AAA titles to 60 frames per second (fps) at higher settings. The small 256GB SSD in our review unit is restrictive for a game library, so we’d recommend upping the capacity. Overall it’s a competent machine, but its performance is rather ordinary, and you can find better values just below and above this price, chiefly the Acer Nitro 5 and the MSI Bravo 15.
Basic GeForce Gaming on a Budget
It should come as no surprise that this budget gaming laptop is neither too flashy in its aesthetic nor fancy in its physical design. It’s a simple, but reasonably compact, 15-inch system with a textured plastic finish on the lid and smooth plastic inside. The G3 15 won’t win any design awards, but it won’t offend, blends in to any environment, and is mostly solid in construction.
As far as portability is concerned, the chassis measures 0.85 by 14.4 by 10 inches (HWD) and 5.18 pounds. This isn’t what we’d call lightweight, for a gaming laptop or otherwise, but it’s not a back breaker; it’s portable enough to slip into a bag or backpack without becoming a burden, even if it wouldn’t be the best choice for a daily commute partner.
For context, this weight is lighter than that of some cheap gaming laptops, such as the Acer Nitro 5 (5.51 pounds), but heavier than others, such as the MSI Bravo 15 (4.1 pounds). You generally have to pay more for super-slim and light systems (especially gaming laptops) like the Razer Blade 15 or MSI Stealth 15M, so this is reasonable for a budget machine. If you’re really concerned with portability, there is a new wave of 14-inch laptops, as well, but they’re a bit beyond budget-tier pricing.
The rest of the build is similarly basic. The keyboard and touchpad are serviceable but ordinary. The keys have a bit of feedback, but the action is on the mushy side at the end of a press, and you may feel some flex on the keyboard deck. The touchpad is very simple, and it has a textured feel rather than the smooth glass finish of more-premium laptops, but it does the job.
While the system design is straightforward, the screen certainly has gaming in mind. The 15.6-inch display features a full HD resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate, a good combination for entry-to-midrange gaming. The resolution is the modern standard, and looks sharp, without being extra-demanding for budget-friendly components (more on those in a moment). The refresh-rate ceiling won’t be met in visually demanding single-player games on this laptop, but in simpler fast-paced games like your favorite MOBAs and battle royales, you’ll see higher frame rates.
The physical and wireless connections round out this build, starting with the USB 3.1 port, a USB Type-C port (with DisplayPort support), an HDMI port, and an Ethernet jack on the left flank. That last one is a particularly nice plus for gaming, allowing you to achieve faster and more stable connections for gaming and game downloads, and is not always found on less expensive laptops. There are two more USB ports on the right edge, alongside the headphone jack and an SD card slot. The system supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth.
Components and Performance Testing
The components make or break a budget gaming laptop, so let’s take a peek under the hood. Our $783.99 model includes an Intel Core i5-10300H processor, 8GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti GPU, and a 256GB SSD. Ours is the base-price, starting unit, so there’s no more price trimming to be done, but you can scale it up a decent way. It will remain an entry-level laptop, but you can outfit it with a Core i7 chip, up to a GTX 1660 Ti GPU, and double the RAM and storage for a few hundred dollars more.
8GB of memory isn’t too surprising at this price point, even if 16GB would be ideal. A mere 256GB of storage for a gaming laptop is really pushing it, though, as only a few leading-edge AAA games and your personal files would fill that up fast. Even just through the course of setting up the benchmark software and a few test games, I had to remove some as I went to make room for the next batch. Game installs are much bigger than they used to be, and often get bloated by updates, so being squeezed into 256GB is limiting on day one. I’d recommend bumping the capacity to 512GB if you can afford it.
To see what these components can do, I put the G3 15 through our rigorous suite of benchmark tests and compared the results to the competition. Below are the scores, but first, here’s a chart with the names and specs of the competitors so you can see what the G3 15 is up against.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both tests yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
Since these laptops are equipped for playing straining video games, even though they’re budget systems, they all meet an acceptable baseline of performance for everyday tasks. The G3 15 isn’t the snappiest machine I’ve ever used, with a couple seconds of hang time here and there when launching a program or multitasking, but the overall speed is good enough for general use.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image, timing each operation and adding up the total. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here.
The G3 15’s decent (but not great) overall speed is demonstrated again on these tests. It’s slower than the competition on two of these tests, though none is exactly ready to churn through media editing or creation. The budget tier isn’t where you look for excellence with these workloads, but they can make it through if you’re willing to wait.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to midrange PCs with integrated graphics, while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets high-end and gaming PCs strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Next up is another synthetic test or gaming simulation, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload for a second opinion on each laptop’s graphical prowess.
The GTX 1650 Ti is very much an entry-level GPU, so it’s no surprise we didn’t see fireworks on the raw 3D power. Across the board, these systems show moderate graphics capability, with the G5 15 (which is a touch more expensive than the rest) ahead of the pack. You probably won’t be using a laptop in this tier for professional 3D work, just gaming, so the raw 3D muscle is less important in this context than the gaming results. Let’s continue on to those.
Real-World Gaming Tests
Synthetic tests are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it’s hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world gameplay at various settings. We run them at 1080p resolution at the games’ medium and best image-quality presets (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5 under DirectX 11, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider under DirectX 12).
On these two games, the G3 15 is roughly the third or fourth best performer on average, which fits the on-paper hierarchy of the GPUs in use. However, the Nitro 5 is less expensive and delivers just about the same performance (though its screen is not high-refresh), so that’s not the best outcome for the G3 15 in that head to head.
If you’re an enthusiast, missing out on 60fps on maximum settings may be disappointing, but you can’t necessarily expect that in this price range. The medium-quality settings show that you can dial down some bells and whistles to achieve better than 60fps, though, which is an acceptable solution for a budget machine.
You may be wondering why you’d want to pay for a 120Hz screen, though, if the laptop can’t push frame rates that high. The reason: The panel is not meant for these types of AAA games. As mentioned, high-refresh screens are more suited to online multiplayer games, so I ran the in-game benchmark for Rainbow Six: Siege to see what the G3 15 is capable of.
The G3 15 averaged 152fps on the lowest preset, and 114fps on the maximum preset (both manually tuned to 100 percent render resolution), making a clear case for the 120Hz screen. Games in that genre will look smoother, and give you a competitive advantage as your screen updates more frequently.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the same Tears of Steel short we use in our Handbrake test—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits.
We see a respectable, if unremarkable, battery-life result here. The Nitro 5 is a big outlier, while the rest are clustered in the six-to-seven-hour range. Six hours of battery life in the described scenario is good for a gaming laptop, though in case you’re unaware, you won’t be able to play games for that long off the charger. Gaming drains battery much faster than general use (word processing, web browsing, and even watching videos like our test), so you’d only be able to play for a couple hours off the charger (and with diminished performance).
Even so, a long-lasting battery makes a laptop a better all-around purchase for your computing needs and travel, not just gaming at your desk.
An Affordable Mainstream Gamer
The Dell G3 15 isn’t remarkable in its design or performance, but it’s a competent full HD gaming machine with a fast display at a nice price. It isn’t the best budget value, with the Nitro 5 roughly equal in performance for even less money, while the MSI Bravo 15 is our favorite under-$1,000 pick. If you like the look of the G3 15, you can configure it with a bit more storage and memory, which we’d recommend if you have the budget.
