Dell G5 15 SE (2020) – Review 2020

The market for budget gaming laptops is ultra-competitive these days, with the latest components from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia allowing for better performance than ever at lower prices. The 2020 version of the Dell G5 15 SE (starts at $879.99; $1,199.99 as tested) opts for all-AMD for its CPU and GPU, delivering great multimedia and decent gaming performance at a reasonable price. It’s a tight field, though, and the G5 15 SE may not do quite enough to separate itself from the pack. The design is a bit basic and hefty; gaming frame rates don’t hang with those from like-priced Nvidia-based laptops; and the storage capacity is restrictive. It’s a pretty good gaming laptop on the whole, but we prefer the Acer Predator Helios 300 at the same price, and the MSI GL65 9SC as a less expensive value option.

A Sturdy Build, and Design That Blends In

The G5 15 SE is a pretty modest-looking laptop, featuring a few design flourishes without screaming that it’s a gaming rig. Most of these flourishes can be found on the lid. It’s colored silver with a metallic glimmer, and carved by two vertical lines, with a shiny Dell logo in the center. Other than that, the notebook is very basic-looking, with gray plastic on the bottom panel and a plain black keyboard deck. While I’m not asking for garish gaming colors, I find the design a bit boring overall, but others may appreciate the more restrained look that can blend in anywhere.

In terms of size, the G5 15 SE is also pretty standard. Most laptops, even potent gaming machines, have gotten thinner and lighter in recent years, but the G5 doesn’t fully follow this trend. It’s not bulky, but at 0.85 by 14.4 by 10 inches and 5.5 pounds, it hardly qualifies as thin and light.

This isn’t entirely surprising among budget rigs—making a laptop slim and sleek is costly, and the money is better spent elsewhere to prioritize getting you a better deal on features and performance—but it is a bit heftier than some competitors. The Predator Helios 300 measures 0.9 by 14.2 by 10 inches, while the MSI GL65 9SC comes in at 1.1 by 14.1 by 9.8 inches, and each weighs 5.1 pounds.

None of this is to say the build quality is bad, however. The whole chassis is plastic, including the lid, but it’s very sturdy. The keyboard is satisfying to type on, with decent travel. The key caps feel a tad small, but at least this is done to accommodate a full number pad. The keys are backlit across four zones, allowing you to customize the lighting in each area, as shown below. As for the touchpad, it’s basic and feels plasticky, but it’s serviceable with no real issues.

In terms of the display, it’s about what you’d expect from an entry-level panel, but not just the bare minimum. The resolution is full HD, which is a good fit for the more mainstream components inside. The most attractive extra is the 144Hz refresh rate on our model (the base version is 60Hz), which will allow for smoother-looking gameplay in certain titles. In AAA games, you won’t hit frame rates as high as 144fps, or likely even 100fps, but in competitive multiplayer games, this feature is a boon.

The screen is bordered by thin side bezels, which helps the whole laptop look a bit sleeker. The bottom bezel is quite thick, while the top is somewhere in between, but it’s still a step up from the four-sided thick bezels of the past. The picture quality is pretty good, and the screen gets plenty bright at its maximum setting. 

Rounding out the physical build is the port selection, which is pretty strong. This includes one USB 3.0 Type-A port, two USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI connection, a mini DisplayPort, one USB-C port (with DisplayPort support), an Ethernet jack, and an SD card slot. With the possible exception of Thunderbolt 3, that’s basically everything most users will need, and the Ethernet port is a nice bonus for gamers who want a faster, more reliable connection. 

One of the more, well, special aspects of this special edition is the set of all-AMD core components. For $1,199, Dell includes a Ryzen 7 4800H processor, a Radeon RX 5600M GPU, 16GB of memory, and a 512GB solid-state drive. This is an appealing combination, even if (like the Predator Helios 300) the price pushes from budget toward midrange. The lesser configuration starts at $879 and nets you a Ryzen 5 4600H processor, the same GPU, 8GB of memory, and a 256GB SSD. The top-end $1,299 model is the same as ours, but it swaps the drive for a 1TB SSD. There is also the ordinary non-special edition of this laptop, but it’s technically a different product with varying configuration options (including Intel parts).

I will say that the 512GB storage capacity of our unit is a bit disappointing, though. In general I have an increasingly hard time recommending anyone buy a new gaming laptop with that little storage given the size of modern game installations. As I’ve experienced with laptops I test-drive for review, by the time you install a few of your favorite games, the drive is full or nearly full. Having to start juggling what’s installed, or be unable to play something new because you ran out of room, is not a way to make you feel satisfied with your purchase.

The Predator Helios 300 suffers from this problem as well, but it’s even more of an issue now than it was a year ago when we reviewed that laptop. At the time of this writing, my PC’s installation of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare comes in at 180GB on its own—more than a third of this laptop’s storage would be gone from one game! This is an extreme example, but it’s a very popular title, and plenty of other games are close to or over 100GB.

Performance Testing: AMD Shows Its Stuff

For the sake of our benchmark comparisons, I gathered a batch of similarly priced and equitably equipped gaming laptops. These will serve as a good point of comparison for rating the G5 15 SE and gauging its performance, and you can see their names and components below:

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.

The Dell G5 15 SE’s AMD chip does good work in PCMark 10, proving its chops for zipping around your desktop and through everyday multitasking. It’s not quite the highest score here, but is notably better than the Core i5 machines as you’d expect and bests the Helios’s Core i7 CPU. As for PCMark 8, these SSDs are roughly all on par with one another, providing fast boot and load times.

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. We time each operation and add up the total. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here.

As we’ve seen for both laptops and desktops in the past year, the latest AMD processors have a leg up on Intel’s offerings for multi-threaded media tasks. When the G5 15 SE won here, it won big, proving much more efficient. The exception is Photoshop, which is more focused on bursts of speed, while Handbrake and Cinebench require longer sustained work. The Ryzen 7’s eight cores and 16 threads tore through these tests, cutting several minutes off of Handbrake and scoring several hundred points higher in Cinebench compared to the others. 

You can see that the Intel chips are largely clumped together here, so it’s the Ryzen platform making a real difference. I wouldn’t recommend this laptop as a specialist workstation for media professionals (most gaming laptops, especially at this price, aren’t), but it can do the job in a pinch better than the others.

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 while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.

Next up is another synthetic graphics test, 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 scenario for a second opinion on each laptop’s graphical prowess.

Dell’s new machine does well here, posting the highest scores in the more strenuous version of each test. We haven’t tested the Radeon 5600M in a laptop prior to this, so this is the first time we’re getting a firsthand feel for what it can do. Based on these synthetic numbers, it seems roughly in line with or slightly better than Nvidia’s midrange GPUs, but let’s hold off on conclusions until we take a look at the real game benchmarks.

Real-World Gaming Tests

The synthetic tests above 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 settings (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5 under DirectX 11, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider under DirectX 12).

First a word of caution to prospective buyers here. When I first ran these tests, it was clear that something was wrong with the results. The frame rates were oddly low, and I suspected that the games were using the integrated graphics rather than the RX 5600M. After tinkering with settings, it became clear that was the case. I checked within the game settings (Far Cry 5 in particular visibly displays which graphics adapter you’re using) as well as the included AMD Radeon software to try to correct this. I think the key was the latter, as the Radeon software allows you to choose which type of profile you’re running (one is titled Gaming while one is called Power Saving, for example) and which GPU that profile will use. If you open the Radeon software and select the “global graphics” settings within the Graphics tab, you can make sure you’re in gaming mode and that the Radeon RX 5600M is the default GPU.

After tinkering with this, my frame rates were much more in line with expectations. I’m familiar enough with what frame rates to expect from various GPUs that this stood out to me as an issue to look into, but I worry that less savvy and younger users won’t realize they’re seeing lower performance than they should be. These types of settings should be correctly configured by default; I’d hate for someone to buy and use this laptop without realizing they’re hamstrung by the settings.

At any rate, the correct results here are a mix of good and bad news, though off the bat I’ll say the Radeon GPU is certainly not bad. AMD may have pulled ahead of Intel in various places, but it has not managed the same separation with Nvidia just yet (though you could argue some of its lower-midrange desktop GPUs are better values). In Far Cry 5, the Radeon 5600M achieves almost exact parity with the GTX 1660 Ti silicon in the Acer and Lenovo, only 3fps behind each. But it fell behind by quite a bit (as much as 26fps) in Rise of the Tomb Raider.

A larger sample of titles may even out that trend, but either way, we’re learning about the 5600M. Its ceiling appears to be around the 1660 Ti level—in other words, a good 1080p gaming GPU. Those hoping it would be a competitor to the RTX 2060 or 2070 may be disappointed, but perhaps the 5700M would be a contender. What you get with this laptop, though, is still a solid 60fps gaming machine for some AAA titles. You may have to dial the settings down in some of the newer cutting-edge games, but it’s still solid bang for your buck.

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 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.

The 2020 Dell G5 15 SE’s battery life was a head above the rest, with the exception of the 2019 model. It’s not the most portable laptop, but it’s still plenty possible to take with you, and it will actually last off the charger for long enough to make that worthwhile.

A Solid Budget Offering

The new Dell G5 15 SE hits a lot of the marks you’d want for an entry-level gaming laptop. It doesn’t feel cheap, delivers solid frame rates at full HD, includes plenty of ports, and has good battery life. The performance outside of gaming is also solid thanks to AMD’s chip, but the graphics performance isn’t a chart-topper. On the negative side, the design is a bit ho-hum, it’s heftier than competitors, and the storage is a bit restrictive. 

Overall, this is a good but not exceptional mainstream gaming laptop. At the higher end of entry-level pricing, we prefer the Acer Predator Helios 300 for superior gaming performance and a better build. On the low end of the price range, the Editors’ Choice MSI GL65 9SC is just $699 for a similar feature set (but more modest gaming performance), making it our top pick for a true value buy.

Dell G5 15 SE (2020) Specs

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