Dell G3 Gaming Laptop
Dell G3 Gaming LaptopMSRP$800.00Score DetailsBenefits Decent build qualityExcellent valueFairly thin and lightGood performanceImproved battery life...
12/01/2022
Dell G3 Gaming Laptop
MSRP
$800.00
Score details
Advantages
Decent build quality
Excellent value
Fairly thin and light
Good performance
Improved battery life
Disadvantages
Bland design
Slow storage options
Screen colors are dull, inaccurate
Nobody likes to compromise, but with gaming laptops, it's unavoidable. As you head into the sub-$1000 range, these trade-offs can become even more significant, often denying a machine our recommendation.
< p>At the same time, the Dell Inspiron 15 5000 series has often been the exception to this rule, and it has often earned accolades asfavorite budget gaming laptop
. Today, Dell relaunched the product line, changing the name to Dell G-series, which includes the Dell G3, G5, and G7. Laptops start from $750 (currently on sale for $680). Our $850 configuration of the Dell G3 contained an Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti and a 128GB SSD.
Taking shortcuts can be risky business, but our time with the G3 showed that Dell knows which features are important for gamers on a budget.
Oh, is this a gaming laptop?
Dell is known for its cutting-edge design in laptops like the XPS 13 and 15, and shrinking chassis and bezels like nobody's business. You may have cast your eyes on the
Dell G7
, which comes in a pristine white “Alpine” colourway. Sadly, little of that style found its way into the cheaper G3. Between the lid, Dell logo, backlit keys and keyboard, there are four different shades of blue - and that's a bit much. It also has thick bezels around the display, reinforcing the laptop's outdated aesthetic.
However, it is at worst indescribable. It doesn't mock itself with cheap chrome and red color swatches, a trap that a lot of budget gaming laptops fall into.
HP Omen 15
Where
Predator Helios 500
are examples of a laptop that looks more like a conventional "gaming laptop" with jet engine exhausts and flashing lights.
Riley Young/Digital Trends
What it lacks in distinctive styling, the G3 makes up for in build quality. The plastic chassis is reinforced in all the right places. Even the hinge felt solid, making it easy to open and close with just one finger.
The 15-inch version we tested was reasonably svelte considering the price and the hardware inside. At 5.6 pounds and 0.89 inches thick, it's not as portable as the
Dell XPS 15
Where
Razer Blade
, but it cuts most of the previous iteration. It's mobile enough to put in your backpack, but not mobile enough that you won't notice the extra weight.
No frills needed
The keyboard on Dell's budget gaming laptops has always been fine, and again, it's a keyboard we've enjoyed.
The display isn't the worst in its class, but it's disappointing by modern standards.
It's not a gaming keyboard, although it does have some of the tactile, tactile feel that gamers love. The keys aren't loose and the bottom action isn't sloppy or sluggish. The layout is good, although we would have preferred to remove the number pad and enlarge the keys. While we're not the biggest fans of the backlight color, it's bright and evenly lit. The Omen 15 has a more gamer-oriented keyboard with its highlighted WASD and 26-key rollover with anti-ghosting, but the overall typing feel is similar. Neither laptop offers the kind of mechanical keyboard that will appeal to hardcore gamers.
The touchpad doesn't fare as well. It's not glass, so tracking doesn't feel precise, which you'll notice most in detailed work like selecting text or carefully moving windows. It supports Windows Precision drivers for fancy multi-touch gestures, but that only highlights the subpar touchpad surface. Dell has done away with the physical buttons this time around, which we like, although the click is loud and too stiff. It's also wonky, leading to frequent bad clicks. Players won't be caught dead using the touchpad while gaming anyway, so saving a few bucks here isn't the worst idea.
Riley Young/Digital Trends
Ports favor gamers that gamers need like Ethernet, HDMI and plenty of USB for peripherals. Dell even added a full-size SD card slot for good measure. What's missing here is Thunderbolt 3 (which the Omen 15 offers), taking external GPUs off the table. Even its predecessor featured at least one USB-C port, but here you're stuck with USB-A accessories.
Barely adequate display
Budget gaming laptops are notorious for poor displays. Unfortunately, Dell is continuing the trend here. The display isn't the worst in its class, but it's disappointing by modern standards. The most glaring issue is color, where it shows 62% of the sRGB color space and only 46% of Adobe RGB. The result is a rather dull screen that lacks saturation, and it shouldn't be used for anything like photography or graphic design. It's also the only one among our comparison machines to offer such poor colors, with the exception of Dell's previous offering in this space, the Inspiron 15 7677 gaming notebook.
In games, the wrong screen color is noticeable, but not distracting. . A game like
Battlefield 1
Much depends on the visual quality of its environments - and when you crank up the graphics settings, it can really look stunning. On the G3, the dullness of the display impacts the experience, making the dark gaming world look flatter than on a better screen. It's certainly not enough to spoil the gaming experience on the G3, but you have to understand that an affordable gaming laptop forces a trade-off in image quality not found on most laptops. models sold above $1000.
Fortunately, it's not that bad. news. The 1080p display is bright enough, maxing out at 251 nits, and the contrast is better than some expensive gaming laptops like the
Alienware 17
Where
Digital Storm Equinox
. The screen also offers good viewing angles. We can charitably describe it as functional.
Riley Young/Digital Trends
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— Eduin L Tue Aug 10 17:49:17 +0000 2021
The internal speakers are another aspect of the laptop that will be underutilized by gamers who prefer to use external headphones or speakers. What's here isn't terrible, but it's not great either.
Great performance, minus the storage
The G3 features the Core i5-8300H processor, a 45-watt Intel chip commonly found in budget gaming laptops like this. It's not the most efficient processor in the world, but it's a huge improvement over the 7th generation chip used in the G3's predecessor. With a significantly increased multi-core score in our Geekbench tests, the G3 can better handle heavily multi-threaded software, including games programmed with quad-core chips in mind.
The strength of the processor is telling in real world usage. We encoded 4K video in Handbrake on the Dell G3 in just three minutes and thirty seconds. That's only a handful of seconds behind the Core i7-8750H in the Razer Blade or Digital Storm Equinox, while also being a minute and a half faster than the U-series in more conventional ultrabooks like the
Razer Blade Stealth
. Only some newer laptops like the XPS 15 and the
ThinkPad X1 Extreme
are significantly faster.
Our configuration came with 8GB of RAM, which was more than enough. memory to manage the other included components. It's removable, but with only one slot, your future upgrade options are more limited. An extra slot is offered in other configurations, but it will increase your price a bit.
All the compromises made in design, storage, and display helped Dell keep the price low and the performance high.
When it comes to storage, Dell offers a wide variety of options. Starting at the lowest, you can buy the $680 model with only a roomy but slow “hybrid” disc drive. We haven't tested it, but don't expect it to be as fast as a standard SSD. Luckily, our unit came with a 128GB SK Hynix SATA SSD, in addition to the old-school 1TB hard drive. The SSD had an average read speed of 500 megabytes per second and a write speed of 209 MB/s.
It's not a lot of space, nor is it fast as the PCIe drives you'll find in more expensive laptops, but this is where the rubber meets the road with budget setups. Both drives are accessible and removable, should you ever wish to swap them out in the future.
The GTX 1050 Ti performs well
You might be wondering if you can play games on an $800 laptop. And we don't mean scoot while playing
Rocket League
on Medium settings. We mean
really
the game. Fortunately, all the compromises made in design, storage, and display helped Dell keep the price low and performance high.
At the center of that performance is the Nvidia GTX GeForce 1050 Ti, which is a solid choice for a budget gaming laptop like this. It can also be configured with the Nvidia GTX GeForce 1050 or 1060, but the 1050 Ti handles gaming and benchmarks well. In 3DMark Fire Strike, the Dell G3's 1050 Ti landed just between the 1050 and 1060. But more importantly, games on the Dell G3 are seriously fast.
We struggled to get playable frame rates at 4K with settings not lowered to the bottom, but if you stick with 1080p you'll be very happy with the results. In
Battlefield1
at maximum settings, the G3 generated 60fps — and the same goes for
Fortnite
. We were delighted to see how responsive the gameplay was in games like these where response time is critical.
Nate Barrett/Digital Trends
The only real obstacle was
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
, a sadly difficult game. At Ultra, the G3 struggled to exceed 25 FPS, and even with the settings lowered to High, it managed a barely playable 34 FPS. In demanding games like this, you'll want to upgrade to the GTX 1060 for smoother gameplay.
Better battery life, but still not great
You can't expect great battery life from a gaming laptop. Even high-end models like the Alienware 17 R5 max get less than four hours of battery life. The Dell G3, with its 56 watt-hour battery, performed honorably for what it is and is an improvement over the previous iteration.
As is common, the G3 did better in our video battery test, lasting five hours and 43 minutes with a looping 1080p clip with the screen measured at 100 lux. For our iMacro web browsing, the G3 ran for five hours and 18 minutes, which, again, isn't too shabby compared to average gaming laptops.
Although it does drop significantly when playing games, it's nice to know you can keep it away from the wall for more than a few hours at a time. You'll want to choose something like a Razer Blade if you need a gaming laptop with near all-day battery life.
Our opinion
The Dell G3 gaming laptop isn't perfect, but it's one of the best in its class. The compromises Dell makes to keep performance high and price low don't sacrifice laptop usability in the way that matters. If there's one area where the compromise seems excessive, it's the display. We'd love to see another budget gaming laptop come along and move upmarket, but so far the G3 is your best bet at this price.
Do you have alternatives?
You don't have many options for gaming laptops at this price point, especially not ones that directly compete in price with the Dell G3. the
HP Omen 15t Gaming
comes close to $849 on sale, albeit without an SSD, and it's a lot uglier. The same goes with the
Asus TUF Gaming FX504
.
Instead, take a close look at the various configurations of the Dell G3. Between the G3, G5, and G7, there's an almost endless variety of GPU options and storage options. Even options just over $1000 offer great value.
How long will it last?
The Dell G3 comes with a standard one-year warranty, which isn't great - however, that's what we'd expect from major (non-Apple) manufacturers. Although its components are all up to date, the missing USB-C port makes it a little less upgradable. Replaceable memory and storage ensure you can upgrade in the future when you're ready.
Should you buy it?
Yes. For gaming on the go under $1000, the DellG3 is your best bet.
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