Dell - G5 15.6" Gaming Laptop - 144Hz - AMD Ryzen 7 - 8GB Memory - AMD Radeon RX 5600M - 512GB Solid State Drive - grey

I already own an Alienware Aurora R9 and it’s a beast of a gaming PC, but I wanted something to game on the go and capable of doing office taks now that I find myself working from home regularly. For a home/office computer – it’s bulky and not that great looking, but it’s extremely fast for any task you put the computer up against. Emails, PowerPoint, Videos, Zoom calls, etc. It does it all, but it’s heavy and not so elegant as my wife's metal MacBook. For gaming – which is really what it’s designed for – I am surprised that this powered AMD laptop allows me to play the same games on similar settings that I play on my R9. Let’s be honest, the plastic design it’s not the reason why someone is going to buy this computer. The fact is people are interested in this laptop because it has powerful specs and it's the first laptop fully powered by AMD, and it sounds like it’s going to be the only one for 2020. For a little over $1000, this little machine is a monster. My Aurora R9 with the GeForce RTX 2080 Super is definitely more powerful, but again, I have played Warzone and F1 2020 on Ultra settings and this laptop can handle the games in such settings surprisingly well. When playing F1 2020 on Ultra Settings, I was getting an average of 100 FPS. Similarly, when playing Warzone in Ultra Settings, I was getting a consistent 80-90FPS. Here is my breakdown of the good and the bad. And if you want to watch a quick unboxing here is a quick link that I posted on YouTube - https://youtu.be/wVhkhVTm47c AMD Ryzen/AMD Radeon – impressive combination of CPU and GPU. SmartShift is the technology that makes this work and although I can’t see it shifting, it must be working as intended because my games ran smooth with zero no problems. FYI you will need to download a driver update because I tried playing Warzone right out of the box and I was getting some color errors, so upload your drivers before gaming! 144Hz Display – The colors feel a little saturated, but I personally like that. The clarity when playing F1 2020 was impressive. The game really took advantage of the 144Hz display. 8GB – not the best part of this laptop, and even though I got a message before playing F1 2020 that the RAM was below the minimum requirement, the gameplay was smooth with zero issues. Virtual Reality – I didn’t try this. Not really into VR games. Wi-Fi – Fast as expected on a gaming laptop. I test my WiFi and got an average of 150 mbps from my internet via my WiFi. Advance Cooling – at idle and when doing “office” related tasks like emails/videos/social media it's running at about 55°C, but when you open a gaming application, it quickly goes to 80-85°C. To be honest, it can get pretty hot at the top part of the keyboard. But seriously, which gaming computer doesn't get hot? For me, the keyboard was warm but super manageable to touch and play without any discomfort. I personally prefer to play with a controller, so I had an Xbox controller connected during all gameplay and didn't mind the computer running at about 80-85°C because I was not really touch it. The fans are quite but they are also not too loud where your gameplay sound is negatively affected. I even gamed a couple of hours with the laptop on my thighs and never felt like I had to remove it because it was getting too hot. A plus for me was the Performance Mode when you would press F7 and the system would automatically make the fans run at 100% speed. Surprisingly, this did help with cooling and I noticed the temp dropped to about 75°C. The fans got pretty loud but again it didn't affect gameplay, and when I had my headset I couldn't hear them running at full speed. RGB Keyboard – love that I can change the colors via Alienware Command Center, and have it match the Rainbow settings of my Aurora R9. I am still trying to figure out to to keep the keyboard lit at all times. The bad: The battery is not great. You can probably get an hour no charge gaming. When using the computer for office tasks, I got about 4-5 hours of battery life, so it was a little better but not impressive in my opinion. The charger is also huge so portability-wise it takes up some space on your backpack. Speakers aren’t great. Not clear and not loud enough, but it’s not a big issue for me since I game with my headset anyway, but for movie/video watching I wish it had better sound. In short, I recommend this gaming laptop because of its price point and at this price it’s above it’s competition. It’s my first AMD-owned computer and I can see why there is hype around this company. They make products that are more affordable but yet deliver in performance.

I was looking for a travel gaming laptop and I believe this fits the bill. First I would like to say I had a few issues when launching my first game which was Escape from Tarkov. The laptop would crash immediately. I ran through some diagnostics making sure all the drivers were up to date including any Windows 10 updates and their were no heat issues, So I can say my first hour wasn't very fun and I became a little frustrated. After all the updates I retried the game and it worked flawlessly. It had quick response time and ran very smoothly with pretty nice quality graphics. The next game I tested was PUBG and encountered another flawless experience. So overall, my first impression wasn't great with all the difficulties I had in the beginning, but now that it isn't crashing anymore, it is a lightning fast laptop with a great response time. I guess this goes without saying "it's not how you start it's how you finish". Look is not classy....but what gaming laptop is. Fans are fairly quiet and picture quality is solid. Speakers are sub par, but I use my Rig 800's Dolby Atmos for sound anyway. Battery life is also average. I got a little over an hour before plugging in when gaming. Standard use was over four hours. Also I should note the charger is huge! Speed is excellent even for some of the higher end gaming which normally struggles with other gaming laptops around this price point. It has plenty of USB ports for a laptop cooler, wired mouse and headphones. I gave it 4 stars only because of all the issues I had in the beginning and the battery life. Great laptop to game on especially when your traveling. I recommend this laptop.

The Dell G5 Special Edition with all AMD CPU/GPU is a great contender for the gaming laptop marketplace. You get the AMD4800H with 5600M dedicated graphics for a reasonable price. For a lot of detailed bench marking information, I recommend you check the review on hothardware dot com. Trust me – you will be impressed. There is 512GB SSD and 8GB of RAM. This is 2 x 4GB of RAM. See the picture and this is 3200 memory with 22 timings at 1T.So if you want to upgrade the RAM, you will likely replace with 2 x 8GB. You can also expand the hard drive with an additional drive. It is supposed to have a pair of M.2 slots for adding a hard drive space. One is taken with the 512GB drive so there is one open. I did not take off the cover and verify this. With an AMD CPU/GPU combination, you get the advantage of SmartShift. This laptop is one of the first to offer this. SmartShift basically controls the power management between GPU and CPU. There is a 4 zone backlit for your keyboard. It was easy to configure in the Alien Command Center. I tried to get a good pic but it does not show up well in pictures. The screen is 1920x1080 @ 144 hz. It is a Va panel. I is crystal clear and amazing. Seeing 2 USB 2.0 connections was a little disappointing. I wish there were at least 2 if not 3 USB 3 instead of just one. But you can use hubs for expansion. After unboxing, I charged the battery. The battery charges relatively fast. I did find the power button a little odd as it is not clear if it is pressed on or not. After going through all of the Windows and Dell registration stuff, I recommend you download all Dell updates (bios, drivers, Alien Command Center, etc.) and Windows updates of course. This was easy and efficient. After it is all charged, I do a battery test. Of course this is a gaming laptop so my expectations were low. Under load/gaming I got about 50 minutes on battery only. Under a very light load I got about 2.5 hours. Definitely in the reasonable range for a gaming laptop. I ran an OCCT stress test to test stability for 2 hours. It passed with flying colors. Temperature is one main concern with any electronics. Heat and moisture is an electronic devices enemy! These are the temps I was seeing: Full load GPU/CPU in Celsius: 66/81 degrees without using the Game shift (Fn shift 7) and 59/84 degrees with Game shift. GameShift makes a HUGE difference as you can see. So you MUST have this on while you are gaming or any other demanding tasks. The heat is concentrated at the rear bottom. I strongly recommend a cooling pad. In fact, you will not be able to game with this sitting on your lap. Now for a gaming test with Game Shift enabled. The fans are a little loud but you do not hear them with a headset on. I tested Call of Duty Modern Warfare. On the lowest settings it was about 130 fps. On max settings it was around 80-90 fps. The screen looked amazing and gameplay was crisp and responsive. Very respectable I gotta say. You should be able to play anything you like on this and it will be fine. I saw the CPU hit a max of 108C and GPU hit 85C. This is much higher than I would like. A cooling pad is mandatory as you can see. You can get good ones for around $30. But remember the heat is in the rear so pick your cooling fan configuration appropriately. I will get one with 4 outside small fans and one large center fan. The keyboard feels really nice while gaming. I did not feel any flex to the keyboard. Overall this is an impressive laptop for a reasonable price. The heat is a concern and you should do everything you can to cool it down while under load. Battery life is in the expected range for a gaming laptop. 8GB of RAM (2 x 4GB) is a little disappointing for this price. 16 GB would be more appropriate. I do recommend this laptop with 4 stars.

I've been a longtime Dell fan, having purchased their products in the past, but there's no question some of the competition has been pretty formidable as well. So when it came time to find a reasonably priced laptop to be able to game on the go I took a look at the Dell G5 and the specs seemed to match what I was looking for. Not only did I want a good, or maybe even great, machine for on the go, more importantly I was looking for a laptop that I could use on my 65" 4K HDTV to game on. Getting the Dell setup was very easy and didn't take long. I also didn't notice hardly any bloatware, a real nice change from my last Dell experience about 15 years ago (which was filled with all sorts of software). The only issue I did have with the setup was the Alienware keyboard lighting software didn't seem to do anything to change the keyboard lights. After 20 minutes of messing with it I was stumped. Finally I restarted the program and it asked me to get additional software from the internet in order to update the Alienware software. I clicked yes and waited. Nothing happened! So I restarted again, same question, I said yes and this time something began downloading. The program restarted and the lights still did not work. However I noticed there was a dim or dark setting in the software and once I flipped that over to dim then the lights came on! Sort of strange, why not label it on or off? Dim and Dark are a strange label. But it then worked and gave me a couple of choices for lighting (I do love the lighting) and I was off and installing. First of all the 512Gb SSD is an amazing drive, and yes this laptop boots up in less than 10 seconds, but if you want to game a lot you should consider buying more storage space, either upfront or like me, adding on a 1TB external SSD. I added the Western Digital P50 1TB SSD and was off and running installing all sorts of software. On the laptop I went ahead and fired up The Division 2, my favorite PC game at the moment, and was able to set everything to Ultra and it ran smooth at nearly 60FPS. I then hooked it up to my 65" 4K Samsung HDTV and for some reason everything was slowed down a good bit. It took me a few minutes to realize that the Division 2 had automatically adjusted to 4K and my game was running in 4K. It looked amazing but ran with too much slowdown. Time to dial back from Ultra. I dialed everything back to Medium, with a few settings at High and then it ran smooth as butter. I installed Anno 1800, Grand Theft Auto 5 and many other games and all ran fantastic at 4K with Medium to Medium-High settings. No problems at all and have played many games all week, probably 25-30 hours or so and this laptop runs like a dream. No crashes which is fantastic considering my last experience using AMD (A $3,500 Falcon Northwest lan small form factor desktop which compared to this machine was more like a nightmare) but then that was 15 years ago so..... Now one note, my wife did say it was awful loud when running a game (the Division 2) in regards to the fans, but then that is what headphones are for right? When not running a game it's dead quiet though. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Dell diagnostics and information station which ships on every Dell and does a great job of making you see everything you have on your machine and does a good job of explaining it all and maybe even making suggestions on what you might want to add. It is also setup to help a technician remotely diagnose any issues you may have on your new Dell which is cool. One word of note, the AMD Radeon software that comes on your Dell is Radeon Light and not the full Radeon suite. To download the full Radeon suite is 109Gb so that is likely why Dell didn't have the laptop come with the full suite of AMD Radeon software. If you have space to store the software I'd highly recommend getting it as it's a game launcher and does all sorts of cool things for FPS, your games, settings and etc. This laptop does an amazing job of striking a really nice balance between looking like a sleek gaming machine but also appearing to be subdued and not too radical and "yo' bro" type of laptop. This is a beautiful machine that you will not feel ashamed of opening up on the airplane or in a coffee shop. Dell deserves kudos for their design here. So to summarize, I'd highly recommend this machine, it's unbelievably powerful, fast and running in 4K it absolutely puts the current console, yes including the Xbox One X (which I also have), to absolute shame in regards to graphics and fluidity (which is absolutely just as important as graphics). One of my foster kids came up to my game room from playing Grand Theft Auto 5 on the Xbox One and saw me playing the same game on the Dell and exclaimed "how's come yours looks SO MUCH BETTER??" and I think that sums it up. The AMD Radeon 5600M is just a BEAST of a graphics card!! I'D HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS DELL TO ALL YOU GAMERS!!

Dell cripples this computer like crazy. Avoid this model! There are lots of things wrong with this computer. To name a few of them: Dell puts tape between the thermal pads and the VRMs/chiplets that causes the thermal pads to not transfer heat, resulting in dangerously hot VRM temperatures. The newer bios revisions throttle the GPU performance of this. Alienware command center is tied in with other essential drivers, so if there's a software issue on this laptop it can break a lot of the other things on the laptop. The copy of windows that is shipped with this has no drivers properly installed on it, resulting in loss of performance out of the box. The heat sink fins have a gap of air between them and the fan where air can escape the cooler, resulting in higher temperatures. The heat sink has hollow space in the middle of it, reduced surface area for the cooler and fans means the laptop won't cool down as fast. The fans audibly struggle to keep up with how warm the computer is getting, to the point where under a full load at max ram speed the computer still reaches temperatures of 100+ Celsius. The computer doesn't have enough power delivery on the motherboard, which means that the computer will throttle because it doesn't deliver enough power. The thermal paste application out of the box is HORRENDOUS, I highly suggest to everyone who has this to repaste it ASAP.

Got the laptop on a $100 discount, which was perfect because it only comes with 500gb. Used the savings to buy a Samsung 970 EVO plus for the second nvme slot for games and videos. I was worried about the 8GB RAM, but the laptop seems to handle everything without a problem. I use the laptop for games and streaming. I stream on 720p 30fps using this laptop with no problem (PS: do not blame the laptop if your upload speed is only 2mbps or lower, do not expect you can stream on that upload speed) CoD Warzone on High settings no problem, when streaming I tone it down to normal, though I have not experienced any problem on high settings. Apex Legends on all Ultra settings while streaming no problem Cons: - Thermal is terrible, if you are planning on using this as your main gaming device buy a cooling pad to help your intake fans. Or, just buy a cooling pad, thermal is terrible. - heavy and bulky for a 15’ laptop. - battery is terrible, only around 3hrs - design.. well its personal preference - if you are sensitive about fan noise, this is slightly louder than a razer laptop. The AMD SmartShift technology is what makes this laptop a very capable budget laptop. My only suggestion is, wait for this to go on sale again.. Dell laptops tend to go on sale very often.

I had bought a msi bravo on 5/17 that had a ryzen 4600h and a rx5500m and there is no comparison this dell g5 is far superior in terms of features and hardware. Screen is so much brighter and is 144hz compared to 120hz. Few trade offs but nothing worth going back. first is no freesync panel and I liked the chassis design better on my old laptop this g5 reminds me of a old ps1 gray plastic body but for the price and productivity of the laptop there is no better deal for the price.

This is a decent gaming computer if you are playing games like Minecraft and what not but not the best for FPS. I don’t love how heavy it is compared to my husbands gaming laptop