Dell Inspiron 15 7559 Review: Pushing Inspiron Boundaries with New Gaming Laptop

Dell’s Alienware is renowned as an archetype gaming notebook, but its new gaming laptop is a lunge ahead from the traditional budget offerings in the Inspiron series. Dell Inspiron 15 7559 is more than a mere iteration in design and offers a treasure of upgrades under the hood, available at a price of Rs. 1,17,690. Powered by the latest i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM and 4GB GPU, this makes for an interesting option in the gaming-oriented segment.

Build that Attracts Attention, not Fingerprints

At 2.67kg, the Inspiron 7559 is not conveniently mobile, but the targeted class of customers cherishes sitting for prolonged periods. Out-of-box, power adapter accompanies the notebook, with standard paperwork. Without intending to compel ultrabooks fans, the Inspiron 7559 is chunky and feels sturdy. Build is durable and the exteriors boast a rubberized matte black finish, which doesn't attract many fingerprints, while red accents on speaker grill, the rubber feet, exhaust vents, around the touchpad and Dell logo on the lid give it a refreshing look. The palm rest is well spaced and doesn’t creak, even on applying pressure.

Red accented chassy

Inspiron 7559, In and Out

The right side houses one, now customary, USB 3.0 port, an HDMI port, a Kensington lock, Ethernet port, and SD Card reader. Left has two additional USB 3.0 ports along with combo headphone jack, power input and one of the three exhaust grills while remaining two are placed at the rear. Though the world is moving away from drives, given the thickness of the laptop, lack of a physical Optical Media drive is displeasing.

Lifting the lid with one hand is easy and doesn't flex the screen, even when pulled or pressed from either edge. Most part of the 15.6-inch display frame is covered with glass and houses HD webcam and dual microphones. The full-sized chiclet keyboard has two-stage backlighting (medium and full) and has a soft texture offering comfort while typing. The keys are big-lettered and decently spaced, however, the included num-pad is cramped in a small space and may challenge those with big fingers. The ClickPad-style trackpad is highly sensitive and seamlessly responds to multi-finger gestures.

Promising Specifications

On the inside, the Dell Inspiron 15 7559 is powered by latest Skylake-based 6th Gen Intel i7-6700HQ CPU with four physical cores and Hyperthreading (Hyperthreading is Intel’s proprietary application for parallel processing of two functions; each physical core acts like two virtual {logical} cores) coupled with 16GB of DDR3 RAM and Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M GPU with 4GB dedicated DDR5 graphics. Onboard it unites a 1TB 5400 RPM Hard Drive with 128GB SSD, letting it power on and off, and launch applications in virtually a blink of an eye.

A gaming and multimedia powerhouse

Beautiful 4K LED Screen: You won’t Stop Looking at it

An alluring feature of the Inspiron 7559 is its Ultra-HD 4K (3840 x 2160) LED-backlit touch screen. It has great touch response but tends to be bouncy on frequent interactions. Owing to its resolution, the screen is otherwise very sharp and animations seem fluid. Colours lean towards warm tones and are soothing to the eyes. Display is fairly bright for indoor seating. The only downside to the screen is its highly glossy nature, which makes outdoor viewing in daylight difficult. Due to high resolution, the display is automatically magnified to 250% (can be scaled to users' preference) which makes certain apps or dialog boxes tiny.

Impressive Performance

With powerful specifications, there is no visible lag in opening large files, heavy software, and loading games. Transfer speeds of SSD and Hard Drive are in the range of 500Mbps and 100Mbps, respectively. Putting its core virtue of gaming to test on Windows High-Performance mode, we observed that Far Cry 4 and Need For Speed (NFS) Rivals run with noticeable shuttering at 4K resolution, but gameplay is seamless when lower resolutions are selected; Battlefield 4 ran flawlessly on highest video settings.

Heat dissipation in Dell Inspiron 15 7559

To keep things cool Dell claims to have new "revolutionary" mechanism with three exhausts which vent hot air off from two fans, using 240 thermal fins. This keeps heat at bay considerably and temperature doesn’t rise to uncomfortable levels, even in episodes of heavy gaming, unless users prefer to play heavy games keeping the notebook on their laps.

Average Sound Quality

A great audio integration is vital for a fantastic gaming experience and this is where the Dell Inspiron 15 7559 falls short of “perfect”. Audio is sourced via 2.0 speakers on the top and a sub-woofer at the bottom, making it a 2.1 setup. The sound quality is decent and clarity of dialogues is ample at high volumes. But it tends to muffle sounds of instruments while playing music and movies or games with dominating soundtracks. The quality deteriorates when boosted by Dell's MaxxAudio Pro by Waves enhancements. Although, the subwoofer adds to the richness of the sound as compared to notebooks without any, Dell's focus is clearly on mids and highs lacking much emphasis on deep bass. Using MaxxAudio, one can tweak the Equalizer to achieve suitable and comfortable audio.

Convincing Battery Life

The Inspiron 7559 comes with a 6-cell 74 watt-hour battery which lasted six hours while running on Windows High Performance mode with full brightness at 4K resolution. Subjecting the laptop to our standard video loop test, it lasted for 2 hours 45 minutes. However, the battery is non-removable and the bottom lid must be unscrewed to take the same out.

Verdict

Undeniably, performance is one arena that Dell Inspiron 15 7559 masters, with due focus on performance-intensive games, except minor lag on heavy graphics usage. For its hefty price badge, it performs suitably well. The notebook’s consistent performance and rugged build earn it golden stars, but heavy weight could be a peeve for many. Users who consume a lot of multimedia from DVDs will have to settle without an optical drive.