Dell launched their mid range series (The 3000 series and 5000 series) of laptops few months back. The people at Dell have given us a chance to try out one of their latest hardware – The Dell Inspiron 14 5000 Series. Out of the box and into the test lab it went. We tinkered with the hardware for around two weeks and we find this laptop to be one of those you would love to have for work and play.
It is thin and sleek, weighing only 2.16kg and measuring 22 x 342 x 246mm. The thinness of the laptop makes it easy for you to slip it into a briefcase, backpack or hand carry bag without taking up much space. The built of the laptop is quite sturdy. Plus, you won’t have to worry about accidentally breaking the hinge that connects the display and keyboard when opening up the laptop single-handed. Dell has done a tremendous improvement to the design of the hinge. Instead of the usual two hinges that holds the laptop together on both sides, its now only one long hinge situated at the middle of the laptop. The external chassis features a brushed aluminium top in silver, giving it a stylish and modern look. Smooth curvy edges complement the modern design of the laptop.
Powering this machine is a 4th Gen Intel Core i7 2.00 GHz processor (4M Cache, up to 2.60GHz). Backing it up is two 4GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600MHz of memory and 1TB of storage. GPU installed is an AMD Radeon R7 M265, which is a lower mid-range DirectX 11 graphics card for laptops. If you are thinking of performing heavy graphical work or graphic-demanding games on this laptop, you will need something more powerful. The display of this laptop is a 14 inch LED Backlit Display with Truelife and HD resolution (1366 x 768) with optional touch. This test unit comes with a touch screen which of course allowed us to fully comply to the Windows 8 UI. Keyboard present on this hardware is not backlit enabled, so you might find yourself in a difficult situation when working in the dark. Good thing is, if you accidentally spilled some water on the keyboard, you can easily get rid of it as Dell made the keyboard spill resistant.
One more thing that I really like about Dell laptops nowadays are their touchpad. It is simply wide enough, providing you with ample amount of space for multi-touch and gestures. Located under the laptop are two tuned speakers with Waves MaxxAudio Processing. Accompanying the aforementioned features are two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, a media card slot, Ethernet port, an HDMI port and a security slot. No optical drive is available for this model. The 5000 series comes pre-installed with Windows 8.1 64-bit edition.
Benchmark results shows remarkable scores for the 5000 series. PCMark Vantage gave it a score of 9658 which is quite high thanks to its processor with a maximum throttle of 2.60GHz during heavy usage. It can be seen on the result sheet that high scores were also given for entertainment and gaming.
On PCMark 7, the 5000 series received a score of 4161, with high scores given for entertainment, which tallies to the entertainment scores given by PCMark Vantage. Other aspects in the result sheet also garnered decent scores.
Battery life is yet again an important aspect when choosing a laptop, even if its in the mid-range category. On a full charge, Powermark was left to run on the laptop til the battery run out of juice. Powermark wasn’t running properly to produce the results we need, but no fret, cause a stopwatch was left running alongside the benchmark. The laptop ran for approximately 6 hours before it shut down. Though 6 hours is not superbly long, its pretty much decent for you to complete your last minute work or watch some videos during transit.
Bottom line, this laptop is considered the higher end model among the 5000 series mid-range laptops. If you are considering for a change and don’t want to break your budget, you should definitely put the Dell Inspiron 14 5000 series on your wish list. The Inspiron 14 5000 series retails at RM2599 and is also available in red colour.
