Compromise and budget gaming laptops go hand-in-hand, but with the Dell G3 Gaming Laptop, Dell has figured out how to balance what gamers want with what they can live without. It’s not a perfect gaming laptop, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find performance value.
No one likes to make compromises, but with gaming laptops, it’s inevitable. When you head into the sub-$1,000 range, those compromises can become even more significant, often denying a machine our recommendation.
At the same time, the Dell Inspiron 15 5000 series has often been the exception to this rule, and it’s often earned honors as our favorite budget gaming laptop. Now, Dell has re-launched the product line, changing the name to Dell G series – which includes the Dell G3, G5, and G7. The notebooks start as low as $750 (currently on sale for $680). Our $850 configuration of the Dell G3 came packing an Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti and a 128GB SSD.
Cutting corners can be a risky business, but our time with the G3 has shown that Dell knows what features matter to gamers on a budget.
Dell is known for its cutting-edge design in laptops like the XPS 13 and 15, and for shrinking chassis and bezels like nobody’s business. You might have laid eyes on the Dell G7, which comes in a pristine “Alpine” White colorway. Unfortunately, not much of that style has found its way to the less expensive G3. Between the lid, Dell logo, backlit keys, and keyboard deck, there’s four different shades of blue — and it’s a few too many. It also has thick bezels around the display, reinforcing the outdated aesthetics of the laptop.
Still, it’s nondescript at worst. It doesn’t make a fool of itself with cheap chrome and red color swatches, a trap a lot of budget gaming laptops fall for. HP’s Omen 15 or Predator Helios 500 are examples of a notebook that’s styled more like a conventional “gaming laptop” with jet engine exhausts and flashing lights.
What it lacks in distinctive style the G3 makes up for in build quality. The plastic chassis is reinforced in all the right places. Even the hinge felt sturdy, making it easy to open and close with 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 nearly as portable as the Dell XPS 15 or Razer Blade, but it cuts the bulk from the previous iteration. It’s mobile enough to throw in your backpack, but not enough so that you won’t notice the extra weight.
The keyboard on Dell’s budget gaming laptops have always been good, and once again, this is a keyboard we enjoyed.
It’s no gaming keyboard, though it has some of the clicky, tactile feel that gamers love. The keys don’t feel loose and the bottoming action isn’t sloppy or soft. The layout is good, though we would have preferred to remove the numpad and enlarge the keys. While we aren’t the biggest fan of the color of the backlighting, 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 notebook offers the kind of mechanical keyboard that will please hardcore gamers.
The touchpad doesn’t fare as well. It’s not glass, so tracking doesn’t feel accurate, 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 sub-par touchpad surface. Dell has removed the physical buttons this time around, which we like, though the click is loud and overly stiff. It’s also wobbly, resulting in frequent mis-clicks. Gamers won’t be caught dead using the touchpad while gaming anyway, though, so saving a few bucks here isn’t the worst idea.
The ports favor those gamers need like ethernet, HDMI, and plenty of USB for peripherals. Dell even threw in a full-sized 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 a USB-C port, but here you’re stuck with USB-A accessories.
Budget gaming laptops are notorious for bad displays. Unfortunately, Dell continues the trend here. The display isn’t worst-in-class, but it’s disappointing by modern standards. The most egregious problem is in color, where it shows 62 percent 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 something like photography or graphic design. It also stands alone among our comparison machines in offering such poor colors, except for Dell’s previous offering in this space, the Inspiron 15 7677 Gaming notebook.
In games, the display’s poor color is noticeable, but not distracting. A game like Battlefield 1 hinges a lot on the visual quality of its environments — and when you crank up the graphics settings, it really can be beautiful. On the G3, the display’s dullness does impact the experience, making the grim game world feel flatter than it would on a better screen. It’s certainly not enough to ruin the gaming experience on the G3, but you must understand that an affordable gaming laptop forces a compromise in image quality not found on most models sold above $1,000.
Fortunately, it’s not all bad news. The 1080p screen is bright enough, maxing out at 251 nits, and contrast is better than some expensive gaming laptops like the Alienware 17 or Digital Storm Equinox. The screen also boasts good viewing angles. We can charitably describe it as functional.
The internal speakers are another aspect of the laptop that will go underused by gamers who’ll prefer to use headphones or external speakers. What’s here isn’t terrible, but it’s not great, either.
The G3 features the Core i5-8300H CPU, a 45-watt Intel chip that’s commonly found in budget gaming laptops like this one. It’s not the most efficient processor in the world, but it’s a huge improvement over the 7th-gen chip used in the G3’s predecessor. With a greatly increased multi-core score in our Geekbench tests, the G3 can better handle heavily multi-thread software, including games that are programmed with quad-core chips in mind.
The strength of the processor is revealing in real-world usage. We encoded a 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 a whole minute and half faster than U-series in more conventional ultrabooks like the Razer Blade Stealth. Only some recent notebooks like the XPS 15 and the ThinkPad X1 Extreme are significantly faster.
Our configuration came with 8GB of RAM, which was plenty of memory to handle the other components included. It is removable, but with one only slot, your future upgrade options are more limited. An additional slot is featured in other configurations, but it’ll bump up your price a bit.
As for storage, Dell offers a wide variety of options. Starting at rock bottom you can buy the $680 model with only a spacious but slow “hybrid” disk drive. We didn’t test it out, but don’t expect it to be as fast as a standard solid state drive. Fortunately, our unit came with a 128GB SK Hynix SATA SSD, in addition to the 1TB old-school HDD. 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 configurations. Both drives are accessible and removable, should you ever want to swap them out in the future.
You might be wondering if you can enjoy play games on an $800 laptop. And we don’t mean scoot by playing Rocket League on Medium settings.
