Dell G15 5530 review: RTX 4050 gaming laptop in Dark Shadow Gray

The G15 is up against other RTX 4050-based 15-inch gaming laptops like the Medion Erazer Crawler E40, the Lenovo LOQ 15IRH8 and the Asus TUF A15 FA507, all of which appear in the tables below for comparison purposes.

Because the chassis is identical to the G15 we previously reviewed apart from its colour scheme (grey instead of white) and keyboard language, we are only going to briefly cover the case, specs and input devices in this article.

The G15 turns out to be a notebook with a classic build, meaning it's neither very thin (2.7 cm, or 1.06 in) nor especially light (2.7 kg, or 5.95 lb). The competitors offer more modern designs, though this doesn’t always have to be a good thing (keyword: emissions). In terms of aesthetics, the laptop's design is particularly eye-catching, but like what many other manufacturers do in this price bracket, Dell has opted for an all-plastic exterior that has a tendency to rattle in some spots. The quality of the fit and finish is good by contrast. The hinge mechanism does a decent job; the laptop can be easily opened with one hand.

Interfaces

The port selection is pretty outdated and sparse. For instance, you won’t find a single USB4 port on the device. Instead, it only comes with one USB. 3.2 Gen 2 (Type C) and three USB 3.2 Gen 1 (Type A) ports. Users will also have to do without a card reader and a Kensington slot. But at least the device has a HDMI 2.1 output, an Ethernet port and an audio jack.

The G15's wireless performance is on par with (send) or higher than (receive) the average we’ve seen so far from this class of laptop. The built-in wireless card is made by Intel (Wi-Fi 6 AX201).

The webcam is fairly mediocre quality-wise. There is still room for improvement when it comes to colour accuracy and image sharpness.

Given the level of performance on offer, the G15 is shipped with an absurdly big and weighty power adapter (incl. cable 1.5 kg, or 3.3 lb).

Opening the chassis can definitely be done even by an average user. After removing ten cross-head screws, you’ll be able to lift the bottom panel out of the retainer. Waiting under the hood are the cooling unit, battery, Wi-Fi module, two occupied memory slots, one M.2 2230 slot in use, and one free M.2 2280 slot for storage upgrade.

Dell provides only a 12-month warranty by default in Germany. But warranty period may vary depending on region.

The touchpad could also use a bit of work from Dell. For instance, besides the somewhat modest size (approx. 10.5 x 6 cm, 4.1 x 2.4 in), we also have gripes about the very loose surface. That said, the touchpad provides an acceptable level of smoothness and precision.

The laptop comes with a 165Hz display as well. However, the panel is different from the one used on the G15 we previously reviewed (see table). This also explains why some of the results obtained for the two displays differ from each other.

Whether it has an RTX 4050 or RTX 4060 inside, the Dell G15 5530 is still a mid-range gaming laptop. The 16 GB of DDR5 memory is absolutely sufficient for gaming purposes at the moment; as mentioned above, the slightly meagre 512 GB of SSD storage can be expanded by adding a larger M.2 drive.

Compared with the Core i7-13650HX, the Core i5-13450HX only has four instead of eight efficiency cores, but the number of performance cores remains the same at six. Both CPUs are from the Raptor Lake generation and fabricated using the improved 10 nm process. Taking all the CPU benchmarks into consideration, the Core i5-13450HX is roughly 15% slower than its more expensive sibling and falls somewhere in between the Core i5-13500H (Medion Erazer Crawler E40) and the Core i7-13620H (Lenovo LOQ 15IRH8). The score decreased slightly over time during our Cinebench loop test, but there weren’t any drastic performance drops.

All the devices in our comparison are fairly close together in terms of system performance. In PCMark 10, the review unit achieved almost the same overall score as the more expensive G15 model.

At first glance, the laptop’s mass storage cuts an excellent figure. Despite its compact size, the 512 GB M.2 2230 drive made by WDC had an extremely good showing in our series of benchmarks. Despite this, our loop test revealed that, under sustained load or stress, the drive sometimes experienced a severe level of throttling not seen in any of the competitors.