Dell G5 15 5590 Laptop Review: Price/Performance King and Problem Child

The G5's budget nature is quite apparent. Although the chassis is visually pleasing at first glance and able to shine with a white exterior in our case, a closer look reveals some flaws. Our test model suffered from loud creaking, which of course detracts from the overall good impression, even though it only occurs when opening or closing the lid and when twisting the chassis.

Speaking of twisting: We would describe the case's rigidity as average. While the base unit does not yield even under higher pressure, the lid could be slightly more rigid still. That said, the same could be said for almost any laptop.

In terms of materials, Dell has chosen a combination of metal (top) and plastic (bottom & cover), matching the expectations for this price class. We were not quite satisfied with the hinges, however. When opening the lid, the base unit moves along for the first few centimeters. One-handed opening is possible regardless.

In terms of weight, its 2.7 kg makes it heavier than the competition (2.2 to 2.4 kg). Although the G5 comes with a slim-bezel design, its 364 x 273 mm footprint is also larger than that of competing devices (see size comparison). The laptop has an average height of 24 mm.

The port selection is solid compared to what the competition offers. Dell equips the G5 with four USB ports in total (3x Type-A 3.0 + 1x Type-C 3.1 Gen2 with DisplayPort support), an RJ45 LAN port, an audio jack, an HDMI output and a Noble lock port. The installed card reader cannot be taken for granted anymore either. While it lacks a Thunderbolt 3 port for a truly well-rounded port selection, the former is absent on most budget gaming laptops.

The port layout, as usual, is a matter of taste. Due to the vents on the sides, some ports are relatively close to the front, which may impair movements of an external mouse.

The SD card reader does not exactly offer first-class performance. 25-26 MB/s for sequential read and write speeds, respectively, when transferring pictures are only on USB 2.0 level and far below the transfer rates of the competition, which tend to at least come close to the speed of an external USB 3.0 hard drive.

We have no complaints in terms of Wi-Fi performance on the other hand. 676 Mb/s in our data transmission and 691 Mb/s in our data reception test (1 m between the device and our reference router Linksys EA8500) is a very good result that places the 15-inch device above many other laptops in our comparison. At least on our test device, Dell installs the popular Intel wireless AC module 9560.

Maintenance on the G5 15 5590 is rather simple. While a convenient maintenance hatch is not available, removing the bottom panel (nine Philips screws + a couple of clips) is far from an impossible task and can be performed even by a layman. On the inside of the case, users have access to all of the important components. This includes the RAM slots, Wi-Fi module, battery, M.2 slot of the SSD and the 2.5-inch drive bay of the HDD. The cooling solution consists of two fans and numerous, light blue-colored heatpipes, which connect the soldered CPU and GPU.

The warranty period of the "retail version" is only 12 months.

At 10.5 x 8 cm, the touchpad is fairly large for a 15-inch laptop. Whether the slightly roughened surface is to your liking is a matter of personal preference. While it gives the mouse substitute a good haptic feedback, the gliding properties suffer in return. There is also some room for improvement in terms of the precision. In our experience, the touchpad is not 100% reliable.

By contrast, we noticed nothing unusual in terms of gesture support (zooming in and scrolling with two fingers). The audible feedback of left and right clicks, on the other hand, is particularly noisy. Key clatter is fairly loud in spite of the otherwise solid construction.

Since this is an entry-level version of the Dell G5, users cannot expect a high-end display. Apart from a good black value (0.22 cd/m²) and a good contrast ratio (1,064:1), the display properties of the Full HD panel are relatively disappointing.

The inclusion of the Core i5-9300H, GeForce GTX 1650, and 8 GB of RAM position the G5 15 5590 as a mid-range device that tries to appeal to casual gamers. Since the storage solution and RAM can be swapped, larger/faster drives and more RAM can be installed without too much effort.

One of the biggest weaknesses of the G5 is the CPU's clock speed behavior. Whereas the 9300H achieves a fairly good Turbo Boost performance under pure CPU load (see Cinebench loop), reaching 3.1 to 4.1 GHz, the processor tends to throttle when simultaneous GPU stress comes into play.

In many of the 3D applications we tested, the individual cores throttle down to a mere 900 MHz, which - particularly on a gaming laptop - is not supposed to happen and makes us question Dell's quality control.

The system performance of the G5 15 5590-PCNJJ ranks below those of its competitors. With only 4,615 points, it comes in last among the devices in our comparison. Subjectively, the system also feels slower than many other gaming laptops. The main problem is the sluggish SSD, as we will see in a moment. Due to this, both the boot process and installations require more patience than usual.

Dell may want to upgrade to a faster model, in order to be able to keep up with the competition. The fact that the installed 1 TB HDD (Toshiba MQ04ABF100) achieves better results in some benchmarks further illustrates this point.

The mid-range GPU GeForce GTX 1650 Nvidia released earlier this year offers a good price/performance ratio - at least within the realm of laptop GPUs.

The DirectX 12-capable 12-nm chip from Nvidia's Turing generation houses 1,024 shader units and has access to 4 GB of GDDR5 memory (128-bit interface). Thanks to GPU Boost overclocking, which is applied automatically and works similarly to Intel's Turbo Boost, the base clock of 1,395 MHz is regularly exceeded by a significant margin during gaming. In our The Witcher 3 test, we recorded around 1,635 MHz. Almost 1,710 MHz in Unigine's Heaven 4.0 benchmark is similarly impressive. During the GPU-Z render test, the clock rate even climbed up to 1,905 MHz.

In terms of the 3DMark 11 and 3DMark 13 results, the Dell G5's GPU performance falls into a similar category as the competition. In our long-term test of The Witcher 3 (around one hour at maximum settings and 1920x1080 pixels), there were no sudden spikes or drops in performance, which hints at an adequate cooling solution, at least from the GPU side of things.