Dell Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1 Black Edition (i7-8565U, MX150) Convertible Review

The Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 9560 adapter provides wireless connectivity with theoretical transfer rates up to 1.73 Gbps. Our current testing setup only supports speeds up to 1 Gbps, but the Inspiron still manages solid speeds of 580 Mb/s transmit and 621 Mb/s receive. This isn’t far from the other laptops in our tests.

The new 4-element lens webcam offers improved performance plus Temporal (multi-frame analysis) Noise Reduction to reduce the incidence of noise in low light (high ISO) situations. Dell also champions the precise focus across the breadth of the image, something which did seem subjectively better than the average webcam during our time testing the machine.

The touch fingerprint reader is integrated into the power button, and we had absolutely no problems during our testing period with its performance. Authentication typically takes mere milliseconds and we never once had to revert to typing a PIN or password as an alternative.

Dell’s Inspiron 7000 2-in-1 normally ships with only an AC adapter, but our review unit also included a Dell Premium Active Pen (model #PN579X, $100 MSRP), which is a Wacom AES 2.0 device that is also backward compatible with Wacom AES 1.0 and MPP (Microsoft Pen Protocol) 1.51. It supports 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity with a 240 Hz report rate, and it links to the computer using the Bluetooth 4.2 protocol. There are three total buttons (customizable using Windows Ink Workspace); like most, the pen is powered by a single AAAA battery and Dell reports a 12 month battery life.

While we do like the pen, the tips aren’t quite as natural-feeling as the rubbery ones of the Surface Pen, and some users report that they can break rather easily. Dell does cover this under their 1-year warranty period, however, so if that becomes a problem, users can contact the manufacturer to have a replacement provided. Please see our Guarantees, Return policies and Warranties FAQ for country-specific information.

Keyboard

The island-style keyboard features a short stroke with medium feedback and actuation force, and after a short adjustment period, it’s comfortable to type with. The keys stop with a bit of softness, which does make the initial adjustment a little harder when coming from something like a Latitude or ThinkPad (both with their arguably class-leading keyboards). It’s definitely a step down from something like an XPS, which (while comparable in terms of key travel and layout) seems to lend itself to quicker and more accurate typing. We have few criticisms about the fairly traditional layout, by the way, apart from the (as often is the case) small arrow keys. The keys are backlit with two levels of adjustable brightness.

Unlike the less expensive flavors, the Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1 Black Edition doesn’t even grant the option of a mere FHD display. Instead, the only choice is a glossy 15.6-inch UHD (3840x2160) IPS display with a very slim 8 mm bezel on the left/ridge sides. Fortunately, at first appearances, the panel seems better than expected; colors are vivid and brightness and contrast seem good enough. Backlight bleed, on the other hand, is quite conspicuous all around the perimeter on any dark screen.

Turning to our measurements, we record 315 cd/m² brightness with a contrast ratio of 892:1. Neither of these numbers is in any way remarkable, but both are perfectly acceptable nonetheless. The brightness actually bests most machines in our comparison table (apart from the wildly luminous Samsung Notebook 9), but the contrast is on the lower end of the competitors.

Our color space rendering measurements explain our positive subjective impressions: with effectively 100% of the sRGB gamut covered and some 67.3% of AdobeRGB, the Inspiron 15 7000 tops all of today’s competitors and even outperforms the Samsung Notebook 9’s 61.3%. Obviously better panels exist in pricier machines, but this is quite good in context with its class.

Color accuracy is a slightly different story, with DeltaE Colorchecker and Greyscale readings of 5.45 and 8.1 (thanks to a particularly deviant white). Still, that isn’t awful, and the Total Gamma measurement of 2.207 and CCT average of 6845 are within a few percentage points of their ideal values.

Response times are too slow for any sort of competitive gaming, though that’s not what this particular machine is intended for at any rate. The display happily does not employ any sort of PWM at any brightness, unlike the competitors.

Outdoors, the glossy screen makes operation difficult. In the sun, it’s practically unusable, and even in shaded areas it requires careful planning and positioning. Viewing angles are as wide as expected for an IPS display.

During our time with the Inspiron 7000 2-in-1, most operations were quick and painless, but installation of programs did take longer than we would have expected given the hardware. Further investigation will reveal (as we’ll see in the next section) that this is due to weak write performance of the particular internal NVMe SSD we received. Nonetheless, PCMark scores are hardly bad: PCMark 10 yields 3719 points (versus a category average of 3820 points), a few percentage points below most rivals and 36% below the XPS 15. Results are a bit more lopsided in PCMark 8’s suite of tests, with the Samsung Notebook 9 actually taking top spot there—but that may be due to its lower FHD screen resolution (PCMark 8’s scores seem to be much more heavily influenced by such discrepancies).

The OEM-provided Toshiba NVMe SSD in our review unit is certainly tiny; it’s one of the newer M.2 2230 NVMe SSDs, and it therefore requires an adapter to span the entirety of the internal M.2 port (the port supports M.2 2280 drive sizes, by the way). But the physical size of the DRAM-less SSD isn’t the only thing that’s smaller than expected here: in our tests, so are the write speed values, falling far short of what’s expected of a typical NVMe SSD (or, for that matter, even a conventional SATA drive).

Our tests with AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark show sequential write speeds of just 209 MB/s and 172 MB/s, respectively, with even lower values in 4K-64 tests. Read speeds are a bit on the low side, but they’re acceptable: we show 1123 MB/s and 924 MB/s in those same tests. So if you’re expecting true NVMe performance, we’d suggest going with the smaller of the two drives and swapping it out first thing for something better aftermarket (such as perhaps a Samsung 970 EVO).

Like the rest of the specifications, lower-end varieties of the Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1 provide a choice between integrated and dedicated GPUs, but the Black Edition goes all in on NVIDIA’s GeForce MX150 dedicated graphics. This entry-level mobile solution based on the GP108 chip with Pascal architecture includes 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM and a power consumption rating of around 25 W TDP.

For those curious, the Inspiron 15 7000 features the fully-powered “1D10” variant of the MX150, not the lower-powered “1D12” label which essentially correlates with a Max-Q derivative of the popular entry-level GPU.

We’ve tossed in a couple different competitors for our GPU comparison for a bit of variety here: the Lenovo Flex 5 15 and the LG Gram, both which feature lower-grade GPUs than the MX150 (which most of the comparison field leverages). As expected, both of these models line the bottom of the charts, some 38% and 63% below the Inspiron in 3DMark Fire Strike. However, the Inspiron does manage to beat the average for this GPU in our database in that same test, and it’s in the middle of the pack of the four other machines sharing this GPU in today’s comparisons with a score of 3465 (as expected, the XPS 15, powered by a GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q, tops the chart here with 7374 points). It’s mostly the same story in 3DMark 11 Performance GPU, where we record a score of 4319 points—a bit more distant from the MSI PL62’s 4876 points, but still above the average for this adapter by around 4 percentage points.

We employ intensive benchmarks to stress each machine and test its limits of performance under extreme conditions. Under full CPU load using Prime95, the Inspiron 15 7000 initially manages a 4.1 GHz clock rate across all four cores, but after around 15 seconds it drops to around 3.0 GHz before eventually settling at 2.3 GHz for the duration of the test. Temperatures peak at 91 °C before dropping eventually to 57 °C once clock rates subside. Stressing both CPU and GPU simultaneously using Prime95 and FurMark results in even lower CPU clock rates of just 1.6 GHz, technically a bit below the base clock rate (and thus qualifying as throttling). GPU frequencies are clearly prioritized here, as they still remain stable even under these conditions at around 1266 MHz.

Running Witcher 3 provides a clearer picture of what one might expect during real-world gaming usage. Here, CPU frequencies of 3.7 GHz and temperatures of 66 °C are fairly consistent. The GPU, meanwhile, averages roughly 1533 MHz overall with a stable temperature of 69 °C.

Our review unit maintains its performance regardless of power state; while operating unplugged, we recorded a 3DMark 11 overall score of 4347.