Dell Inspiron 1564: Mobile i3/i5 for the Masses
by Dustin Sklavos on March 3, 2010 11:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Dell Inspiron 15 3DMark Performance
The chip that powers the Inspiron 15's ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330—the M92, the desktop RV710's mobile derivative—remains extremely common as a dedicated option in modern laptops, routinely appearing as the higher-clocked Mobility Radeon HD 4570. While it sports an anemic 80 stream processors, that's still twice the number found in AMD's top-end integrated graphics part, the Radeon HD 4200. The HD 4330 also benefits from a dedicated 512MB of GDDR3 in the Inspiron 15 clocked at an effective 1.2GHz. While most gamers would scoff at such an underpowered GPU, we only need enough power to game at the Inspiron 15's modest 1366x768 resolution.
We've got a second point of comparison with the HD 4330 just to make things interesting. The MSI X610 uses a single-core AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 running at 1.6GHz. Obviously, that's a much slower CPU than the i5-520M, but it will be interesting to see whether the bottleneck is the CPU or GPU in our 3D and gaming results.
It isn't ideal, but in 3DMark the Mobility Radeon HD 4330 at least puts in a decent showing against NVIDIA's competing lowest-common-denominator, the GeForce G 210M powered by 16 of NVIDIA's CUDA cores—though granted the G210M is handicapped somewhat by the slower SU7300 @ 1.73GHz CPU. The CPU also makes a huge difference when we compare the MSI X610 and the Inspiron 15, with each succeeding 3DMark version showing a larger gap. We'll see how things stack up in our gaming results next.
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T2k - Thursday, March 4, 2010 - link
1. Well, I have seen both (current) displays and I found Acer's somewhat better + webcams were always great in the few Acers I've come across recently (in 2-3 years) whereas Dell's track record is rather spotty there...2. There's an i5-520M version of it, for $850 but I don't think it worth $100 at all - IMO you would be better off rather spending it on a small SSD for the system and moving the 500GB to an external case instead...
3. Acer is fully-featured, unlike this one which, as the writer said it, feels stripped down.
4. The new DX11 mobile ATI chip gives you full 8-channel audio over HDMI which is a big plus for HTPC use, even if occasional.
5. Of course, this new mobile chip will drive 13x76 resolution just fine even in new games.
KaarlisK - Thursday, March 4, 2010 - link
Why should that be an external case? Just replace the DVD drive with a caddy holding the SSD/HDD and move the DVD drive to the external case.kmmatney - Thursday, March 4, 2010 - link
I'm not a big fan of the 16:9 laptop screen. Seems like things have gone backwards when you have fewer vertical pixels that the old 1024 x 768 screens many years ago.JarredWalton - Thursday, March 4, 2010 - link
What I've heard is that it's all about maximizing the number of LCD panels you can get from the glass substrate... if you use 16:10 each panel is 10% larger, and the source substrate size has been optimized lately for 16:9 production.strikeback03 - Thursday, March 4, 2010 - link
Might be true, but it still sucks. Kinda like just about everything relating to laptop LCDs these days.shobazee - Thursday, July 22, 2010 - link
Dell Inspiron 17 inch with corei5 is the best laptop .. Dell's designers seem to understand the importance of user experience extending beyond simple metrics like system performance... I THINK IT IS A GREAT DEAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!anisurrups - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
Your article is very important for every dell user