Dell Inspiron 1564: Mobile i3/i5 for the Masses

Dell Inspiron 15 Gaming Performance

In our actual game benches, we found the Inspiron 15's Mobility Radeon HD 4330 to offer barely adequate performance. Since the Intel Core i5's integrated graphics can already handle high definition video acceleration, the real reason to opt for upgrading to the Radeon is going to be for a casual game here and there.

We used the built-in benchmarks for Far Cry 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum, while Empire: Total War, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, Crysis: Warhead, and Mass Effect 2 were all tested by repeating a section in each game and measuring the framerate using FRAPS. You'll notice we've added a few new titles, which means at present we don't have any results for previously tested laptops in those games. We'll be adding more as time passes, but it's pretty clear the HD 4330 is the bottleneck here.

The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 in the Inspiron 15 doesn't offer world-shattering performance—and we didn't really expect it to—but it does at least show playable performance with low/minimum settings at the screen's native resolution in every game we tested, the one exception being Crysis: Warhead. This shows that at least there's some breathing room with the 4330 for playing modern games; the brand new S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat isn't going to run in all its DirectX 11 glory, but there's definitely room to raise the detail settings.

Comparing the Inspiron 1564 with other laptops, we see the 3DMark results reflected in the various gaming titles. Titles that are more CPU limited show the i5-520M with HD 4330 with a slight lead over the UL50Vf with G210M. The UL50Vf struggles in Crysis: Warhead and Mass Effect 2, though the latter appears to be more of a driver issue than a CPU bottleneck, given the performance of the MSI X610.

Given that the Mobility Radeon HD 4330 can at least handle games at the Inspiron 15's native resolution, we're comfortable suggesting this upgrade for light gaming on the go. If you look at Dell's pricing, the Intel HD Graphics model comes with only 2GB RAM and a 250GB HDD for $579, so the extra $90 gets you a larger HDD and twice the memory ($50) in addition to the GPU upgrade ($40)—certainly a reasonable cost, if you're willing to sacrifice a bit of battery life. One thing that does bear mentioning is the system's fan: during games it spins up, and it gets extremely loud. The sounds of the game should mask it for the most part, but it's very audible. If you're going to game on the Inspiron 15, consider investing in a pair of closed-ear headphones.