Dell Inspiron 5577 : A Noob's Review

Unboxing and initial impressions:

Unboxing the package does not seem to be very special. In the box only three items are provided: a charger the notebook and some manuals.

The laptop at first seems to have a good built which i will elaborate about later. The booting tike is pretty fast and seems to run quite quiet during the setup of windows.

The power brick is rated at 130 W and doesn't get very hot while charging, but while playing games it gets very hot.

So far so good!

Display and lid:

The lid flexes only a little if force is applied on it. However it gets a little more mushy towars the centre or dell logo. It has a soft touch finish.

Hinges are tight and sometimes I wonder if they will damage the panel if opened abruptly .

The display has an IPS panel. Strange enough since I saw on dell's website that it only comes with back-lit led display. The display gets super bright on full brightness. The display has good viewing angles and a matte finish. Only problem is that dark colors appear to be less dark .

Light bleed is minimal.

Keyboard and track-pad:

Keyboard is a red backlit keyboard having two stages of brightness. The typing experince so far is more than pleasant and comfortable. I had a macbook air whose keys were bit more crisp in comparision. While gaming the keyboard is not hot at any point and creates no problems.

The trackpad takes some time getting used to but once its done its pretty good to use. It is very sensitive but less accurate than mba that i was using previously. It has a plastic surface and scrolling is somewhat inaccurate.

The keyboard deck has a same soft touch matte finish on it and offers no flex no matter how hard it is pressed. Same goes for palmrest which has good build quality.

Internals:

Processor: Intel i5 7300hq

GPU: GeForce GTX 1050 (4 GB GDDR5)

Thermal performance : (UPDATE)

At first glance itself, I became sure that this laptop will not be able to handle the internals( I got the idea by seeing the laptops thickness )

I did the initial tests for aida64 when I was at my home. It was cold there like 15c and I observed no throttling or whatsoever under full load and turbo locks applied topping at a bad 87c. So when I gamed on it there was no performance cap or loss.

The story changed drastically when i returned to my college in south India where the temp was about 27 to 30c. The CPU throttled at 97c max for cores 0 and 2.

So to sum it up, thermal solution is not good, PCH too hits maximum of 79 C and stays there on full load.

The problematic part is the SSD getting very hot and reaching about 56 C.

UPDATE: The overheating problem was fixed by itself after 1 week of hardcore gaming on the notebook. I know it sounds weird, but that's how it got fixed ! Now I get stable temperatures of about 87 C max. on CPU and 68 C max on GPU. I guess the thermal paste took some time to settle..

UPDATE 2: Read how this laptop has made me go crazy on the last post.

1st update : 30/01 : Started the review, more coming soon!
2nd update : 04/02
3rd update : 07/03

 

Things I like:

1. Hinges are tight.
2. Display is definitely better than other competitors.
3. Palm rest and keyboard area have no flex.
4. Accurate track-pad.
5. One screw access for back panel. Inside everything is laid out nicely.
6. Budget friendly.
7. GPU overclocking in afterburner allows me to go up to +420 MHz without any problems.
8. Got 120 Hz overclock on display without any artifacts using CRU.
9. All USB ports are USB 3.0.

Things I dislike:

1. Track pad is a little wobbly.
2. Keyboard registers single key press as double
3. Undervolting is not at all possible. It makes my system unstable.
4. Fan assembly screws are below keyboard and ot directly under the back panel. This kills me a little
5. USB 2.0 SD cad reader.
6. Soft touch material on lid and palm rest really loves getting scratched.
7. Connect the laptop to a WiFi and it will hog the traffic (I forgot the name of process, but if you kill it using task manager, it would create no problem afterwards).
8. Though it has a 76 W Hr battery, it doesn't give that much battery backup.

Update #1: 04/02

 

I just purchased a 5577 w/the i7-7700HQ, 8 GB DDR4, 128 GB M.2 SSD, and a 1 TB HD.

I immediately cleaned out all the junk files, useless programs, as well as disabled Cortana. I then upgraded to the very latest drivers, as well as the BIOS.

So far, I don't like the Red Back Lite Keyboard, and most especially, the Display.

The Red Lite Keyboard is hard to see the characters even in low light.

The Display quality isn't very good. The colors aren't very good, such as white looking more like a cream white, plus not being very sharp. Then off course having to move the display panel in order to get the best picture view.

Oh, and you definitely need more than 8 GB of RAM in order to have the laptop really perform. The laptop only has one memory card slot filled w/a 8 GB stick of memory. It would of been far better to have two 4 GB cards rather than just one 8 GB. Anyway, the 8 GB isn't enough for games like Star Citizen w/o crashing.

Other than that, I have no other complaints so far. I like the case design.

I'm thinking about sending it back, mainly due to the display quality, and going w/the 7577.

 

Please return the laptop. I'm having so much trouble with the laptop right now. Parts such as RAM, PCH & SSD run beyond 80c.
Now customer support guys are asking me to exchange the product with a new one and to pay the shipping too(obv I'm not gonna pay that, would ask them to do that).
Man, I was looking for having a good time with this laptop, but guess what? Nope!