Dell Studio 15 (1555) Review

I had a Studio 1555 here for a while. They were the best speakers I have ever heard on a laptop.

 

I recently received a Studio 1555 as a replacement for my defective Studio 1535...I gotta say, it's a lot better than I expected. I love the speakers and subwoofer; I think this review unit must have been faulty. The 720p LED display is beautiful. I have the P8600, ATi 4570 256MB, and 9-cell battery, and I can get 5 and a half hours of battery life with the display on minimum brightness, Power Saver scheme, and WiFi/Bluetooth on.

Build quality is miles ahead of the 1535; there's no obvious flex here, whereas with the 1535, if you opened the display from one of the corners, the display bezel would pop out of the frame from the stress.

I had my doubts about the 16:9 display at first, but I think Dell really did the Studio 15 justice with this refresh.

 

UPDATE

Hey, I just wanted to let everyone know that we've updated our review after getting our Studio 15 back from Dell's service center. It turned out we had a faulty subwoofer in our review unit and once that problem was corrected it made a HUGE difference in terms of the audio quality from this notebook.

Bottom line, the only way this notebook has bad speakers is if there is something wrong with your particular system. If the speakers and subwoofer are working properly then you should be very impressed with the sound coming from this laptop.

 

Thanks for following up on that guys. Good information to know.

 

I'm glad to hear you actually got that taken care of and looked at it again. Pretty good sound for a 15.6", am I right?

I've recently been playing CoD4 on my 1555...it turns out the 256MB ATi 4570 is plenty powerful enough to run it at my native 720p. I haven't checked actual framerates, but there's no noticeable stutter, and I've mostly been playing 32-player TDM servers.

CoD4 is definitely something my old 1535 with the ATi 3450 could not do. It would just vomit pixels trying to push 20 frames per second at 800x600.

 

Hi guys,
I own Dell Studio 1555 for a week now. It came with T6600, 4GB RAM, 4570 graphics and 1080p screen.

I have a problem with it because it heats quickly, area around touchpad and palm rest is warm, so my palms can get sweaty a bit. Also, after an hour or two of light load (browsing the Net, CPU under 10%), the fan is working almost 50% of the time. This can be irritating in a quiet room. Temperatures as seen in HWMonitor can go over 60C on light to moderate load, and over 43C as seen in SpeedFan (not sure why's the difference).

Is this behavior normal? The thing I hate the most is the fan working on light load. I called Dell in my country, and they said this is normal as I have 4570 graphics. TBG, I don't find it normal to have fan working half of time under light load, no matter which graphics in the laptop, as it's not really used much while browsing the Net.

 

I havent seen this review...

Interesting, the 1555 doesnt overheat, while the 1557 does according to NotebokCheck...