We change very few settings before testing in an effort to ensure that the laptop performs at the same level for us that it will for readers who buy it. That said, many factors affect performance, so benchmark comparisons between notebooks and laptops are a guide rather than a guarantee. We kicked off our performance benchmarks with several well-known tests, including the hard drive-specific ATTO Disk Benchmark, the JavaScript browser benchmark Sunspider, and the CPU/GPU tests in Cinebench.
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ATTO Disk Benchmark
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Peak Sequential Storage Throughput
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The ATTO Disk benchmark gives us a look at how the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming’s SSD performs. The 256GB SSD in our test system should be speedy, but won’t offer the blazing performance that the PCIe NVMe 512GB SSD (which ships with high-end models of this laptop) provides.
As we expected, the Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming rolls in with solid performance. The hard drive produces read and write speeds well in excess of 500 - 550MBps, which is roughly the real-world maximum for a SATA device. As we mentioned, buyers can expect much faster read/write times from the NVMe SSD in Dell’s top-shelf Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming models, but we suspect that anyone who goes with the bigger drive will be doing it just as much for the extra storage as the speed bump.
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SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark
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JavaScript Processing Performance
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Next up, we have some numbers from the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. According to the SunSpider website:
This benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other. Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is real-world, balanced and statistically sound.
We should note that this is more of a platform test, in that different browser versions, associated with different OS types can and do affect scores. However, among the Windows 10-powered machines here, all things are relatively equal.
The Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming didn’t top the charts in the SunSpider test, but the score puts the laptop among the leaders of our comparison pool. That’s not bad for a laptop priced at under $850.
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Cinebench R11.5
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3D Rendering On The CPU And GPU
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Cinebench is developed by Maxon, which is better known for its Cinema 4D software. We use both of Cinebench’s tests. The CPU test uses thousands of objects to stress the processor, while the GPU test puts your system’s graphics chip to work with a short, animated 3D scene involving a car chase. The CPU test is measured in points, while the GPU test is measured by the framerate. In both tests, higher numbers are better.
The Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming landed just behind another Dell gaming laptop we recently tested, the Alienware 13 R3. That laptop sports an Intel Core i7-6700HQ and a GeForce GTX 1060 (and sells for more than $2,000 as configured). The Alienware system blew the Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming out of the water in the CPU test, but both produced solid scores in the GPU portion of the benchmark.
