Dell Inspiron Best Performance

In a world full of sleek and slim Ultrabooks, the Dell Inspiron 15R 7520 looks enormous. This 15.6-inch laptop is bulky, heavy (7.4 pounds), and not terribly stylish. But it does have some surprises under the hood—namely, four USB 3.0 ports, a full HD screen, and solid overall performance. The Dell Inspiron 15R 7520 might fly under your radar amidst all the superskinny Ultrabooks that are zipping around, but it's worth a look if style and weight aren't major concerns for you. It offers an excellent screen (most Ultrabooks don't), sturdy components, and great general performance, and it will play games fairly well, even though it isn't built to be a gaming laptop. In the end, the Inspiron 15R 7520 looks like a great choice for college students, especially with its gimmicky switchable lids. It's always nice to see a 1080p screen on a 15.6-inch laptop, and the Inspiron 15R 7520's display does not disappoint. The matte LED display looks fantastic, with great color fidelity, excellent contrast, and crisp, clear images and text. It's also very bright, which makes it great for use outdoors or in brightly lit areas, and it has good off-axis viewing angles. The only issue I saw in my testing was that, at the brightest setting, scenes with lots of whites and neutrals started to look washed out. However, this effect was minor and didn't really detract from the overall experience. Video looks and sounds great on the 15R 7520. The laptop has two speakers on the bottom, near the front. The speakers produce better-than-average audio, enhanced with Waves MaxxAudio software. In my opinion MaxxAudio doesn't do for this Inspiron what BeatsAudio enhancement does for HP laptops, but it does help to create fuller and much louder sound than you'll otherwise hear. The Inspiron 15R 7520's discrete AMD graphics card helped to boost its graphics performance. In our Crysis 2 graphics tests, the 7520 managed frame rates ranging from 12.7 frames per second (maximum quality settings, 1920-by-1080-pixel resolution) to 63.2 fps (low quality settings, 800-by-600-pixel resolution). While those are good scores for average all-purpose laptops, they're not quite the frame rates you need if you want to play a lot of graphics-intensive games. The Alienware M14x, for instance, carries an Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics card, and it achieved a rate of 94.7 fps on our low-quality, 800-by-600-pixel Crysis 2 test (the M14x does not have a full HD screen, and therefore we could not evaluate it on the maximum-quality Crysis 2 test). dell founders bid