Dell G16 7630 - Nuclear Review

depending on your point of view Dell's g16 is either a g15 in a tuxedo or an alien wear M16 having a slightly bad headache in a nutshell this this is a slightly Posh variant of Dell's entry-level gaming chassis that sort of bridges a non-existent gap in the market that didn't really need to be filled great work product planners as is now normal for this lineup this is a thick heavy set machine with priorities focused far more on durability and to some extent cooling than portability there are some genuine benefits over the basic g15 such as a new Quad HD Plus display and radically improved trackpad and keyboard minus the number pad of course and this is probably the pck of the two unless you're really going to miss that numpad I would I'd miss it dearly Dell's marketing Focus mostly on performance and power bragging about shoving 195 WTS directly under your keyboard the product page also claims that on certain configurations a vapor chamber and element 31 alien wear's proprietary liquid metal compound are used for cooling both of those are present and accounted for on today's victim Del Australia currently only lists two basic configurations for this one with an RTX 4060 or 470 but the unit I have here is bafflingly nugget spec combining the power guzzling core I 53450 HX with a GeForce RTX 450 which seems to be out of its League hooked up to a Quad HD Plus display but more on that later way Ed whopping 2.77 kilos you're not going to want to carry this one around in a backpack all day but making this problem far worse is the mandatory inclusion of Dell's absolutely ancient huge fat and heavy 330 W power adapter thanks to that HX series CPU this ugly chuner thing weighs you down by a further 1.6 kilos included in the very recyclable packaging is the bare minimum laptop big fat pale bastard and some basic documentation I'm always pleased to get a laptop that's free of any obvious defects and this particular g16 was almost immaculate out of the box with not a single Dent scratch or creaking hinge to report there was just one little thing the factory worker forgot to remove the adhesive backing from the battery cable that's no big deal but nothing escapes me around the outside going counterclockwise there's a pair of have you noticed how stupid the names for USB ports are now it's just full on alphabet soup at this point so on the right there's two big fat fastish USB ports on the rear is a skinny clicky very fast USB with display port a fulls sizee HDMI 2.1 another big fat fastest us B and the DC in Jack and on the right hand side is a flappy ethernet and combined headphone and microphone Jack USB type-c charging is not supported at all and you can't even plug in a slightly smaller Dell Barrel Jack charger without being winged at right well let's see what we've got in here if you've seen my older reviews of Dell g15s you'll know how crappy the trackpads have always been with the flimsy wobbly construction causing an annoying second Phantom click when you press down on the right side it seems like someone at Del has finally listened the g16 track p is gloriously overbuilt compared to the old design with a rejigged click mechanism and loads of mechanical support around the edges extending right into the palmrest area to keep things nice and stiff and responsive this is exactly the sort of improvement I want to see and I have pretty much no complaints this time around this is a genuinely decent trackpad good job the single zone backlit RGB keyboard is another welcome upgrade over previous designs with noticeably more key travel and a generally nicer feel key actuations are extremely quiet so your 1 a.m. internet arguments shouldn't disturb anyone despite the amount of reinforcement underneath and there is quite a lot this keyboard does have a bit of squishiness around the middle same bro the number pad is gone and instead there's a row of function keys down the right hand side arrow keys are full size and if you're the sort of person who cares there is a dedicated insert key along with the classic G key short for G I'd love it if the computer made more noise the display is secured to the body with the same thick sturdy hinges bolted onto a huge piece of cast magnesium that's lived in these machines for years the solid construction continues inside the lid assembly everything here is bolted in using metal standoffs and sensibly sized screws the result of this is a lid that makes absolutely no awful noises when open and close and doesn't wobble around the display itself is a pretty basic 16-in IPS type LCD made by Au optronics with a resolution of 2560 x600 pixels for a 16 to10 aspect ratio this panel has a 165 HZ refresh rate and gsync and the laptop has advanced Optimus so the screen is automatically switch to being driven directly from the dedicated graphics when a game is launched measurements are decent enough for an LCD with the basic srgb color gamut fully covered brightness maxing out at 314 nits and contrast at 1369 to1 nothing exciting but it's not terrible note that all panels will measure slightly differently and Dell does Now list a 240 HZ wide gamut panel as standard in the higher end models above the display are the completely predictable mediocre webcam and stereo microphones the video and sound quality captured by these makes me feel nostalgic for late NAU's unboxing videos okay guys get excited time for a main event very Brown and heavy and large okay guys now we take up the quest forever okay guys I seem to have dropped the PlayStation 3 the stereo speak is in stored in the g16 are the exact same little pieces of crap as Auto models these specific speakers are just about the worst off-the-shelf part in the industry and they heavily rely on audio processing software to make him usable in this case the audio software has just gotten worse the settings no longer hang out inside Alienware Command Center instead you're now automatically kicked out into some Dolby adwar don't you just love it when your audio driver starts asking for money inside the settings tab here there are some completely opaque audio modes that only give vague explanations of what they do and a custom mode to let you drive yourself nuts trying to improve things not happening the sound is pretty bad here noticeably worse than in the old g15s any upper base and mid-range that did exist has been gutted to increase the maximum volume without improving the hardware the headphone amp on the other hand is close to decent with enough power to get dangerously loud powering 32 ohm headphones unfortunately the audio Drive is still gets in the way and Call's base and mid-range frequencies just like it does for the internal speakers albeit not quite as badly you can go in and disable all of the audio processing in Windows settings if you're only going to use headphones and external speakers and I'd strongly recommend that you do the included SSD is a western digital SN 740 surprisingly in the tiny M2 2230 form factor read and WR speeds on the factory SSD are pretty good if not the best possible for a pcie4 drive but I've got no complaints here the slot on the motherboard will accommodate either a 2230 or 2280 drive and would you believe it Dell have finally come around and fitted a second M2 socket including mounting hardware so you're no longer forced to stick with only one drive or pull your hair out trying to find an adapter on eBay Saints be praised a copper heat spreader is provided for both the factory SSD and the second slot including a fresh plastic backed thermal pad for the ladder loaded up on the factory SSD is a copy of Windows 11 pre-loaded with a pretty typical array of bloat in addition to the usual Microsoft shovelware most of which you can safely uninstall Alienware Command Center is where you'll find most of the important controls for the laptop including pair and thermal modes and RGB lighting customization this software is now in its sixth major release and seems much more polished and reliable than previous versions but it still just feels a little bloated and sluggish same bro other than the usual preset performance modes there's a custom mode which allows you to either set an offset or totally custom curve for both fans and there's also a slider for the TCC offset this lowers the thermal throttling limit for the CPU all the way down to 85° C zero on the slider means 100 15 means 85 I'd probably suggest just leaving this one alone but it's there if you want to mess around with it the myell app is mostly useless other than the power manager section in here you can set charging Behavior or set a charge limit for the battery and enable Dell's Express charge fast charging it's worth pointing out that pretty much all of the performance thermal and battery settings that you're likely to need are available in the extensive bios menus including some very granular battery charging control and you can easily control the keyboard lighting with a tool like open RGB so really any and all of Dell's software can be safely uninstalled if you won't miss the convenience there's one more thing and it's a big one this is yet another Dell laptop that left to its own devices will do its best to convince you that it's broken just like the old G7 in one of the earlier videos on this channel the g16 is designed to heavily power throttle the CPU and GPU if it detects literally any Motion in the chassis in the unit I have this pretty much means it's always throttled as the accelerometer seems to have gotten a little hyp sensitive the fix for this is to jump into device manager open the system devices section then disable Intel integrated sensor solution and fully power cycle the laptop all performance and thermal testing was carried out with this fix in place this is a really stupid issue that I'm sick of seeing and it must be generating a ridiculous number of product returns for Dell but it just keeps showing up in new machines great work testing your own products guys overall power draw on this g16 is pretty reasonable at idle in Balance mode as measured from the power outlet the machine draws around 14 wats and when running flat out with the GPU and CPU fully loaded up this Peaks at 210 and settles at around 180 WS you'd be forgiven for thinking that 330 WT power adapter was kind of pointless the 86w battery fitted to this unit is reporting 97% of its rated capacity after calibrating over a few charge cycles but this will gradually drop with use with the display set to 300 nit brightness and sitting idle on the Windows desktop doing nothing the g16 managed 5 hours and 2 minutes of runtime during my usual heavy internet usage test it quit after only 3 hours and 22 minutes yep those numbers are terrible charging from empty in the standard charging mode it took exactly 1 hour and 20 minutes to hit 50% and 2 hours 46 minutes to get back up to 100% using Dell's Express charge to cook the spicy pillow as quickly as possible charging to 50% took only 26 minutes and it hit 100% in 2 hours 20 when it finally wears out that batter is extremely easy to replace accessible immediately after removing the lower case and held in by eight Phillips screws this one can be swapped out in less than 5 minutes the very nice part number is 69 kf2 and this battery is shared with an incredibly long list of laptops so you'd have no trouble finding a replacement in the future the processor included here is definitely a weird one for those who don't know Intel's H series laptop processors are the high-powered units you typically find in a gaming laptop and the new HX variants take that idea and bump it up another notch to make things as fast and loud and hot as possible in this case we've got a core I 5 13458 Che which has six P cores with hyperthreading and four e cores for a total of 10 cores and 16 threads the rated maximum power consumption during pl2 is a staggering 157 wats but Intel specifi the pl1 or long-term power as a more reasonable 55 the CPU is fed by what looks like a 5+1 +1 phase power supply if I'm reading this board correctly and all components here are actively cooled by the heat sink the ram supplied with this unit is a pair of 8 GB single rank SK hyx ddr5 4800 o dims with a cast latency of a very lazy 40 so nothing exciting here and of course the GPU here is a little tiny baby GeForce RTX 450 seriously look at how comically small this thing is same bro inside that tiny package there's 2560 cores 80 tmus 48 RS and a stupid little 96-bit memory boss with 6 gigs of gddr6 memory attached on balance with that very narrow memory boss and lack of any real improvements I'd say this isn't a real step forwards from the old RTX 3050 TI the only saving grace here is the 50% increase in vram but that's just trading one problem for another maximum tgp is allegedly 140 WS but more on that in a moment and power for the GPU is provided by a 5 plus one phase power supply the system tasked with extracting heat from these parts is a pretty big and complex unit with a total of four heat pipes moving heat from a big Vapor chamber to four heat spreaders which in turn are cooled by two 60 mm fans these heat spreaders do look much bigger than they really are measuring only a couple of millimet deep for around half the height of the fence the cooler weighs in it a pretty chunky 362 G without the fans attached more weight does mean more thermal mass and when this is balanced well against the cooling requirements it should result in the fans audibly ramping up and down less often which is the case here and rather excitingly alen wear's element 31 liquid metal compound is used for the thermal transfer on both the CPU and GPU dice element 31 is gallium mixed with a carrier compound that attempts to reduce the electrical conductivity reduce corrosion and make it a bit safer to apply and remove than classic liquid Metals making things even safer there are barriers installed all around the CPU and GPU to prevent anything nearby from being shorted out but regardless you probably shouldn't try removing and replacing this stuff as there's still a pretty high risk of bricking the board this should last a lot longer than normal thermal past though and I'd be genuinely surprised if there was ever a real need to replace it for the life of the laptop so on that note I've gone ahead and removed and replaced it with normal thermal paste just to see what happens more on that shortly coal plate surfaces on that cooler appear to be nickel plated to prevent corrosion and they're decently flat with only the tiniest suggestion of pitting on a near mirror finish frustratingly the fans can't be removed for cleaning without taking the entire heat sink off which requires removing the entire motherboard from from the case and risks creating a short with the liquid metal so there's a massive serviceability fail here just getting some cat hair out of the fans and heat sink fins could take you well over 2 hours once everything's back together and it requires a level of technical skill that not everybody has if manufacturers are going to start putting these long life liquid metal compounds inside laptops they're going to have to start making sure the fans come out easily for cleaning because this is going to be really annoying long term now because of gaming laptops expected to run at full load for extended periods of time we're going to have a look at how the temperatures and power delivery behave over a 30-minute torture test for this test the laptop in its high performance mode sitting flat on the desk in a 22° office with cinebench 23 and MSI combuster running together for 30 minutes to stress the CPU and GPU simultaneously data is recorded approximately every half second power for the core I 5 starts off at a ridiculous 140 ws and then rapidly ramps back down and eventually sustains a still high average of 75 temperatures or should I say temperature while this goes on is a very consistent 100° that's exactly what the HX chip is intended to do completely max out the power delivery or cooling which comes first and it sticks to that temperature Like Glue as I mentioned earlier the RTX 4050 is rated for a whopping 140 wats but it's far too small and weak a chip to max out that power budget so what we're seeing here is a pretty consistent 95 to 100 wats the 4050 stays nice and cool barely nudging 70° but it does sustain just over 80° on The Hot Spot video memory temperature follows the hot spot pretty closely stabilizing it around 80° so about that liquid metal I've temporarily replaced it with arctic MX5 and then rerun this test to see what happens since the CPU temperature was 100° before and can't go any higher there's nothing new here it's still 100 happy days but check out the massive drop in power with the regular thermal paste it's only managing to hit 55 WS before thermal throttling that's still pretty decent for a gaming laptop but the difference that element 31 makes here is clear as day so if you have one of these by all means stick with the liquid metal as long as possible it's annoying to work around but it's clearly required to extract the maximum performance out of this machine as always a lot of people will be wondering whether a laptop stand or cooling pad would help this laptop run any cooler so here's a a side by side of the g16 sitting directly on the desk and elevated on a fanless stand as you can see there's pretty much nothing in it with the air inlets completely unobstructed the g16 only runs about a degree cooler so the only reason you'd elevate it would be for ergonomics or if you're gaming on your lap and on that note unless you're trying really hard to sterilize yourself you're not going to be laptop gaming with this gaming laptop directly at top your lap for more than about 30 seconds at a time under a typical gaming load despite having a flipped motherboard with all of the hot components up near the keyboard the g16 gets extremely toasty down here temperatures peak in the 50s gear which is getting into tissue damaged territory and Beyond uncomfortable the keyboard and palr area fars much better with the palr staying completely cool and the keyboard becoming noticeably warm in places but never uncomfortable so given that this is a gaming laptop how well does it actually run games well since this unit has the ungodly combination of an RTX 4050 and a Quad HD Plus screen the answer depends entirely on what you're asking it to do here's a clip of the g16 running cyberpunk 2077 inbuilt Benchmark on identical settings at the dis displays native Quad HD Plus resolution on the left and in 1920x 1080 on the right performance is just about hared by running that screen at its native resolution so here's a few games running at the native Quad HD to give you an honest idea of performance I've said all these games to use the highest graphic settings that result in frame rates close to 60 FPS without using any UPS scalers or resolution scaling so for the most part that 4050 is adequate to get games moving on this screen but the limitations of the GPU sometimes become pretty obvious check out metrox this enhanced Edition this machine can't even hold on to a steady frame rate at this game's normal graphic settings with dlss upscaling enabled given that something is weak and memory constrained as the Xbox series s can run this one smoothly that's just embarrassing Gathering Benchmark data from a variety of performance tests done under identical conditions to position the g16 on my relative gaming performance chart you can see the advantage that high powerered CPU provides it shoves it surprisingly high up in the mix here due to excellent performance in CPU bound benchmarks nonetheless thanks to completely unpredictable performance provided by the a narrow memory bus and Tiny GPU I'd probably take any of those RTX 3060 equip machines over this one any day of the week so would I actually recommend you buy this laptop with reservations maybe build quality is excellent the display is okay and the keyboard and trackpad are pretty decent but on the flip side the battery life absolutely sucks it's extremely heavy especially with the power brick and you're probably going to be up against Dell's best efforts to ruin your experience with software glitches weird throttling and apparently now adwar embedded in some of the drivers you definitely don't want one in this entry level configuration since the ratio of weight heat and noise to actual performance is ridiculous it's actually annoying how close this one gets to being actually good without quite getting there maybe some things will improve with updates but for now I'm rting this one a solid me or three apathetic laptops and on that note

Channel: NuclearNotebook

Views: 19,267

Keywords: dell, alienware, g15, g16, gaming, gaming laptop, laptop, intel, core i5, nvidia, geforce, rtx 4050, 13450hx, alienware m16, dell g16, dell g15

Id: KVZ3DGbi910

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2024