hey everybody it’s lon seiben we’re taking a look today at the dell inspiron 14. this is a two-in-one which means that it can turn into a tablet if you want and then it can operate in other modes here as well like this display mode here or in tent mode and this one is powered by an amd ryzen processor they do have an intel version of this available but today we’re going to focus on the amd variant here now i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure this is on loan from dell so we’re done with this it goes back to them all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this laptop is all about now the price point on this comes in at around a thousand dollars as configured now this one has a ryzen 7 5700u processor on board it has 16 gigabytes of ddr4 3200 ram and a 512 gigabyte ssd now you can upgrade the ram and the storage on this and one of the things that i really liked about how they configured this one is that the ram is not only upgradable but it has two ram modules installed and that’s important because that puts the computer in dual channel mode to get the most performance out of its ryzen processor and even the entry level version of this laptop has two ram modules so that was good to see and also good to see that you can replace both of those modules if you want to upgrade
down the road now the display on this one isn’t bad it’s a 1080p 14 inch 16×9 aspect ratio display it’s got decent viewing angles it’s not very bright though it only comes in at around 260 knits or so but it’s adequate for the task here it’s got nice touch responsiveness and i think for the market they’re targeting this too which is kind of more casual computer users i think it’s fine for that professionals will probably want to look at the xps line which has displays more tailored for professional photo and video editing work at least within dell’s line but here i think the display is adequate for its place in the market now it does support pen input but dell did not include a pen for us to test with the unit in the box so we’re not going to be able to test that feature unfortunately build quality feels pretty nice it’s a mixture of metal and plastic the keyboard deck here does flex a little bit when you put weight on it but otherwise it feels nice and solid i like the hinge on this quite a bit because it stays in place it doesn’t bounce around all that much and what’s cool is that when you lift it up to put it into laptop mode it kind of angles the keyboard up at you which was nice to see on this so it’s got a nice feel especially when it’s just being used as a traditional laptop and then of course you can flip it around into the different modes that the hinge here supports a nice hinge mechanism on this one weight is 3.43 pounds or 1.5 kilograms and the reason why it’s a little bit heavier than others in its
price range is that it has a pretty big battery on board and it’ll go probably about 10 or 11 hours at least based on our testing and that’s assuming you’re keeping the laptop to the basics like web browsing word processing and email and also keeping the display brightness at a reasonable level now there is a webcam on board of course but it’s only 720p like most laptops at its price point nothing spectacular but adequate enough for your zoom calls there is a little shutter here at the top of the display a physical shutter that covers up the lens so you won’t need to have a piece of tape on your laptop all the time now i’ve been very happy with the keyboard on this as i’ve been testing it the keys are nicely sized and very nicely spaced apart you’ve got good travel on them so you have good tactile feel the keyboard is backlit as well you have a fingerprint reader which doubles as the power switch in the upper right hand corner the trackpad is nice also very large very accurate it feels really good and dell has really been putting out some nice keyboards and track pads lately and this machine is no exception to that rule now the speakers on this sound pretty good they are downward firing speakers and generally i’m not a big fan of these but this one sounds okay to me it’s very crisp and clear you don’t get a lot of deep bass but it doesn’t sound cheap or tinny either but the speakers will change in quality based on the surface that they’re sitting on and then when you move it into the display mode here those speakers go from downward firing to upward firing and they’re located behind the display so they don’t sound as good when you’re in this
mode versus the traditional laptop mode but you’ll get good stereo separation in either scenario and i think they’re certainly adequate for doing spoken word things or watching videos or communicating with people on a conference call if you’re into music i think headphones are probably your best bet there there is a headphone jack here on the side or you can connect up some bluetooth headphones if you want now the port selection on this is a bit lacking on the left hand side we have an hdmi port but this supports only hdmi 1.4 and that means while you can connect a 4k display to it it will only output 4k video at 30 hertz not 60.
So just be aware of that this is a usb 3 port a full size usb 3 port and then we have a full service usb type-c port now this will be where you plug its power adapter into but it can also support display output at the same time power is going in you will need some kind of dock for that though so you’ll need to pick up an adapter of some kind but this might be the best way to get your higher frame rate 4k video out of this laptop this port though is not usb4 it is usb 3.2 gen 1 so it’s running at the slower 5 gigabit per second speed many laptops that we see now will have a 10 gigabit port here so just be aware of that and this is the only usbc port on this unit on the other side we have a micro sd card slot a full size usb 3 port and that headphone jack we talked about earlier so let’s take a look now and see how it performs we’ll begin with the basics here a little web browsing and then we’ll play some games i’m going to visit the nasa.gov homepage here real quick to
see how everything loads up and as expected it is a very snappy experience here and that’s because we’ve got that ryzen processor on board this is a very nicely performing chipset and all together here it’s a very nice browsing experience if you’re doing basic work on here i think that will go quite well also this does have wi-fi six on board and that’s how we’re currently communicating with the internet and that wi-fi six board inside can be upgraded down the road as well and a little bit earlier we tested out a 60 frames per second youtube video at 1080p it played back perfectly no drop frames all was good so if you’re looking to watch netflix and twitch and all the other video services out there you shouldn’t have any issues on this one and on the browserbench.org speedometer benchmark test we got a score of 161 and it’s about what i would expect out of this processor and if you’re curious as to how the 5500u based version of the inspiron 14 performs you can see the hp laptop 14 there had that processor and it comes in at around 145 and i would expect that to be about the difference between this one and the lower priced unit all right let’s take a look now at some games and here we’ve got fortnite running at 1080p medium settings and we were in the 50 to 65 frames per second territory here sometimes getting up into the 70s and of course you could turn some of these settings down and reduce resolution to get a higher frame rate but still decent performance out of these ryzen processors and that looks to be the case with this unit too we also looked at red dead redemption 2 this is running at 720p at the absolute lowest settings and here we were able to stay north of 30 frames per second very very playable so if you have a gaming machine at home you can run it at a higher resolution there and then take it on the road
with a slightly lower resolution but still get a really playable experience here and here we’ve got doom eternal running at 1080p low settings and we were getting in the 30 to 40 frames per second territory here also a very playable experience on this amd hardware and on the 3dmark time spy benchmark test we got a score of 1206 and this one performs slightly below what we saw out of an hp computer running with the very same processor so a little bit slower perhaps than some of the other 5700 use out there but still it was fine for the games that we tested on it we also ran the 3d mark stress test and this might be the reason why our score was off a bit there we got a score of 94.8 percent which indicates that we’ll see some throttling on this one when the computer is placed under heavy load for a sustained period of time a passing grade is 97 on that test there is of course a fan on board to keep this thing cool it’s not very loud it is a little high pitched but i’ve heard much louder fans on other computers so if you are looking for something that can perform well but doesn’t have a really obnoxiously loud fan i think this one will do fine you just want to keep the airflow clear on it so it’s definitely not performing up to the same level as some other machines we’ve looked at with the same processor but i think it’s more than adequate for doing the types of things that we’ve been looking at here in the review all right one last thing to take a look at and that is linux compatibility we booted up ubuntu on it everything got detected properly out of the gate including the touch panel here the video was fine audio was fine wi-fi bluetooth everything just worked out of the gate here really nice linux experience so if you’re looking to run something other than windows you should be able to do that on here without too many problems or any problems for that matter uh one other thing is that it is compatible with windows 11.
Our unit came with windows 10 although i got it before windows 11 came out so it’s possible the new units that are shipping now will have windows 11 installed versus 10 either way it will run both versions of windows without issue and i think overall not a bad laptop here from dell i think the entry level model is pretty competitively priced based on the features set and it’s definitely something worth checking out if you are in the market for a mid-range laptop that is going to do it for now until next time this is lon simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by theland.tv supporters including gold level supporters hot sauce and video games brian parker chris allegretta tom albrecht thomas anfang jim tannis and handheld obsession if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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