The Dell Inspiron 15 (opens in new tab) gaming edition sat in our best budget gaming laptop spot for most of 2016, and the honor was well deserved. For the price, Dell made something that was compelling and pretty darn powerful when it came to on-the-go gaming.
However, since then NVIDIA has completely revamped its GPU lineup, and the new 10-series did away with dedicated mobile versions. That means today's budget gaming laptops will most likely come to market with a GTX 1050 or GTX 1050Ti.
Since we recently reviewed such a laptop — the ASUS Strix GL753 — now's a great time to compare last year's pick with this new contender. So we've grabbed our trusty Inspiron 15 7559 and fired up a few quick comparison tests.
The laptop we're using here has an Intel Core i7 6700HQ processor, 16GB of RAM and a 4GB GTX 960M GPU. The ASUS Strix isn't an exact match, with a Core i5 7300HQ and 12GB of RAM, but it also has a 4GB GPU, the GTX 1050.
So, on to the numbers.
The benchmarks
For the synthetic benchmarks, we're using 3DMark Fire Strike and Time Spy (DX12), along with the Geekbench 4 compute test. For games, we're running Gears of War 4, Dirt Rally and Rise of the Tomb Raider, utilizing all in-game benchmark modes. Both laptops were set to high graphics settings for consistency.
3DMark Fire Strike (Higher is better)
| Device | Score |
|---|---|
| Dell Inspiron 15 7559 | 3,870 |
| ASUS Strix GL753 | 5,406 |
3DMark Time Spy (DX12) (Higher is better)
| Device | Score |
|---|---|
| Dell Inspiron 15 7559 | 1,299 |
| ASUS Strix GL753 | 1,790 |
Geekbench 4.0 CUDA (Higher is better)
| Device | Score |
|---|---|
| Dell Inspiron 15 7559 | 45,983 |
| ASUS Strix GL753 | 76,007 |
Gears of War 4 (High)
| Device | Score |
|---|---|
| Dell Inspiron 15 7559 | 37.3 frames per second (FPS) |
| ASUS Strix GL753 | 56.8 FPS |
Dirt Rally (High)
| Device | Score |
|---|---|
| Dell Inspiron 15 7559 | 46.18 FPS |
| ASUS Strix GL753 | 76.36 FPS |
Rise of the Tomb Raider (High)
| Device | Score |
|---|---|
| Dell Inspiron 15 7559 | 31.96 FPS |
| ASUS Strix GL753 | 41.55 FPS |
The results
These are pretty clear cut results across the board. Results may vary from game to game, but it's clear that the GTX 1050 is a significant improvement. Remember, too, that the 960M isn't even the last generation bottom rung because the GTX 1050 is for the new Pascal cards.
Whether this is cause to run out and buy a new laptop is up to you, but the new generation of gaming laptops have serious advantages it seems over laptops that are only 12 months old.
Improvements are always good, but NVIDIA went above and beyond this time.
