This review has been sitting in my Drafts folder for the longest time. A laptop that was supposed to be the affordable gaming laptop was overpriced to hell and back and I just couldn’t recommend anyone buy it. Now that the price has normalized again I can finally post my review of the Dell Inspiron i7567 gaming laptop.
Last year Dell tested the gaming laptop waters with the Inspiron i7559 gaming laptop. Following the great success of that model, Dell made a maour update for 2017 and launched the new Dell Inspiron 7567 gaming laptop. Let’s see what Dell came up with for 2017.
The Exterior
While the previous model was a regular 7000 series chassis laptop with minor red accents and details, the new Dell Inspiron 7567 gaming laptop is a completely redesigned laptop from the ground up. It is in keeping with Dells simple and sober matte black design language and feature some interesting new gamer oriented details.
For a start it now has its very own special purpose-built chassis that has a much improved cooling solution. It has retained the dual-fan setup, but it now features mach larger and better positioned inlets and outlets. The body is in keeping with last years general design language. Everything is matte black soft touch plastic with a bright red Dell logo right in the middle of the cover. The screen also gets a much better designed single hinge in the middle. The back side of the body finishes in a wide silver section that contains the improved cooling solution. You can see the red painted cooling fins through the provided triangular holes inside the silver casing. This back part can be had in either silver or black.
The display present on this model is a FullHD (1920×1080 pixel) TN panel with a 60Hz refresh rate. This base model display is the one major bad feature of the whole package. The viewing angles are small and the color fidelity isn’t good. The touchscreen enabled model gets a much better IPS panel or if you go for the more expensive model you can even get a 4k IPS panel. If you already know you are going to be playing on an external display then the base model is a bargain.
The inside of the Dell Inspiron 7567 gaming laptop continues with the matte black theme with red type on the keyboard and a small red line in the middle of the touchpad. The gamer WASD homerow keys are red in contrast to the other keys around them. On the right above the keyboard we have the power button. The keyboard is backlit in red and features 4 levels of brightness.
The front lip of the body features a fine black mesh with red triangles. The triangle right in the middle is a status LED. Just like with the previous model, Dell made it very easy to get access to the main components and provided a large panel underneath you can use to access the most important upgradeable bits.
The Connectivity
The connectivity of the Dell Inspiron 7567 gaming laptop is geared toward high performance more than connectivity. While other laptops still come with at least one USB 2.0 port, Dell has deemed it obsolete and there are only 3 USB 3.0 ports on this gaming laptop. Rather disappointingly there is no mini DisplayPort. The available ports are as follows:
- The left side of the body features the Kensington-Lock port, the power connector, one USB 3.0 port, and the built-in SD-Card Reader
- The right side of the body features a full sized Gigabit-Ethernet port, one HDMI-Port, the remaining two USB 3.0 ports and finally the headphones-microphone combo jack.
- On the inside it features the latest WiFi 802.11AC technology and Bluetooth 4.2
The Performance
The Dell Inspiron 7567 is marketed as a gaming laptop to the public and based on the specs alone you would actually believe Dell.
In its base configuration it comes equipped with a high power quad core Intel Core i5-7300HQ running at 2.5GHz with a maximum Boost-clock of 3.5GHz. This processor is aided by 8GB of DDR4 RAM which can easily be upgraded to a maximum of 32GB thanks to the large service panel Dell has provided. This 8GB should be enough for most of today’s titles, but I don’t think it will be enough for more demanding titles.
The storage is provided by a Hybrid-HDD solution with 1TB and 8GB Cache SSD. This setup is not as responsive as a SSD but it is definitely much faster than a regular HDD.
The biggest plus point of this laptop compared to any other competing laptops at launch is the GTX 1050 or GTX 1050ti gaphics cards. This model in particular comes with the GTX 1050 graphics card with 4GB of VRAM. Both of these card variants are very potent, but just to prove that I’m not talking out of my behind, here’s a nice video showing the performance of the GTX 1050 on 15 popular game titles:
Another great feature of the Dell Inspiron 7567 is that it comes with a very generous 6-cell (74 WHr) battery. I expect the combination of the FullHD LED-backlit screen and Intel Core i5 processor to be able to use this battery under regular desktop and browsing usage for at least 6 hours. Gaming on battery power has generally been a very bad idea and I would’t recommend it.
I held my review of this model back because it was severely overpriced on launch. The base 850 dollar model was being sold for well over 1100 dollars and I just couldn’t recommend it when you could have gotten the Lenovo Legion Y520 instead for less. Right now the prices seem to have normalised and I can finally recommend the Dell Insprion 7567 gaming laptop to people looking for an affordable gaming laptop.
