Dell Inspiron 5577 — A great laptop if you get it cheap
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About a month and a half ago, I needed a new laptop. During the summer, I go on vacation and am away from my main desktop, so until this year I have been using a 2009 MacBook Pro. It’s finally gotten to the point that it’s not worth the work to keep that MacBook going, so I decided to go to Amazon and buy the best laptop I could find for under $800. That laptop would be the Dell Inspiron 5577, which at the time of my purchase cost $799 (though it’s risen to $899 since).
Specifications
The Inspiron 5577 is a pretty powerful machine for $800, with an Intel Core i7–7700HQ processor, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050, and 8GB of RAM. I will say, however, if you do anything intensive you might want to purchase and install an aftermarket RAM upgrade (Crucial’s 8GB DDR4 SODIMM should work fine if you need 16GB total, and its price is comparable to full size DIMMs).
The Inspiron 5577 includes Windows 10 Home, which unfortunately does not include the Group Policy Editor so certain tweaks (such as disabling Windows Defender permanently) cannot easily be executed. Granted, this is a budget laptop so Windows 10 Pro shouldn’t be expected.
Synthetic Benchmarks and Per-Component Review
I used UserBenchmark as my synthetic benchmark, since it’s the first website I go to for PC component benchmarks. If you would rather just see the raw numbers and not my review of each component, check out the benchmark run page.
Processor
This laptop contains an Intel Core i7–7700HQ processor, with a base clock of 2.8GHz and a theoretical boost clock of 3.8GHz. In my tests, however, the average boost clock was 3.5GHz. Its performance is similar to the desktop Intel Core i7–6700T processor, which is the low power variant of last generation’s i7–6700 processor. This performance is approximately 75% of the consumer top-of-the-line desktop Intel Core i7–7700K, which is honestly quite amazing for a laptop this thin, especially considering this is about 6% better than the average i7–7700K.
I would highly recommend always using the “High Performance” power preset, as the others highly limit Turbo Boost, which is practically required for good performance.
Graphics
UserBenchmark severely plays down the ability of the mobile NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050, placing its score in the red zone. Yes, it only achieves about 30% of the performance of a desktop GTX 1070, but it’s still very capable. For a proper representation of its performance, see the gaming benchmarks.
The NVIDIA Optimus technology used in laptops is a fantastic idea, however NVIDIA’s execution has been lacking ever since it was introduced. To get UserBenchmark to properly run, I had to tell the system to only use the GeForce GTX 1050 and not the integrated graphics, because NVIDIA Control Panel wouldn’t cooperate with me trying to set the UserBenchmark app to the “High-performance NVIDIA processor.” Another issue I’ve come across is VSync doing absolutely nothing in Minecraft, as well as it feeling framey. I always get above 60FPS (which is a problem; this is with VSync “on” and with the built-in 60Hz display), however looking around just feels choppy. This issue doesn’t occur in any other games I’ve tested, so if you don’t play Minecraft then this won’t affect you.
SSD
The SSD is mediocre. It’s definitely faster than a hard drive, gives near-instant boot, and has decent read speeds (469MB/s sequential, 22.8MB/s random 4K), but a particularly fast hard drive could beat its sequential write speeds (116MB/s). It’s nothing special, but it works fine as a boot drive.
Hard Drive
I rarely use hard drives, and for good reason. They’re slow, and the one contained in this laptop is no exception. My plan is to replace the hard drive with my desktop’s Samsung 850 Pro SSD when I get an NVMe drive for my desktop. Sequential speeds are as you would expect from a 5400RPM drive at around 85MB/s, but as with all hard drives random read/write suffers greatly, with write being less than 1MB/s and read barely breaking 1MB/s.
Memory
The memory… is memory! I can’t say I’ve ever experienced memory speed bottlenecking, but apparently according to UserBenchmark this is around 40% of the speed of some 3200MHz kit.
But I can attest to the capacity, and it’s not much by my standards. For gaming, it’s fine, but when I’m running Chrome with approximately 1 trillion tabs, Discord, Atom, Webpack ( — watch), MySQL, and a Node.js web server the 8GB limit is being pushed. Sometime down the line I will likely purchase another 8GB DIMM, but for now it’ll do.
Gaming Benchmarks
Grand Theft Auto V
Even though it was released nearly four years ago, Grand Theft Auto V is still a fantastic game for benchmarking both CPU and GPU performance. Since this is on the budget end of gaming laptops, I’ve run the benchmark at Normal settings with VSync off on the built-in display, which is 1080p.
The framerate hovered around the 80s, which is much more than playable. As a matter of fact, these settings are lower than the settings I play with normally; I typically enable 2x antialiasing and increase the texture quality to “Very High.” These settings still net me over 60FPS on average, and when it dips I hardly notice.
I ran that benchmark on Normal settings, which is a far cry from Ultra performance-wise, however, in my opinion, there is no actual reason to play on Ultra especially on a mobile system. There is only a slight visible difference between Normal and Ultra visuals, as you can see in this video:
When actually playing the game, chances are you won’t even notice you’re not playing on Ultra (except for the higher framerate).
Cities: Skylines
Cities: Skylines is an incredibly CPU intensive game, especially with large cities. Thus, it isn’t surprising this laptop doesn’t perform too well on a large city, such as MonoCity, which is what I used to test. I used the vanilla game with no DLC and achieved an average framerate of 35 frames per second, a maximum of 60FPS, and a minimum of 13FPS. I would not recommend relying on this system for CPU intensive workloads.
Overall Opinion
This laptop is fantastic if you can get it for less than the MSRP of $999.99. Wait for it to go on sale on Amazon for about $800, then it’s a great deal. At the MSRP price point, I would rather recommend something like the Acer Predator Helios 300, which has the same CPU but an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 instead of the Inspiron’s GTX 1050, twice the RAM, and twice the SSD storage space; beware it doesn’t have a 1TB hard drive like the Inspiron.
