Owner's Thread: Dell Inspiron 7000 series

@Akvavit, an invaluable thread, doing what no one in the tech press has managed to do so far and coming up with a comprehensive review of a laptop that I think there is a lot of interest in. Good work.

One question, is there a way to disable the Touchscreen to conserve battery life?

Looking forward to hear how the SSD swap over goes, if its smooth I think I'll be going for the 7537 rather than the new XPS 15.

 

Please .. can you guys who has the pc check the max GPU frequency ??? ... thanks .. I want to know if it runs on half power or run on full speed ... !!!

 

750m is rated at 967MHz, but could potentially overclock to around 1070MHz at full load on an i5-4200u at max turbo. Obviously turbo boost might not even activate on battery (even on high performance settings).

 

Yes I know it... I can read it on the net ... But I want to know how it's working specially in this machine... In the test ,which Akvavit dit, GPU was only on 400 MHz... That's why I'm curious ;-) .. Anyway thanks!

 

Here are some reviews that were posted in this thread:

Laptop Mag

Tech Kalauz (Hungarian translated)

Tests seem fairly promising.

Credit to newoverhere and Pocok256 for finding and sharing

 

The 1080p screen is not dull... I cant measure it but it is substantially better quality that an "average" laptop screen.

 

Can you post some photos of your 1080p screen from different angles .. thanks

 

I don't undertand that what they write on the hungarian site .... they reviewed inspiron 15 with the 768p screen but they also write about 1080p game play ...... that's strange ... maybe they played on the second screen .... I'm lost

 

Yes would have been external monitor, also there will probably be increased performance just playing on the 1080p 7537, instead of this setup.

 

Thanks .. it must be only solution ... they should write it in the review .. maybe i missed it

 

Yes. The tester was wondering how much slower the laptop was in 1080p because he wanted to test the CPU limit. He thinks that i5 has not enough power for a 750m vga.

And the final conclusion is that i5 has not enough power for 720p and not enough power for 1080p in some games.

hint: I know the tester

 

I hope that i7 will be enough

 

Some photos of the 1080p screen - sorry for the quality - these were taken on my phone...

The first 4 are full brightness in a brightly lit office on battery only, the second 2 are in my dark study on power. Both are with full brightness.

 

An quick video of the intro to Skyrim on medium settings. The fan went to full and was pretty noisy, though it soon got back to silent after quitting the game.

 

Thanks so much pma99car !!!!!!! That was really what I want to know Screen looks gorgeous !!! .... Noise level is quite ok when you are doing hard stuff .. Important is noise level in idle or light power usage... and I think that it's quiet ,isn't it ??

.. If you have time .. can you pls check battery run time .. (in movies,net,normal stuff,....) Can you pls post your battery results until now

Thanks !!!

 

Project SSD completed!

Installed a Samsung 840 EVO drive, and it is crazy fast, well spent money I must say!

New score:


Old score:



Easy access (ram will be next!)


The "old" HDD:

 

+1 Thanks for contributing, loving the display, must be an excellent TN panel or IPS. I'd also be interested in seeing battery results on the 1080p version. Also was Skyrim running at native resolution? If so could you possibly check the FPS on medium. Would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again.

 

Nice one! Do you now feel like the old drive was a bottleneck on the CPU & GPU? How's the experience been with everything else since your last update?

 

Good job !!

 

Besides loading times in games, not a whole lot there. But for my primary use (Photoshop, Premiere Pro etc) this really made a world of difference! Also - booting up in about 7-8 seconds, that is just nice to have

 

Yep, it was at 1080p. I'm a little short on time at the moment, but will try to run some FPS tests this weekend. My initial feeling is that it was easily plus 30.

 

No problem, yes seems around 30-40.

 

any idea if it has msata????

 

Only the 14" model has an mSATA slot, and that requires you to take quite a lot of it apart to access.

 

I think I saw some service manual online in its tear apart at dell usa webstie and there is a panel separate from the motherboard near fan which has usb and there looks like a msata port there. not sure

 

ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/all-prod...top/inspiron-15-7537_Owner's Manual_en-us.pdf

page 37 see remove the usb board . the usb board has 2 usb and controller chips and the connecting wire has lots so usb is 4 wires plus one negative and one postitive . that looks like lots of wires and the port is definitely msata por if you see the number of pins from behind,

 

It does look like mSATA, it seems weird they don't mention it, yet I believe its listed on the 14 inch service manual. Still requires you to remove quite a few things. I also asked on Dell's website before and got this reponse:

"In this case it is an either, or. There isn't available space in the chassis for an additional SSD."

Pretty vague answer.

 

If anyone has opened theirs up enough to be able to see the separate USB board can you confirm whether it is mSATA or not, the pictures in the service manual aren't great. If it is then hopefully it's SATA III.

Thanks

 

@Akvavit, did Dell send you a copy of Windows 8 with the laptop? I have now ordered my 7537 and already have a brand new Corsair Neutron GTX sitting next to me ready to install. But it occured to me that I should check whether Dell is shipping with an OS disc, so that I can put that on a usb stick or the drive before installing it.

If they didn't send a disc what did you do?

 

There is only a recovery partition. You can always clone the HDD to your SSD, if the corsair comes with a USB to SATA adaptor then you would be set to go, if not you could order one.

 

hey
could you post some battery test result when you get a chance im interested in the browser test just browsing maybe some music , really curious what is the result because the lower res one got close to 10 hours so would be very interested to see whats with the 1080 screen version i like to buy soon.

thanks alot for your time !!

John

 

@j24d. Thanks, I'll go down the clone route.

 

Yes, only a recovery partition - I would have liked a cd, but guess that is not how things work these days?

I used the migration tool provided by Samsung - worked like a charm.

 

What is weird is how they report at the hangaria magazine that the laptop they test is below the average of the category at benchmarks etc. Which is the average? I mean this is a laptop with just integrated card they cannot to compare it to laptops with dedicated cards and make conclutions...

I am just waiting for the high end model reviews

 

Agree - it was an odd test - I mean.. Is it normal to test the slowest model of a line?

 

Just had conversation on Dell's online chat, they confirmed that the 7537 does indeed have a free mSATA slot that supports SATA III 6Gb/s up to 256GB. Looks like I've found my new notebook

 

Wow, I can't believe they would keep something like that a secret. It's not even in the manual. Crazy.

 

I wonder where they hid it - I did not spot it when I installed my SSD.

 

It's underneath the bottom cover to the right of the fan, it's part of the USB board. If you look at the service manual and zoom in on the image on page 37. It requires you to remove the battery, HDD, wireless card, keyboard and bottom cover.

 

Cheers mate! I wonder if they mentioned anything about the size/brand of it? Also - are the any benefit in upgrading this one, now that I have replaced the default HDD with an SSD?

 

As long as it's an mSATA SSD and 256GB or less it should be fine. I'm not sure if you would benefit much now, mabye at a later date if you need the extra space. Might also be possible to run them in RAID 0 which would increase speeds further, no experience in doing that myself however. Personally looking at getting this one, as it has pretty good read/write speeds.

 

Just had another chat with someone at Dell and they said that as long as you don't damage anything while performing this upgrade then the warranty will still stand. It's not one of those stupid "Don't break this seal" type things.

 

That is great to hear, that was one of the things I feared when I switched from desktop to laptop, that upgrading would be impossible. So far it's been a breeze to get to the hard drive bay and the ram are easily accessible too. Thumbs up to Dell on that one

If you decide to pull the trigger on the mSATA, do let us know how you find it - could be interesting to see!

 

Yes that was reassuring. I certainly will, might not get it straight away but I will probably be ordering the laptop today, wont be dispatched till 28th however.

 

I just used the chat function on the Dell site and they told me the 15 inch model doesn't have a free mSATA slot, who should I believe?

 

Kind of expected this to happen, people over on 14" thread also getting conflicting responses in regards to HDD dimensions. Here is part of my chat log:

10/18/2013 08:14:49PM Me: "Does the 15 inch model have a free mSATA slot? It's not listed in the specifications but looking at the service manual there appears to be one."
10/18/2013 08:15:44PM Agent (Windie B): "I see. Let me double check it for you."
10/18/2013 08:15:55PM Agent (Windie B): "Kindly give me a couple of minutes."
10/18/2013 08:16:25PM Me: "Ok thanks, I'm looking at the image on page 37 for reference, it's on the USB board."
10/18/2013 08:18:39PM Agent (Windie B): "Thanks for that additional information. Checking on the details."
10/18/2013 08:23:11PM Agent (Windie B): "Thank you for patiently waiting, I'm still checking on it. Please give me a minute more."
10/18/2013 08:23:30PM Me: "OK no problem."
10/18/2013 08:27:24PM Agent (Windie B): "Thanks for waiting"
10/18/2013 08:28:13PM Agent (Windie B): "Upon checking, yes there is an mSATA slot on it. Are you planning to get one of these laptops?"

And also:

10/18/2013 08:46:47PM Agent (Windie B): "Upon checking, yes it can support SATA III up to 256GB "

You can clearly see an mSATA port in the service manual so I'll believe them until I get it and see for myself.

 

Okay, thanks for clearing that up.
I hope to receive my laptop somewhere next week, but I'll wait for a tutorial on how to put in a SSD since I am sort of a noob and don't want to break it.
Especially because the slot is not easy accessible.

 

If you want to replace the default hard drive with a SSD, then that is easy... even I managed to do it in about 5 minutes.

If you mean the mSATA SSD, then yes - I'll wait around for a bit, and let the more tech savvy people have a go with that

 

Replacing hdd with ssd on 7000-7537 (15") yes it is easy, it uses standard height 7 mm size. And to access msata slot is relatively easy as well, only need to take 2 bottom covers (2 layers) off.

For 7000-7437 (14") it's different. The drive slot is only 5 mm height, I can't find any ssd today in market which will fit. And in order to get access to msata, pretty much it seems involving to take almost the entire laptop apart... and flipping over the motherboard in the end. This can be handled by me, but I can't say the same for everyone.

 

hi - I am very eager to know if anyone has managed to put in an mSATA drive in this rig. I want a comination of 256GB mSATA + 1TB regulad HD for my requirements!

Thanks!