Your thoughts on the 2017 Dell Inspiron 7370 and 7570?

I'm in the market for a nicely built (metal preferred) 1080p laptop with a quad with HT. These two seem great for me. Both basic models that i'm personally interested in start at $779. Seems great to me and both feature Kaby Lake R i5 8250u with is a 4 core 8 thread chip. NO gaming whatsoever but I will use Abobe Premiere for it's most stressful software. Seems like the 15" model is the better value with the dedicated 940. But I love the 13" form factor. I also prefer the clam shell design over the 2 in 1.

Please give me your thoughts on these and potential issues.

7370 http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-inspiron-13-7000/spd/inspiron-13-7370-laptop

7570 http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-inspiron-15-7000/spd/inspiron-15-7570-laptop

 

Lots of views but nothing? Perhaps it's too new?

 

It is pretty new, but i've got the top config you can get right now (in my sig)

The only thing I can fault it for is the battery capacity is quite small (38W/hr) so if you are stressing the system out while on battery it doesn't last much longer than about 2 hours, just simple web browsing it lasts 4-5 hours. As for the performance with the i7 8550u it is very fast, and while it throttles it doesn't throttle enough to hurt performance, as a matter of fact under sustained load the cpu only gets to about 80c. It definately a laptop to consider. Check out my benchmark thread here http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ing-behavior-on-dell-inspiron-13-7000.809595/

 

Ive had the 15" 7570 Touch for 3 weeks now. i wrote a lengthy review on dell.com, title: " 3 week review: The good, the bad, and suggested improvements"

Overall i like it for how much i spent. no blue screens, runs cool and quiet, no issues except some niggles related to windows.

Bro-tip: find a coupon (i got 10% off). Also, slickdeals sometimes has rebates on Dells. Luckily i bought mine during the 2 day window for their last rebate and now im also getting a $100 gift card sent to me.

 

Bob, I really like your youtube videos on this laptop! I have one on order and was planning to do a similar youtube review as there is still almost nothing there for this laptop and I think its a bit of a hidden gem in dell's lineup at the moment. My only gripe and wish is that they went with the mx150 instead of the 940mx.

 

The 7570 offers some serious bang for the buck if you are patient at the outlet. You can pick up the 8250u, 940mx, 8gb, 1920x1080 touch, 1 TB HD for around $450 after discounts and cash back sites. I was little disappointed in the build quality, especially where the base meets the keyboard/palm rest area. Definitely a step down from previous 7000 series Inspirons. However the specs are incredible for this price point given the 2 ram slots, m.2 NVME support and 2.5" bay, HDMI 2.0 and display port.

 

That’s a really good price.

I liked these but that FireCuda drive kills me. But at $450 I’d replace it happily.

But the 940mx throttling at 70c is the real bummer.

 

I agree. I hope Dell or someone else might come out with a fix for the GPU temps. Dell left a lot of headroom on the table with the 70c limit. I immediately replaced the drive with a 512 NVME ssd which I had no problem doing at this price point.

For getting the best specs/price at the outlet, check around 3:30 PM CST +/- 15 minutes and 1:30 AM CST +/- 15 minutes - this is when stock updates daily. You can find scratch and dent versions of the specs I listed for around $570. Combine this price with a 15% promo (they run these frequently) with the 5% referral coupon and 8% cash back that ebates or top cash back runs and you can get a great deal.

 

I am an outlet hound and I haven't see anything close to a deal like that.

So I have been using one for about a week now and can say that I am not impressed as much as I thought I would be. The bezels seem much smaller in pictures, but this is no where near the XPS 15 level. The gaming performance has been pretty bad too, worse than I expected. Even hearthstone ran with studdering. The build on mine is exceptionally bad. The screen does not close all the way. I can slip roughly 17 pieces of paper in the gap it makes. The backlight bleed is the absolute worst I have ever seen. Every corner has massive light spots. The colors look good though, but that bleed. Last nail in the coffin is that the battery life is pretty awful. For the money, its still a quality machine but for their 7000 series, I expected more. This could have been a 5000 series and all would have been overlooked.

 

As harsh as you are, I can't really stand toe to toe with you and disagree. The build quality on mine around the seam (right side) had a pretty big gap. It would snag my arm hair all the time.

The 940mx is neutered but the 70c thermal limit. This was a LARGE mistake! I spoke with 3 different Dell techs about it and their interest in a solution was next to nothing.

Mine didn't exhibit BLB worth mentioning but other than that, my experience is pretty much the same.

 

I found your video (before looking at this forum) and was shocked. Was looking forward to getting one of the Dells Inspiron either 2-in-1 or not, but this thermal limit turned me completely off.

Well, truth is, the 940mx als turned me off, and I hoped that they put in the successor mx150, but now I must assume that they will throttle it too.

In fact, I am pretty sure that they will throttle the mx150, because it has already happened on the Dell Inspiron 17 7000 2-in-1. In a german review https://notebooks-und-mobiles.de/dell-inspiron-17-7000-2-in-1-7773-im-test#comment-3032 they pointed out that the mx150 GPU is being throttled, which can also be seen by their firestrike benchmarks:

Dell 17 7000 (mx150+8550u): 2662 points
Acer Aspire 5 (mx150+8250u): 3220 points

What a joke...

 

I'm glad you found out about this before buying! Honestly I cannot recommend the laptop to anyone.

The dGPU is useless and i'd send people in a different direction if they said they don't need the 940mx.

Then I should mention the build quality too in this post as well. I knew mine was a bit bent, but others have noticed theirs in the same way as mine.

This laptop just seems like a new CPU with leftover parts from their parts bin.

 

I wonder if the GPU throttling can be prevented by putting some thermal pads on its VRMs (which read the temperature), and stack them until they touch the bottom cover so the heat is dissipated to the case?

I read about this "trick" in the XPS 9560 owner's thread. Not sure if it's possible on the Inspiron as well. It was just a thought.

 

It looks at though dell have released a mx130 4gb version of the 7570. Anyone know whether this one has the same 70c limit or is it higher (ideally what should the gpu limit be?)

Thanks

 

Had a similar issue with a GeForce 840M, in my old Asus X550LNV, practically the same GPU as the 940MX/MX150. I found intermittent rock drops to like 135Mhz or so in the GPU under full load in stress tests and games.

Solution was to extract the bios then from that the vbios and mod it so boost clocks were disabled and then no more throttling at all. At 1029 MHz it was solid. Boost was originally 1176Mhz I believe. My guide is still on nVidia’s forums, for the Asus. If you can extract the vbios from the Dell then follow the rest of my guide, it should work.

Basically the extra voltage and temps affiliated to the boost causes either temp or power limit to be reached causing the drops. For me it was the power limit I believe. Mod didn’t work for all Asus laptops as can be seen from that thread as some models seemed to have a backup vbios or something.

 

For some reason your original post on NV forums isn't loading properly. (pretty sure this is it: https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/820979/)

Would you mind being in touch with the details on how to disable boost clocks?

Thanks

 

What is really funny is that my 5000 series device (leaving gaming out of it because I do not game) has none of these issues you mention. Maybe you got a bad example?