My new work laptop is pretty dang decent, and just so happens to be Dell's deal of the week

"Textured Soy Protein" (texturedsoyprotein)
06/01/2020 at 16:44 • Filed to: None

I just started my new job, and I’m pretty happy with the laptop they gave me. It’s a fully-loaded Dell Vostro 15 5590, which is a thin & light 15" machine that’s actually manage-ably sized because of nice thin bezels on the screen. Out of curiosity I peeked at it on Dell’s site and it’s !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .

Specs are:

Intel Core i7-10510U
Nvidia GeForce MX250 2 GB DDR5 GPU
16 GB DDR4 2666 MHz RAM
512 GB SSD
15" 1080p matte screen - pretty good quality if not super high res
Backlit keyboard + num pad
Healthy port selection including USB-C with PD & video output for 1 plug docking - works perfectly with my !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! connected to monitor/keyboard/mouse/speakers
3.66 lbs and reasonably thin, nice metal build

With that discounted price this config if you order it yourself is $979 direct from Dell at the link above. Overall a pretty solid bargain for this level of machine. I honestly haven’t used a thin-bezel 15" laptop like this before and it’s perfectly portable enough, although I think 14" is more of the sweet spot of portability and screen real estate. Not like I’ll be doing much traveling anytime soon anyway.

If I were in the market for a personal laptop, this thing ticks almost all my boxes, except for the screen. I’d rather have a 1440p or 2160p display but even at the 15" size the resolution isn’t bad. I can somewhat see the pixels, which is not the case on my 6 year old 13" MacBook Pro that’s still trucking along fine for my personal machine.

The quality of the panel is pretty ok in terms of brightness, with very good contrast, but !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . Since I do a bunch of video and photo editing in my personal life, the display would probably rule it out as a personal machine for me. My Dell U2518 25" 1440p HDR monitor on my desk !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , and usually that’s where I do my video/photo work, but I’d want to at least be able to do that stuff on the laptop’s screen as well.

That said, the brightness and especially the contrast make using it for work purposes an above-average experience. I’ve definitely had much worse laptop displays.

Also it has a built in microSD card reader, which is fine, but I do a lot with regular SD cards from cameras so I’d have to use one of my multiple SD card reader dongles I already own, including the aforementioned Aukey hub. I guess I shouldn’t really care if a laptop has a built-in SD card slot but it’d be nice. Le sigh.

So if you’re in the market for a laptop for about a grand, and don’t have a need for a wide color gamut display, check this thing out.

DISCUSSION (11)

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Textured Soy Protein
06/01/2020 at 16:47

I’m still using a D430.

PyroHoltz f@h Oppo 261120 > Textured Soy Protein
06/01/2020 at 16:49

Solid notebook. I wish Dell were embracing the Ryzen chips more, Intel has some serious security holes in their silicon and the Zen 2 APU s offer impressive GPU performance for being on chip.

Textured Soy Protein > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/01/2020 at 16:51

Holy shit, I googled that and it’s ancient. Like, a low-end 2020 smartphone is more powerful.

My 6 year old MacBook Pro actually is halfway acceptable at light video editing of 4k videos in iMovie. It just takes a while to render the final output files and doesn’t like to preview in full screen if there are too many effects applied to the footage. But I’ll need to upgrade at some point soon, maybe get a desktop but then that screws up my ability to dock laptops at the desk.

Textured Soy Protein > PyroHoltz f@h Oppo 261120
06/01/2020 at 16:54

AMD is killing it lately. Their laptop chips are very exciting. Like this is one of Intel’s top laptop chips and I’m pretty sure a $700 AMD machine will run circles around it in Geekbench.

Aremmes > Textured Soy Protein
06/01/2020 at 16:56

But the new G5 15 SE is out , though, and it’s not lacking in speediness .

Textured Soy Protein > Aremmes
06/01/2020 at 16:59

That’s a 5.5 lb gaming laptop. I don’t game and I’m not about to get something that approaches even 4 lbs.

Aremmes > Textured Soy Protein
06/01/2020 at 17:04

Ah, 5.5 lbs doesn't seem like much to me after having lugged 6- and 7-lb notebooks daily for years. My current Precision 3510 weighs 4.75 lbs and I think it could use a sandwich.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Textured Soy Protein
06/01/2020 at 17:11

More than one D430, actually. They’re nice little lappies, Core i5, SSD... Good travel laptop, web appliance, video streamer to the living room television.

Textured Soy Protein > Aremmes
06/01/2020 at 17:15

When 14" models with low-end dedicated GPUs are under 3 lbs, yeah no.

Right now I’m at the very beginning of wrapping my head around video production, and my youtube cooking videos don’t need crazy editing power, but I’m looking to move up from iMovie to DaVinci Resolve, and need some decent horsepower to run Resolve.

Ideally I’d do a desktop with an 8 GB GPU, but I’m not sure I want to tie up my monitor setup with that. My wife and I both work from home now and take turns docking our laptops at the desk. Her work is entirely web-based, so I could set up separate user accounts for each of us on a desktop, but because of security requirements I’m not quite sure about doing my work on a personal machine. I’d have to ask.

Textured Soy Protein > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/01/2020 at 17:17

I must be looking at something different from what you have.

https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/latit/en/spec_latit_d430_en.pdf

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Textured Soy Protein
06/01/2020 at 17:40

My 2014 MBP is also still solid and capable.