Dell G15 5520 (2022) - Nuclear Review
Originally published in 2022. Text review adapted from YouTube video script. Original video currently only available at patreon.com/NuclearNotebook.
A powerful GeForce RTX graphics chip, Intel’s all-new 14-core mobile processor, and Dell’s plastic-fantastic entry-level gaming laptop.
Let’s see how well this works.
Recently refreshed for 2022, this new top-tier G15 5520 is equipped with an Intel Core i7-12700H 14-core processor, 16GB of 4800MHz DDR5 RAM, and a 140-watt GeForce RTX 3070 Ti.
Also included in this configuration are a 15-inch 165Hz 1080P IPS display with Advanced Optimus and G-Sync, a 512GB PCIE 4.0 SSD, AX WiFi, 86 watt-hour battery, and an orange backlit keyboard.
As you can see, there are all sorts of different options available on the Dell website for this laptop so there really should be a configuration to suit almost everyone.
In the Box
In the boring but very eco-friendly brown box you’ll find the laptop itself, Dell’s absolutely massive 240-watt power brick, and a small amount of documentation.
Around the outside of the laptop itself, on the right hand side you’ll find a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, the first of four exhaust vents and a fluorescent orange G logo.
On the rear, we have two large vents, a Thunderbolt 4 Type-C port, another USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type A, HDMI 2.1 output, and the DC-in jack.
And along the left hand side, there’s one more exhaust vent, RJ-45 Ethernet with a spring-loaded flap of doom, combo headphone/microphone jack and a battery status LED. This LED also doubles as a fault code indicator so if your G15 stops starting up, check for a flashing light here.
Compared to the original G15 5510, the new G15 is slightly thicker overall, and has noticeably bigger ventilation openings to help cool the significantly more powerful parts.
As always, the lid swings open easily with no major flex, and the strong hinge assembly holds the display in position very firmly so you won’t notice any screen wobble in normal use.
Inside you’ll find a fairly small trackpad with one of the worst integrated mouse buttons in the business, a full keyboard with number pad, and a large row of air intake vents.
Around the display is a thick lower bezel, reasonably thin bezels at the sides and top, and above the screen is a small, low quality webcam straddled by a pair of stereo microphones.
Input Devices
The Windows Precision trackpad surface responds well without any noticeable input lag or stickiness.
Unfortunately the button mechanism here is really bad. It’s very inconsistent, loose and wobbly, and suffers from a double-clicking issue that comes and goes over time, possibly due to dirt building up inside
Having a quick look at the trackpad from the inside, you can see the trackpad & button are not an integrated unit, but instead the tracking surface loosely rests over a separate button assembly which is fixed to the palmrest area.
Not great for stability, and you can see how much flex there is in this design when I click the button from the other side.
The keyboard on the other hand is very good. The keycaps are slightly undersized and the number pad is far too narrow, but the key mechanisms have nice firm feedback and I have no complaints about the layout.
This all-orange backlight is on the boring side but the optional RGB keyboard is only a few dollars extra, so make sure to opt for that one if this will bother you.
Display
The LG IPS display in this G15 measures up pretty well, if not quite up to a standard that would be considered ‘premium’ in 2022.
Measured with an X-Rite i1DisplayPro Plus, brightness hit 324 nits, contrast comes in at a very good 1222:1, and the panel covers 95.8 percent of the sRGB colour gamut, 73.7% of DCI-P3, and 71.5% of Adobe RGB.
It’s important to note that there is no factory colour calibration or preloaded colour profile so actual accuracy will vary wildly between units. Once calibrated, sRGB accuracy on this panel was fantastic.
Dell do offer a 240Hz 1440p display with wider colour gamut coverage and higher brightness for additional cost and I would recommend upgrading to that display if you’re going to be doing any content creation.
Advanced Optimus
Advanced Optimus is fitted to this machine but this is an unusually well-hidden feature, and Dell don’t even mention it on the product page.
This fully automatic system replaces the old style of MUX switch on laptops that required you to manually select a graphics chip and restart the computer.
If you open Nvidia Control Panel and click into the Manage Display mode tab, you’ll see these three GPU selection options.
Always leave this on Automatic Select.
When you open up a game, you’ll see the current status here change to Discrete Graphics. This means you’re now running the display directly from the dedicated graphics, bypassing the integrated GPU altogether.
You’ll also notice the G-Sync tab has appeared in the sidebar.
On my unit, G-Sync was enabled by default, but it’s worth clicking in here just to make sure it’s set up properly.
Note that Advanced Optimus is disabled entirely when an external display is connected to the HDMI port.
Battery
This being a portable machine you’re likely to be interested in the battery life, and I don’t have much good news here.
With the display set to 70% brightness and sitting idle on the Windows desktop, I recorded just under 10 hours.
However at 100% brightness and with my usual mix of heavy internet use, the machine died after only 2 hours and 20 minutes.
The Balanced power profile was used for both of these tests.
This very poor result was repeatable, and since no applications were unnecessarily using the dedicated GPU, this is clearly just a result of poor power management.
It’s possible that updates over time will sort this out, but you should never rely on future updates to solve problems, and for now this laptop is close to useless away from a power outlet.
LatencyMon
DPC latency is once again an issue on this laptop. This is a long-standing problem that Dell seem unable or unwilling to sort out.
You will occasionally get a noticeable pop or stutter in the audio & I wouldn’t rely on one of these for any live audio work.
Software/Fan Control
Now before we hit the thermal and performance data, I need to comment on the increasingly disastrous state of Dell’s software for this line of laptops.
Alienware Command Centre SHOULD be your hub for changing thermal & power profiles. However, it began to flat-out refuse to work properly after I’d had this laptop for a few days.
Here is what the main screen in the app should look like. Notice the power and fan profile settings toward the bottom right.
Now here’s what happens every time I try to open it up on the 5520.
After an irritating wait, we get a User Account Control popup, and then a while later it loads into this.
You can edit power profile and fan settings from the Fusion tab, however you can’t actually switch between them from here.
I’ll also call out the separate app you’re kicked into for changing sound profiles, Dolby Access.
For starters, it’s not particularly reliable. As you can see, on this attempt it just sits there for several minutes thinking.
Once I lose patience and open it manually, it jumps into a home screen that’s bordering on adware. Switching to the Settings tab – oh, well, never mind. Just don’t bother. The speakers are pretty bad anyway and this software does very little to help.
So without Alienware Command Center working, you’ll need to instead jump into the My Dell app to change between performance profiles, and this one’s a bit painful.
Digging through to the Power Manager section that would look more at home on a tablet, we have various settings for charging modes to preserve the battery, and a selection of four thermal modes under the adjacent Thermal tab.
The only one of these modes that will allow the GPU to hit its maximum 140-watts of power is Ultra Performance, which is the mode I used for all benchmarking.
There is the usual G key on the keyboard to kick the fans up to maximum speed and theoretically improve performance by a small margin, however this isn’t working properly.
Either nothing happens when I press the button, or it does activate but then refuses to turn back off, and the only way to stop the fans running at full speed is to shut the laptop down entirely.
Fantastic.
BSODs/Recovery on wake
One last quick word about reliability. This specific unit, for some reason, is unable to successfully wake from sleep mode.
Every time it’s woken up, it briefly shows a black screen before rebooting into Recovery mode. No helpful errors are logged in Windows Event Viewer, and after several BIOS reflashes and a Windows reinstall I’ve given up on diagnosing the fault.
At present, I can’t confirm whether this is common on these machines, so please leave a comment if you have one and you’ve run into the same problem.
Fan noise
The perceived severity of the fan noise on this laptop will be a little subjective. It’s free of any lower-frequency whines or other immediately annoying sounds, however I found my ears screaming in agony after my several-hour benchmarking sessions with this one.
So while the sound signature of the fans isn’t particularly irritating, the actual volume of noise coming from the machine can be pretty intense.
Here’s a quick clip of the G15 loading into Cyberpunk to give you an idea of the change in sound levels as the fans spin up.
You’ll no doubt also have noticed Cyberpunk opened up somewhere off to the upper left instead of full screen. All games I tested on this laptop were prone to doing this occasionally. It’s quite annoying and usually needs the game to be restarted to sort it out.
Heat measurements (external)/FLIR
External case temperatures on this machine tend to be noticeably warm all the time and can get very high in places under high loads.
With a heavy game loaded up, you’ll see the base of the laptop hit peaking at around 55 degrees Celsius, which would become dangerous if you had the machine sitting directly on your lap for a period of time. If you’re gaming on the couch you should always use a laptop stand of some sort.
The upper deck gets warm, with the WASD keys hovering around 35 degrees, and the centre of the keyboard nudging 40.
The peak temperatures at the rear shown by the red reticle are very high but as this isn’t a touch point it’s generally nothing to be concerned about.
Palmrests generally stay under 30 degrees which is a little warm but not particularly irritating.
Cooling: Flat-on-desk vs Cooling Pad
Here’s a side-by side demonstration of the difference a laptop stand makes in a 21-degree room. On the left, the machine is sitting directly on the desk, and on the right it’s elevated a few inches on a fanless stand.
The GPU runs extremely hot while flat on the desk, indicating that there’s nowhere near enough clearance underneath to allow adequate airflow to the intake vents.
Not only is 86 degrees right up near the thermal throttling limit, it’s also well outside of what I’d consider a safe temperature for a GPU long-term.
Propped up off the desk surface, it’s back under 80 degrees, which is good. You’ll definitely want a stand or cooling pad of some sort if you pick one of these up.
Throttling tests
1) CPU Throttling
It’s important to know how well a gaming laptop’s power delivery and cooling holds up over time, so I’ve devised a throttling test consisting of running Cinebench R22 on a continuous loop and capturing data at one minute intervals.
The G15’s Core i7 initially has 115 watts pumped into it which proves too much for the cooling system to handle, resulting in the CPU instantly hitting 100 degrees and throttling.
It then briefly overcorrects, dropping power down to around 78 watts, before stabilizing with both power and temperature sitting at 90 for the remainder of the test.
At a constant 90 watts, the 12700H runs at 3.4GHz on the performance cores.
2) Combined CPU & GPU Throttling
Now running the test again but throwing in MSI Kombustor to load up the RTX 3070, the CPU initially receives 100 watts but over the next 5 minutes drops all the way down to 45, ultimately stabilizing at 2.3GHz.
The GPU is remarkably stable, hovering around 126 watts and 1440MHz for the duration of the test.
Looking at core temperatures, once again the i7 immediately smashes into the 100 degree thermal limit, eventually dropping down to a steady 81 degrees.
The GPU temperature is initially brought up to 77 degrees by the intense heat from the processor but eventually stabilizes at 74 degrees.
Benchmark Disclaimer
A quick word before we jump into some benchmarks: you should never shop for laptops solely based on benchmark scores but – instead - include these results in a wider assessment of how well any machine you’re considering fits your expectations for usability, reliability, durability, and after-sale support.
Laptops are complex, tightly integrated machines and the quality of your ownership experience will hinge on every one of these factors being satisfied equally, so if you skipped straight to this section, I would urge you to consider going back and reading this article in its entirety before making a decision.
All benchmarks are run with the laptop set to the Ultra Performance power mode.
Benchmarks
Straight away, it’s clear that the new 12th generation Core i7 as a monster of a CPU and absolutely the star of the show here.
In Cinebench R23, we’re looking at a multicore score not far off what you’d expect from a 16-core desktop chip only a few of years ago, and by far the fastest mobile chip I’ve seen so far.
The included Western Digital PCIE 4.0 solid state drive is a little disappointing, giving read and write speeds more like a PCIE 3 SSD, but given its tiny 512GB capacity that’s not too surprising.
3DMark results, which give us an idea of how the gaming performance will stack up, are looking promising.
CPU scores are definitely the star of the show, towering over the older high-end 8-core chips.
3DMark results, which give us an idea of how the gaming performance will stack up, are looking promising.
CPU scores are definitely the star of the show, towering over the older high-end 8-core chips.
Game Benchmarks
Having a look at some actual gaming benchmarks, I’ve included runs with and without the Core i7’s efficiency cores disabled through the BIOS, because it turns out that in some games there can be quite a difference in the results.
Without the E-cores active, the i7 functions as a normal 6-core, 12-thread chip , instead of the more complex big.LITTLE setup with 6 performance cores and 8 small efficiency cores.
To disable the efficiency cores, you’ll need to reboot into the BIOS, head into the Performance tab, and under Multiple Atom Cores, change this setting to zero. Remember that performance in productivity applications will be substantially reduced so you’ll want to undo this change if you need the best performance in a heavily multithreaded workload.
Cyberpunk 2077 is within margin of error on both runs, and the new G15 does a great job of keeping the framerate over 60 in the demanding Ray Tracing Ultra preset either way.
Watch Dogs Legion is a full 13.3% faster in average framerate with the E-cores disabled. 1% and 0.1% lows are significantly higher as well.
Division 2 doesn’t seem too fussed about the core configuration, and neither does
Metro Exodus Enhanced, which is again roughly within margin of error and a strong showing either way.
Far Cry 6 is completely unphased by core configuration and runs extremely well.
Borderlands 3 despite having a very similar average framerates gets more than double the 0.1% low result without the E cores. There’s a very noticeable stutter in this game in the default configuration which is alleviated entirely
Gears 5 shows a less dramatic difference in lows than Borderlands however performance is clearly improved across the board with the E-cores disabled.
Relative Gaming Performance
Now moving onto the final chart, what I’ve done here is average out the gaming performance results for a number of different machines tested under identical conditions and then set the highest overall result to represent 100%.
As you can see the G15 5520 just barely manages to claw its way to the top spot here, and while the end result is less dramatic than synthetic benchmarks would lead you to believe, this is still a great result that shows that the system isn’t buckling under pressure and will give you the gaming experience you paid for.
Two new additions to this chart are what I consider to be decent representations of both an entry-level desktop gaming PC with a Core i3 and Radeon RX 6500 XT, and a more midrange system with a Core i5 and GeForce RTX 3060.
If you’re considering switching over to a gaming laptop this might help you to understand how various configurations will compare to a desktop machine.
Teardown
Right, let’s tear this thing apart and check it out from the inside.
You may be wondering what the point of this is.
In simple terms, we’re looking for the same things inside as we were on the outside – quality of design, construction and assembly, and serviceability which always becomes important later in a laptop’s life.
Note that Dell provides factory service manuals for all of their computers on the Dell Support website. This is a fantastic resource for easy step-by-step instructions for any work you need to carry out on your machine.
As always, initial disassembly is simple, with four captive screws popping the base cover out of its clips, making it easy to remove. The clips on this one were unusually stubborn but after a brief argument it let me in.
Once inside, you can see the 86 watt-hour battery, M.2 SSD, socketed WiFi card, two DDR5 SO-DIMM memory slots, both of which are populated, and Dell’s insulting solution to last year’s problem of not including a bracket for the second SSD – they’ve now just straight-up not soldered in the socket for a second drive.
This offers no benefit to you whatsoever, but simply saves Dell a few cents on board manufacturing, and forces you to consider paying more for a larger SSD upfront since you can’t add another down the track.
Thanks a lot, Dell.
If you’re unfamiliar with these G15s you may also be surprised to see that the heatsink and fan assembly is not accessible from here.
You will need to fully dismantle the machine and remove the motherboard to repaste the CPU and GPU and properly clean the heatsink fins.
Definitely not a service-friendly design.
Let’s press on.
After disconnecting and removing the battery and enormous amount of fiddling to remove all installed modules, the rear housing, and a dozen small cables and screws, the motherboard assembly eventually lifts out.
Other than a few unimpressive build quality details like speaker O-rings not installed properly or plastic backing left on this black tape implying a rushed assembly line, the structure under the top case is the same good design as last year, with a large and solid magnesium frame supporting the display hinge and metal screw standoffs used throughout.
The plastic casing may feel a bit cheap but this is a strongly constructed laptop that should prove durable in the long run.
The air vents above the keyboard are mostly closed off, but the dust filter used this year is a less dense weave than in older generations to allow more airflow.
The cooling system itself is a large but fairly basic quad-heatpipe design, with two shared heatpipes and one additional pipe each for the GPU and CPU which wrap around to secondary heatsinks on the side.
Dell’s design for the primary rear heatsink fin stacks is a little bizarre, with more than half the total height of the fins awkwardly protruding from the cooler in a narrow row and receiving zero direct airflow from the fans.
This would no doubt assist with cooling to a certain extent but don’t let the size of the rear vents fool you into thinking there’s some ultra heavy-duty cooling in here.
On the plus side there’s very good coldplate coverage of all components including voltage regulators and the PCH.
Not too sure what this strange sandwich of a MOSFET, adhesive metal strip, Kapton tape, and a thermal pad are meant to accomplish but we’ll just pretend we didn’t see it and move on.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve encountered an overtightened screw in a new laptop but irritatingly one of the six securing the heatsink on this one was jammed hard and threatening to strip out.
After a few minutes of pain it did come out without any damage, but make sure you’ve always got exactly the right size screwdriver for this sort of job because a slightly under or oversized driver will easily strip the heads on these weak screws.
Finally, after all that work, the heatsink comes off.
Thermal paste application on both the GPU and CPU is great with full die coverage.
We have what appears to be a 5+1 Phase VRM on the CPU and 5+2 Phase VRM on the GPU which is definitely on the stingy side for such high-wattage parts but seems to do the job since there’s no unexpected power throttling on this machine.
The thermal pads for the voltage regulator components are very chaotically applied to the cooler but appear to be making fairly solid contact.
Lastly, the contact plates for the CPU and GPU definitely aren’t machined to a mirror-like finish but nonetheless aren’t too badly scored or pitted. I’ve definitely seen worse on other laptops and thermal paste is designed to fill these small gaps anyway.
Interestingly, the conformal coating applied over the Core i7 has a noticeable amount of pitting in the surface. It’s hard to capture in a photo but all these white dots on the die are actually tiny pits that seem to have come from bubbles under the coating.
Since it would be very risky to attempt to remove this coating from the chip in pursuit of improved temperatures I’ll be leaving it alone. to have come from bubbles under the coating.
A major bugbear of mine with Dell’s parts support for many of their laptop lines, including the G15, is that the LCD panel itself is not available as a replacement part.
Instead, Dell only list a part number for the entire display assembly, including the front and rear plastic housings.
In most cases, that will significantly increase the amount of plastic and e-waste going to landfill in the event that the screen is damaged, not to mention the increased cost for buying a number of parts you don’t actually need.
As you can see, it’s very simple to remove the bezel around the screen, which is held on with a few plastic clips and thin strips of double-sided tape.
Conclusion
Overall, I’m in two minds about the G15 5520. On one hand, the updated processor and graphics chip are seriously powerful components, and the new display options are an improvement over last year’s model.
The structure of the laptop is still reassuringly solid, and Dell’s after-sale support tends to be very good.
Unfortunately though, my ownership experience so far with this machine has been quite poor. Between constant struggles with Dell’s software, strange reliability faults, intense fan noise, high temperatures and miserable battery life, I would find it extremely difficult to recommend this laptop, especially at the elevated you pay for these high-end specifications.
Flaky quality of assembly and a hopeless trackpad just drive the point home.
It’s entirely possible that some or all of the issues I’ve encountered will be sorted out by future software updates, but as of June 2022, I’m going to say give this one a miss and look elsewhere.
