Dell G16 7630 (2023) - Nuclear Review
Originally published in 2024. Text review adapted from YouTube video script. Original video currently only available at patreon.com/NuclearNotebook.
Depending on your point of view, Dell’s G16 is either a G15 in a tuxedo, or an Alienware M16 having a slightly bad hair day.
In a nutshell, this is a slightly posh variant of Dell’s entry-level gaming chassis, that sort of bridges a nonexistent gap in the market that didn’t need to be filled anyway. Great work, product planners!
As is now normal for this lineup, this is a thick, heavyset machine with priorities focused far more on durability and to some extent cooling rather than portability.
There are some genuine benefits over the basic G15, such as a new Quad-HD+ display and radically improved trackpad and keyboard – minus the numberpad, of course – and this is probably the pick of the two unless you’re really going to miss the numpad. I would. I would miss it dearly.
There are also some downsides, depending on your point of view, such as the supposed “upgrade” to Intel HX-series processors, which exist solely to make your laptop hotter, heavier and louder, just like you’ve always wanted.
Dell’s marketing focuses mostly on performance and power, bragging about shoving 195-watts directly under your keyboard.
The product page also claims that on certain configurations, a vapor chamber and Element 31 – Alienware’s proprietary liquid metal compound – are used for cooling. Both of those are present and accounted for on today’s victim.
Dell Australia currently only lists two basic configurations for this one, but the unit I have here is bafflingly nugget-spec, combining the power-guzzling Core i5-13450HX with a GeForce RTX 4050 which seems to be out of its league hooked up to a Quad-HD Plus display, but more on that later.
Weighing in at a whopping 2.77 kilos, you’re not going to want to carry this one around in a backpack all day – but making this problem far worse is the mandatory inclusion of Dell’s absolutely ancient, huge, fat and heavy 330-watt power adapter, thanks to the HX series CPU. This ugly chonker of a thing weighs you down by a further 1.6 kilos.
In the Box
Included in the very recyclable packaging is the bare minimum – laptop, big fat power bastard, and some basic documentation.
I’m always pleased to get a laptop that’s free of any obvious defects, and this particular G16 was almost immaculate out of the box, with not a single dent, scratch, or creaking hinge to report.
There was just one little thing – the factory worker forgot to remove the adhesive backing from the battery cable. That’s no big deal, but nothing escapes us.
I’m always pleased to get a laptop that’s free of any obvious defects, and this particular G16 was almost immaculate out of the box, with not a single dent, scratch, or creaking hinge to report.
There was just one little thing – the factory worker forgot to remove the adhesive backing from the battery cable. That’s no big deal, but nothing escapes me.
External Interface Extravaganza
Have you noticed how stupid the names for USB ports are now? It’s just full-on alphabet soup at this point.
On the right-hand side there’s a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports:
On the rear are a USB Gen 2 Type-C with DisplayPort, HDMI 2.1 (connected directly to the dGPU), another USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, and a standard barrel-type DC-in jack:
And on the left-hand side are an RJ45 Ethernet jack and 3.5mm headphone & microphone combo jack.
USB Type-C charging is not supported at all, and you can’t even plug in a slightly smaller Dell barrel jack charger without being whinged at.
Input Devices
If you’ve seen my older reviews of Dell G15s you’ll know how crappy the trackpads have always been, with the flimsy, wobbly construction causing an annoying, second phantom click when you press down the right side.
It seems like someone at Dell has finally listened – the G16’s trackpad is gloriously over-built compared to the old design, with a rejigged click mechanism and loads of mechanical support around the edges, extending right into the palmrest area to keep things nice and stiff and responsive.
The single-zone backlit RGB keyboard is another welcome upgrade over previous designs, with noticeably more key travel and a generally nicer feel. Key actuations are extremely quiet so your 1am internet arguments shouldn’t disturb anyone.
Despite the amount of reinforcement underneath, this keyboard does have a bit of squishiness around the middle.
The numpad is gone, and instead there’s a row of function keys down the right side. Arrow keys are full-size, and if you’re the sort of person who cares, there is a shared Insert/Delete key, along with the classic G key, short for Gee I would love it if the computer made more noise.
Display
The display is secured to the body with the same thick sturdy hinges bolted onto a huge piece of cast magnesium that’s lived in these machines for years.
The solid construction continues inside the lid assembly – everything is bolted in using metal standoffs and sensibly-sized screws.
The result of this is a lid that makes absolutely no awful noises when opened and closed and doesn’t wobble around.
The display itself is a pretty basic 16-inch IPS-type LCD made by AU Optronics, with a resolution of 2560 by 1600 pixels, for a 16:10 aspect ratio.
This panel has a 165Hz refresh rate and G-Sync, and the laptop has Advanced Optimus so the screen is automatically switched to being driven directly from the dedicated graphics when a game’s launched.
Measurements are decent for an LCD, with the sRGB colour gamut fully covered, brightness maxing out at 314 nits, and contrast at 1369:1. Nothing exciting, but it’s not terrible.
Note that all panels will measure slightly differently, and Dell does now list a 240Hz wide-gamut panel as standard in the higher-end models.
Webcam & Microphone
Above the display are the completely predictable mediocre webcam and stereo microphones. The image and sound quality captured by these makes me feel nostalgic for late-noughties unboxing videos.
Internal Speakers & Audio Software/Settings
The speakers installed in the G16 are the exact same little pieces of crap as older models.
These specific speakers are just about the worst off-the-shelf part in the industry, and they heavily rely on audio processing software to make them usable.
In this case, the audio software has gotten worse, with the settings no longer hanging out inside Alienware Command Centre – instead you’re now automatically kicked out into some Dolby adware.
Don’t you love it when your audio driver starts asking for money?
Inside the Settings tab here, there are some completely opaque audio modes that only give vague explanations of what they do, and a Custom mode to let you drive yourself nuts trying to improve things.
Not happening. The sound is pretty bad here, noticeably worse than in the old G15. Any upper bass and midrange that did exist has been gutted to increase the maximum volume without improving the hardware.
The headphone amp on the other hand is close to decent, with enough power to get dangerously loud powering 32-ohm headphone.
Unfortunately the audio driver still gets in the way and culls bass and midrange frequencies just like it does for the internal speakers, albeit not quite as badly. You can go in and disable all of the audio processing in Windows settings and if you’re only going to use headphones and external speakers I’d strongly recommend that you do.
Storage
The included SSD is a Western Digital SN740, surprisingly in the tiny M.2 2230 form factor.
Read and write speeds on the factory SSD are quite good, if not the best possible for a PCIE 4 drive. No complaints here.
The slot on the motherboard will accommodate either a 2230 or 2280 drive, and would you believe it, Dell have finally come around and fitted a second M.2 socket including mounting hardware, so you’re no longer forced to stick with only one drive, or pull your hair out trying to find an adapter on eBay. Saints be praised.
A copper heat spreader is provided for both the factory SSD and the second slot, including a fresh, plastic-backed thermal pad for the latter.
Software
Loaded up from the factory on that SSD is a copy of Windows 11, pre-loaded with a pretty typical array of bloat in addition to all the usual Microsoft shovelware, most of which you can safely uninstall.
Alienware Command Centre is where you’ll find most of the important controls for the laptop, including power and thermal modes and RGB lighting customization.
This software is now in its 6th major release and seems much more polished and reliable than previous versions, but it still feels just a bit bloated and sluggish.
Other than the usual preset performance modes, there’s a Custom mode which allows you to either set an offset or totally custom curve for both fans, and there’s also a slider for the TCC offset.
This lowers the thermal throttling limit, all the way down to 85 degrees Celsius. 0 on the slider means 100 degrees, 15 means 85.
Increasing the value on this slider will directly reduce both the performance and power consumption of that Intel HX chip by throttling it at lower temperatures, but under a full load it won’t reduce the heat load in the system – measured in watts, not degrees – since any extra power will end up being slung over to the Nvidia GPU by Dynamic Boost, so the cooling system will be doing the same amount of work either way.
Basically, this can be seen as roundabout way of freeing up more power for the GPU, but anyone paying attention back when this feature debuted will remember the real point was to give users a way to stop seeing 100-degree temperatures on the CPU, which some people don’t like.
I’d suggest just leaving this alone, but it’s there if you want to mess around with it.
Pretty much all of the performance, thermal and battery settings you need are available in the extensive BIOS menus, including some very granular battery charging control, and you can easily control the keyboard lighting with OpenRGB, so any and all of Dell’s software can be safely uninstalled if you won’t miss the convenience.
Battery & Power Draw
Overall power draw on this G16 is generally pretty reasonable.
At idle in Balanced mode, as measured from the power outlet, the machine draws around 14 watts, and when running flat-out with the GPU and CPU fully loaded up, this peaks at 210 and settles at around 180 watts. You’d be forgiven for thinking that 330-watt power adapter was kinda pointless. In fact, you’d be spot-on.
The 86 watt-hour battery fitted to this unit is reporting 97% of its rated capacity after calibrating over a few charge cycles. This will gradually drop with use.
With the display set to 300 nits brightness, and sitting idle on the Windows desktop, the G16 managed 5 hours and 2 minutes of runtime.
During my usual heavy Internet usage test it quit after only 3 hours and 22 minutes.
Yep.
Those numbers are terrible.
Charging from empty in the standard charging mode, it took exactly 1 hour and 20 minutes to hit 50%, and 2 hours 46 minutes to get back up to 100%.
Using ExpressCharge to cook the spicy pillow as quickly as possible, charging to 50% took only 26 minutes, and it hit 100% in 2 hours 20.
When it finally wears out, the battery is extremely easy to replace. Accessible immediately after removing the lower case and held in by 8 Philips screws, this one can be swapped out in under 5 minutes.
The very nice part number is 69KF2 and this battery is shared with an incredibly long list of laptops so you’d have no trouble finding a replacement in the future.
Processor
The processor included here is definitely a weird one.
For those who don’t know, Intel’s H-series laptop processors are the high-powered units you’d typically find in a gaming laptop, and HX variants take that idea and bump it up another notch to make things as loud and hot as possible.
In this case, we’ve got a Core i5-13450HX, which has six P-cores with HyperThreading, and four E-cores for a total of 10 cores and 16 threads.
There’s 20 megabytes of Intel SmartCache onboard, so the spec sheet for this one reads like an i7-13700H with four less E-cores, four less megabytes of cache, and a much higher power budget.
The rated maximum power consumption during PL2 is a staggering 157 watts, and Intel specify the PL1 or long-term power as 55 watts.
The CPU is fed by what looks like 5+1+1 phase power delivery, so if I’m reading this board correctly it’s a bit skimpy with only 5 phases dedicated to the CPU cores, but these are pretty decent components and everything is actively cooled.
Memory
The RAM supplied with this unit is a pair of 8GB, single-rank SK Hynix DDR5-4800 SO-DIMMs. CAS latency is a very lazy 40 cycles, so nothing exciting here.
Graphics
And of course the GPU here is a tiny little baby GeForce RTX 4050. Seriously, look how comically small this thing is.
Inside that tiny package there’s 2560 cores, 80 TMUs, 48 ROPS, and a stupid little 96-bit memory bus with 6 gigabytes of GDDR6 video memory attached.
On balance, with that very narrow memory bus and lack of real improvements, I’d say this is a step backwards from the old RTX 3050. The only saving grace here is the 50% increase in VRAM, but that’s just trading one problem for another.
This is what happens when you give someone a monopoly.
Maximum TGP is allegedly 140 watts, more on that in a moment, and power for the GPU is provided by a 5 plus 1 phase power supply.
Cooling System
The system tasked with extracting heat from these parts is a pretty big and complex unit, with a total of four heatpipes moving heat from a big vapour chamber to four heat spreaders, which in turn are cooled by two 60-millimetre fans.
These heat spreaders look much bigger than they really are, measuring only a couple of millimetres deep for around half the height of the fins.
This cooler weighs in at a pretty chunky 362 grams without the fans. More weight means more thermal mass and when this is balanced well against the cooling requirements it should result in the fans audibly ramping up and down less often, which is the case here.
Rather excitingly, Alienware’s Element 31 liquid metal compound is used for thermal transfer on both the CPU and GPU dies.
Element 31 is gallium mixed with a carrier compound that attempts to reduce the electrical conductivity, reduce corrosion, and make it safer to apply and remove than classic liquid metals.
Making things even safer, there are barriers installed all around the CPU and GPU to prevent anything nearby from being shorted out.
Regardless, you probably shouldn’t try removing and replacing this stuff as there’s still a risk of bricking the board. This should last a lot longer than normal thermal paste, and I’d be genuinely surprised if there was ever a need to replace it for the life of the laptop.
So on that note I’ve gone ahead and removed and replaced it with normal thermal paste just to see what happens. More on that shortly.
Coldplate surfaces appear to be nickel-plated to prevent corrosion and are decently flat, with only the tiniest suggestion of pitting on a near-mirror finish.
Fan noise is very similar to older G15 models, that is to say it’s present, but reasonably quiet - provided you ignore the G key - and there are no annoying whining noises or vibrations.
Frustratingly, the fans can’t be removed for cleaning without taking the entire heatsink off, which requires removing the entire motherboard from the case and risks causing a short with the liquid metal, so there’s a massive serviceability fail there.
Just getting some cat hair out of the fans and heatsink fins could take you well over two hours once everything is back together and it requires a level of technical skill that not everyone has.
If manufacturers are going to start putting these long-life liquid metal compounds inside laptops they’re going to have to start making sure the fans can come out easily for cleaning because this is going to be really annoying long-term.
Power Delivery & Temperature
Now, because a gaming laptop is expected to run at full load for extended periods of time, we're going to have a look at how the temperatures and power delivery behave over a 30 minute torture test.
For this test, the laptop is in its high performance mode, sitting flat on the desk in a 22-degree office, with Cinebench 23 and MSI Kombustor running together for 30 minutes to stress the CPU and GPU simultaneously.
Data is recorded approximately every half second and clock speeds won’t be included since they’ll vary wildly depending on the workload.
Power for the Core i5 starts off at a ridiculous 140-watts, then ramps back down and eventually sustains a still-high average of 75.
Temperatures, or should I say temperature, while this goes on is a very constant 100 degrees. That’s exactly what the HX chip is intended to do – completely max out the power delivery or cooling, whichever comes first, and it sticks to that temperature like glue.
As I mentioned earlier, the RTX 4050 is rated for a whopping 140-watts, but it’s far too small and weak a chip to max out that power budget. So what we’re seeing here is a pretty consistent 95 to 100 watts.
The 4050 stays nice and cool, barely nudging 70 degrees, but it does sustain just over 80 degrees on the hotspot.
Video memory follows the hotspot temperature pretty closely, stabilising at around 80 degrees.
So, about that liquid metal. I’ve temporarily replaced it with Arctic MX-5 and then re-run this test to see what happens.
Since the CPU temperature was 100 degrees before, there’s nothing new here, it’s still 100. Happy days.
But check out the massive drop in power. With the regular thermal paste it’s only managing to hit 55 watts before thermal throttling. That’s still decent for a gaming laptop, but the difference that Element 31 makes is clear as day here.
So if you have one of these, by all means stick with the liquid metal as long as possible. It’s annoying to work around, but it’s clearly required to extract the maximum performance out of this machine.
As always, a lot of people will be wondering whether a laptop stand or cooling pad would help this laptop run any cooler, so here’s a side-by-side of the G16 sitting directly on the desk, and elevated on a fanless stand.
Well, there’s pretty much nothing in it. With the air inlets completely unobstructed, the G16 only runs about a degree cooler, so the only reason you’d elevate it would be for ergonomics, or when you’re gaming on your lap.
And on that note, unless you’re trying really hard to sterilise yourself, you’re not going to be lap-top gaming with this gaming laptop directly atop your lap for more than about thirty seconds at a time.
The keyboard and palmrest area fares much better, with the palmrests staying completely cool, and the keyboard becoming noticeably hot but never becoming unusable.
Gaming
Right, so, given that this is a gaming laptop, how well does it actually run games?
Well since this unit has the ungodly combination of an RTX 4050 and a QHD+ screen, the answer depends on what you’re asking it to do.
Here’s a clip of the G16 running Cyberpunk 2077’s benchmark, on identical settings, at the display’s native Quad HD resolution on the left, and in 1920x1080 on the right.
Performance is just about halved by running that high res screen at its native resolution.
1080P looks a bit gross on this display, and while upscalers do exist, it’s disingenuous to include any form of software-based framerate boosters in performance tests since they’re such a constantly moving target for performance and quality.
So, instead, here’s a few games running at the native Quad HD to give you an honest idea of performance.
I’ve set all of these games to the graphics presets that result in framerates close to 60FPS without using upscalers or resolution scaling.
For the most part, that 4050 is adequate to get games moving on this screen, but the limitations of this GPU sometimes become glaringly obvious.
Check out Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition. This machine can’t even hold onto a steady framerate at this game’s “Normal” graphics settings with DLSS upscaling enabled. Given that something as weak and memory-constrained as the Xbox Series S can run this one smoothly, that’s just embarassing.
Relative Gaming Performance
So, gathering benchmark data from a wide variety of performance tests done under identical conditions to position the G16 on my Relative Gaming Performance chart, you can see the advantage that high-powered CPU provides, shoving it pretty high up in the mix here due to excellent performance in CPU-bound benchmarks.
Still, thanks to completely unpredictable performance provided by the narrow memory bus and tiny GPU, I’d take any of those RTX 3060-equipped machines over this one, any day of the week.
Conclusion
So would I recommend you actually buy this laptop? With reservations, maybe.
Build quality is excellent, the display is OK, and the keyboard and trackpad are pretty decent.
On the flip side, the battery life absolutely sucks, it’s extremely heavy - especially with the power brick - and you’re probably going to be up against Dell’s best efforts to ruin your experience with software glitches, weird throttling, and apparently now adware embedded in some of the drivers.
You definitely don’t want one in this entry-level configuration, since the ratio of weight, heat and noise to actual performance is ridiculous.
It’s annoying how close this gets to being Actually Good without quite getting there. Maybe some things will improve with updates, but for now, I’m rating this one a solid Meh, or three apathetic laptops.
