Dell G15 5510 (2021) - Nuclear Review
Originally published in 2021. Text review adapted from YouTube video script. Original video currently only available at patreon.com/NuclearNotebook.
The Dell G15 5510 is Dell’s all-new-for-2021 replacement for the outgoing G3, G5 and G7.
Engineered by Alienware, this fresh reboot of the budget-conscious G series aims to address many shortcomings of the older models, with a focus on build quality and cooling capacity.
The unit we’ll be looking at here is equipped with an Intel Core i7-10870H CPU with 8 Skylake-era cores and 16 threads, a GeForce RTX 3060 6GB graphics card at up to 90 watts with Dynamic Boost 2.0, 16GB of DDR4-2933 RAM in dual-channel, a 1-terabyte NVMe SSD, and 165Hz LG IPS display.
Other noteworthy features are as follows:
Resizable BAR: Yes
Nvidia Dynamic Boost 2.0: Yes
MUX switch: No
Adaptive Sync/G-Sync: No
HDMI 2.1: Yes (4k120Hz output supported)
Undervolting enabled: No
4-zone RGB keyboard
Notably absent are any form of adaptive sync on the display and a MUX switch. Nvidia Optimus is always active unless you connect an external display.
In the Box
Inside the very brown & recyclable box, you’ll find the machine itself, a massive 240-watt power brick, basic usage guide & warranty information, and nothing else. Very exciting.
This G15 is finished in the “Phantom Grey with Speckles” colour scheme. I was quite surprised to discover that Phantom Grey is actually a light shade of blue.
The speckled finish is certainly eye-catching and quite a novel idea.
External Interface Extravaganza
Connectivity on this machine is - just like Lenovo’s Legion 5 - spread across all three non-user-facing sides of the machine.
Along the right hand side you’ll find the right hand speaker grille, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, and the first of four fan outlets.
Moving to the rear, there are two large fan outlets, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 & Thunderbolt 3 type-C port supporting DisplayPort alt mode, a single USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, HDMI 2.1, and the DC-in jack.
Finally, along the left hand side there is a Gigabit Ethernet jack, power status LED, and a combo headphone-microphone port.
Underneath is the bulk of the ventilation. The fan inlets are huge on the G15 and run almost the full width of the machine.
Open Up
Opening the machine up, the lid swings open easily with no discernible flexing and the strong hinge assembly holds the display in position firmly.
Inside you’ll find a fairly small trackpad with integrated mouse button, a full keyboard with number pad, and a large row of air intake vents.
The speckled colour theme continues here and even the trackpad surface has been finished off to match the palmrest which is a nice touch.
Input Devices
The Windows Precision trackpad works well with no input lag.
The integrated clickpad button unfortunately suffers from a little too much free play towards the lower right hand corner. This manifests both as an annoying rattle and a phantom secondary click when pressed from certain angles.
This unit is equipped with the optional 4-zone RGB-backlit keyboard. Keycaps still feel slightly undersized but notably, the key mechanisms on the RGB keyboard are distinctly different to those on the standard keyboard – the scissor mechanisms feel more solid and provide more even support to the keycaps, making this one more pleasant to type on.
Display
This 165Hz, 300-nit LG IPS panel is fantastic. Contrast is high, response times are good with no noticeable ghosting during fast motion, colours are nicely saturated and the LCD covers 100% of the sRGB colour gamut.
There is no noticeable backlight bleed on my unit, however this tends to vary between individual laptops.
Sound
The speakers in the G15 are a bit of a letdown. Maximum volume is very high and midrange and high frequencies are fairly well balanced, but there’s a complete lack of any bass.
The biggest issue is the placemenet - bottom-facing speakers are fundamentally awful. Frequency response and volume change dramatically depending on the surface the laptop is sitting on.
Battery Life
The 86 watt-hour battery fitted to this machine gives excellent run times. In my testing the G15 managed just on 12 hours while idle on the Windows desktop with the display at 70% brightness, and 6 hours, 30 minutes during heavy internet use with YouTube videos constantly playing and the display at maximum brightness.
Cooling System
The G15’s fans are particularly quiet and free from any annoying high-frequency whining.
Unfortunately, this is achieved by keeping the CPU and GPU core temperatures particularly high, with the GPU core readily reaching 80 degrees even in a 21-degree office. This setup will result in throttling in higher ambient temperature conditions.
DPC Latency (Windows)
DPC latency as measured by LatencyMon is disappointingly poor on this machine. This may improve with future software updates, but right now it’s not good at all, and is at the point where it even causes Windows’ alert sounds to stutter. Bad.
Benchmarks - Synthetic
It’s worth pointing out that out of the box, with the preinstalled drivers, the G15 does not report as supporting Whisper Mode 2.0 or Resizable Bar.
Additionally, gaming performance was initially awful with extreme stutters during gameplay. This was due to an Nvidia GPU driver that was months out of date.
GeForce Experience was not automatically downloading the latest driver so I had to manually download driver 466.11 from the GeForce website and update it myself.
Please bear this in mind if you buy the G15 because unless Dell sort this out in the preloaded software, there’s a good chance you will need to manually update the GeForce driver yourself to get playable performance and enable all features.
With that out of the way, it’s time for some benchmarks.
Starting off with Geekbench 5, the G15’s multi-core seems a little low for this Core i7, with the Alienware M17 scoring nearly 700 points higher with the exact same CPU.
Nonetheless, there’s a clear performance lead over the 6-core i7-10750H.
As expected the Ryzen 7 5800H tops the chart here when equipped with dual-channel RAM.
In single-core performance, the G15 is on par with the other two Intel chips, with the Ryzen 7 scoring a couple of hundred points higher.
Moving to Geekbench 5’s OpenCL Compute test which measures GPU performance, the RTX 3060 shows a clear lead over the old 115-watt RTX 2070, and is close to the 95-watt RTX 2070 in the TUF A15.
Cinebench R23 has been run on a 10-minute loop to get past the initial power throttling on all machines.
Much like in Geekbench 5, the G15 is underperforming a little here compared to the M17 with the same CPU, but again shows a very large performance advantage over the 6-core chip in the G7.
In 3DMark Fire Strike, which is an older DirectX 11 benchmark, the G15 slots in just above the older Dell G7, with a roughly equivalent overall score.
In Time Spy, which uses DirectX 12, the G15 pulls ahead of the G7, but only by a little. The 90-watt RTX 3060 is slightly faster than the 115-watt 2070 here, so there’s clearly a solid performance-per-watt improvement over the Turing chip
Port Royal is 3DMark’s DirectX raytracing benchmark.
This shows us what to expect from the RTX 3060 in games supporting ray tracing. Performance should be roughly on par with the RTX 2070.
In our worst-case-scenario stress test which involves running MSI Kombustor and Prime95 for 30 minutes, we get a good look at how the power delivery in these machines holds up with maximum CPU and GPU load at the same time.
Unlike the other machines in this comparison, Nvidia Dynamic Boost on the G15 has prioritized CPU power in this combined test, so there’s 45 watts being delivered to the CPU and just over 80 watts to the GPU.
Benchmarks - Gaming
Starting things off we’ll take a look at results for my driving benchmark in Cyberpunk 2077. This benchmark involves driving through a fixed course at the same time of day, starting and finishing out the front of V’s apartment block. I run this and all other benchmarks 3 times on each machine to get accurate results.
Somewhat unbelievably, the G15 is almost tied with the RTX 3070-equipped Asus TUF A15 here, with the average frame rates being within margin of error between the two.
This is both an excellent showing for the G15 and a disappointing result for the Asus.
Moving on to Watch Dogs Legion, another game featuring DirectX ray tracing, the Dell G15 is closer to parity with the old G7.
I suspect that VRAM capacity may be becoming an issue here because as a general rule, you’d expect better 1% and 0.1% lows from the G15 because of the 8-core CPU.
In The Division 2, the trend continues. The G15 is getting slightly better average framerates than the G7, but slightly worse lows.
Again, this could be due to VRAM limitations. I’ll be doing more gaming tests with the RTX 3060 at different graphics settings & resolutions and will post a follow-up video on this in the future.
In Borderlands 3 with graphics set to High, the G15 is beating the G7 in both average and low framerates. This is definitely a good result for the RTX 3060 and places it squarely between the old 2070 and the 95-watt RTX 3070 in the Asus.
And finally, in Gears 5 with graphics set to Ultra, the results are similar to Borderlands. Lows are looking great and far better than the G7’s, and the 3060 is only losing to the 95-watt 3070 by around 10 frames per second.
The elephant in the room in this and all the other charts is that 140-watt RTX 3070 in the Alienware M17.
The massive lead that machine holds in every benchmark show just how badly Ampere GPUs need all the power they can get to perform at their best.
Now moving onto the final chart, what I’ve done here is average all game performance results for each machine and then set the highest overall result to represent 100%.
This chart will become more accurate as we add additional games to my benchmark suite, and I’ll be including it from now on just to give you a clear overview of where the various tested laptops stand relative to competitors from a purely gaming performance standpoint.
Teardown
Right, time to tear this thing apart and check it out from the inside.
Initial disassembly is very simple. Just undo eight screws from the bottom panel, starting closest to the rear of the machine and moving forward.
The four screws toward the front are all captive. Those in the left and right corners will pop the panel free of the surrounding plastic clips and from there you just use a guitar pick or spudger to release the remaining clips and lift the panel away.
Inside the machine, once again we can see that Dell are using the flipped motherboard design in the G15 with the CPU, GPU and heatsinks toward the top of the case.
From left to right, we have the socketed Intel AX201 wifi chip above the first M.2 SSD slot which is covered by a copper heat spreader, two RAM slots, and the second SSD slot which is conspicuously missing the required bracket to screw in an SSD. I’m not sure whether Dell will make this part readily available as a spare so bear this in mind if you’re buying this machine and intend to install a second drive.
Down below, there is the 86 watt-hour battery with the two tiny stereo speakers on each side.
Heading further in, we need to remove the rear IO cover assembly.
This is quite simple – take out the two screws from the inside, flip the laptop up and take out the final two screws from the rear. The IO cover slides backwards and off from there.
Now we get a good look at the two very large fan assemblies Dell have installed in this machine. These fans are larger and have far more blades than on the base model G15.
Getting access to the heatsink assembly in the G15 is a little difficult.
If you’re doing this yourself, you will want to have the Dell service manual open for this procedure as it’s easy to miss a step or forget to plug something back in afterwards.
We have to remove the battery, RAM, any installed SSDs, the WiFi card, and all connected cables from the board.
There are 6 screws securing the board to the chassis.
Once all screws and cables are unplugged, gently lift the board up and out starting at the rear of the case.
With the board out of the way, the interior of the G15’s case shows lots of sensible design decisions. All screw standoffs are metal and mounted onto a steel backing plate. The hinge bolts into a massive magnesium plate at the rear of the machine. This is a very sturdy laptop and should remain free of any structural issues after years of use.
Here’s a clear shot of the cooler. 4 heatpipes in total, two are shared and two individually route heat from the CPU and GPU to the smaller heatsinks on either side.
We’re not stopping here though.
The final step to remove the heatsink and fan assembly is to remove six screws. Each screw is numbered from one to six, which is the order they need to be tightened in. During removal you should undo the screws in the reverse order.
Then just carefully pull the heat spreader free from the motherboard.
Thermal paste application on this machine is quite good with full coverage of the dies, but more importantly it’s very clear that all thermal pads have been making good, firm contact with the VRM components and VRAM.
Voltage regulation components look decently robust by laptop standards. These are nowhere near as strong as those fitted to Alienware models but should be more than enough for this machine.
Now here’s a couple of shots of the bare dies after cleaning off the thermal paste. Note that you need to be extremely careful cleaning the GPU because the die is surrounded by tiny surface-mount resistors that could easily be knocked off if you’re rough with them.
Contact patches on the copper heat spreaders for the CPU and GPU are reasonably smooth. They do have minor pitting on the surface but nothing major, and thermal paste is designed to fill these imperfections anyway.
Conclusion
Summing this machine up, for the money you’re getting a laptop with a fantastic display, great battery life, and good performance with an impressively solid and sturdy build.
Even the cooling for the CPU and GPU is surprisingly effective.
The only real negative for the G15 is the fact that the RTX 3060 is only running at 90 watts. So you will get great gaming performance, but it could have been better if Dell had pumped the TGP up a little higher, which the cooling could easily handle.
This could prove to be a problem for the G15 soon – this week I’ll be receiving Lenovo’s new similarly priced Legion 5, featuring an RTX 3060 with 130-watt TGP so we’ll be able to clearly see what difference that makes to performance.
Furthermore, I was quite disappointed to find that this was yet another Dell laptop that shipped with out of date and somewhat broken drivers out of the box. This is fairly easily remedied and I’d recommend installing a clean copy of Windows 10 anyway, but nonetheless it’s quite annoying and something Dell really need to address.
Overall, this is a well-built, durable laptop with the sort of flaky software that we’ve all come to expect from Dell. Your tolerance for these issues will dictate your experience; I’ll happily rate this one as “good, but compromised.”