When comparing Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming (7577) vs Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, the Slant community recommends Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon for most people. In the question“What are the best general-purpose high-end laptops?” Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is ranked 4th while Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming (7577) is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is:
The Carbon X1 is a very light and durable laptop. It has the characteristic raven-black finishing of other Thinkpads on top of a carbon-fiber reinforced chassis. The carbon fiber increases the overall durability of the laptop, making it a great fit for people who travel a lot since it can withstand a lot of physical damages.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Very easy to upgrade on your own
There's just one screw on the bottom that allows the user to replace/upgrade the HDD, SSD, and RAM. The base model has a 256GB SSD but you can easily add your own to increase the storage size if you wish. It can also support up to 32GB of RAM, and uses a single 8GB stick.
Pro Does not become hot enough to be uncomfortable
This laptop's WASD keys—the ones that control movement in most games, and as a result the ones you touch the most—get warm during demanding games or longer sessions, hitting 38 °C after half an hour of The Witcher 3 and 36 °C (100 °F) after playing Overwatch for the same amount of time. Those temperatures feel warm to the touch but are not uncomfortable even after long play sessions.
Pro Good looking design
While this is a gaming laptop, it isn't super gaudy. The Dell logo is red, and there are red accents angled away from direct sight (also the keyboard backlight is red). It's made entirely out of soft-touch plastic, and ends up looking pretty sleek overall.
Pro Best price-performance ratio
At $900 the Dell Inspiron 15 700 Gaming comes with a GTX 1060, a 7th generation i7 and with 8GBs of RAM. It provides the best gaming performance out of all laptops at this price range, performing better than even some more expensive models.
In more detail, the GTX 1060 lets you run VR games and can handle even the most graphic-intensive video-games at 1920x1080 without any big problems.
Pro Great build quality
The Carbon X1 is a very light and durable laptop. It has the characteristic raven-black finishing of other Thinkpads on top of a carbon-fiber reinforced chassis. The carbon fiber increases the overall durability of the laptop, making it a great fit for people who travel a lot since it can withstand a lot of physical damages.
Pro Great battery life
The battery supports over 10 hours of light activity like web browsing, watching videos and editing documents. This can be doubled to 20 hours by swapping in the extended, 6-cell battery, which can be hot swapped without turning off the laptop since it also has an internal 4-cell battery.
Pro Very portable
At around 2lbs this is a very light laptop. Especially when you compare it to other Thinkpads. It's light enough to carry in one hand and when it's carried in a backpack it's easy to forget that you are carrying a laptop because of how light it is.
Pro Excellent display
The X1 Carbon comes in two different versions. With a 1080p or a 1440p display, with the latter being $70 more. Both displays are excellent. The image is sharp and the colors are very noticeable. Although, understandably, the 1440p display has images that are a bit sharper than its 1080p counterpart.
According to colorimeter tests, both versions of the display can produce 104 and 103 percent of the sRGB color gamut, respectively. That's very impressive when compared to the average for 14" displays (83%).
The 1080p screen is noticeably brighter than the 1440p screen (292nits vs 257nits) and the colors generally start fading only at about 45 degrees viewing angle.
Pro Excellent typing experience
Like most Thinkpads, the X1 Carbon has an excellent keyboard as well. The keys have about 1.8mm of travel and provide great tactile feedback. Their gently curved keys also make it very easy to target without looking at them. The keyboard also has optional backlighting which can be turned on or off with a simple key press.
Pro Built-in support for Amazon Alexa
The 2018 model of the X1 Carbon has far-field microphones built-in to work with Amazon Alexa. This will allow you to give commands to Alexa from across the room.
Pro Built-in support for Amazon Alexa
The 2018 model of the X1 Carbon has far-field microphones built-in to work with Amazon Alexa. This will allow you to give commands to Alexa from across the room.
Pro Great speakers
The X1 Carbon has bottom-mounted speakers which provide excellent audio output. The sound is loud enough to fill a large room and there's clear separation of sound coming from the speakers, making them great for any sorts of recreational activity involving audio be it listening to music, watching movies or playing videogames.
Cons
Con Not very portable
Even though it's a gaming laptop, at 6.3 pounds the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming is a bit heavier than most gaming laptops out there.
Con Extremely loud fans
Being one of the coolest gaming laptops comes at the price of it being one of the loudest laptops as well. Under heavy load the GPU and chassis fans start working at an extremely high rate which produces noise loud enough to drown dialogues in games unless you use headphones.
Con Extended dual battery adds weight
6-cell extended battery adds 0.4 pounds to take this ultrabook's weight far above that of the ultrabook standard (<3 pounds).
Con Missing an Ethernet port
The X1 Carbon is missing an Ethernet port, so people who prefer having that option as well are forced to use Wifi only.