When comparing Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming (7577) vs Microsoft Surface Book 2 (15-inch), the Slant community recommends Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming (7577) for most people. In the question“What are the best general-purpose high-end laptops?” Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming (7577) is ranked 6th while Microsoft Surface Book 2 (15-inch) is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming (7577) is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 Gaming performance on-par with gaming laptops
The 15-inch version of the Surface Book 2 comes with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GPU. This is a powerful, VR-ready card that handles intensive gaming tasks.
As for real-world performance, Hitman (1920 x 1080, ultra) runs at 71.9 frames per second, Grand Theft Auto V runs at 45 fps.
It should also be mentioned that you need to be using the dock in order to do graphic-intensive tasks since that's where the GPU is located; using the laptop in tablet-mode will yield poor results in this regard.
Pro One of the best performances found on a 15-inch laptop
Equiped with an Intel Core i7-8650U CPU, 8GB (or 16GB) of RAM and an SSD that goes up to 1TB, the Surface Book 2 certainly packs a punch. It handles multitasking perfectly; you can open dozens of Chrome tags, stream video, and draw using the built-in software without experiencing any lag even once.
As far as benchmarks go, on the Geekbench 4 overall performance benchmark, the Surface Book 2 got a score of 12,505, better than the 15-inch laptop average (11,004) coming third after the Dell XPS 15 (13,911) and the MacBook Pro (15,170).
Pro The hinge is quite stable as far as 2-in-1 laptops go
The new fulcrum hinge that Microsoft used for the Surface Book 2 is much more stable than the one found on the previous Surface Book or even other 2-in-1 laptops for that matter.
Pro Great display for creative professionals
This laptop's display is bright and vivid, making it perfect for people who do a lot of drawing, design, or video editing work. The display offers an excellent coverage of 131% of the sRGB colour gamut (the average for this price range is 101%). The colour coverage and the bright display which measures an average of 417 nits really makes colours truly pop out and offers lifelike pictures.
Pro The battery easily lasts a full work day on a single charge
The Surface Book 2 lasts on average 12 hours on a single charge. This should be more than enough to get anyone to the end of their workday on a single charge.
Pro Great tying experience
Even though the keyboard is rather shallow (just 1.2mm of travel), the typing experience is excellent. Keys have a great amount of feedback when clicking and you rarely (if ever) bottom out when typing.
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 No Thunderbolt port
For a laptop aimed at creative professionals, the missing Thunderbolt 3 port is surprising considering the fact that Thunderbolt 3 is used to connect a laptop to peripherals such as external GPUs or power-dual 4K displays.
Con The pen must be bought separately
If you want to use the Surface Book for drawing then you will probably have to buy the Surface Pen which unfortunately does not come bundled with the laptop (it costs an additional $99).
Con Disappointing audio performance
The audio that comes out of the speakers is quite average. It's enough to fill a small room but that's it.