You’ll also find a small light at the top of the touchpad, which, when turned on, indicates that the touchpad is disabled.Īside from looking a little low-res, the 15R’s screen isn’t bad. The touchpad is accurate and sensitive, and performs multitouch gestures smoothly. Two large mouse buttons sit inside the indent, which are soft to the touch and easy to press. The touchpad is simply an indent in the brushed-aluminum deck, with a slightly rougher texture.
Below the other hinge (on the right) are three small buttons: a settings button, which brings up Windows Mobility Center an audio button, which toggles through different audio preset modes and a programmable button, which can be customized to launch programs or perform various functions.Ī large touchpad is located directly below the keyboard. The power button is a medium-sized plastic button that manages to blend into the keyboard deck because it’s located right beside one of the laptop’s hinges. The glossy 15.6-inch screen is surrounded by a black plastic bezel, which houses a webcam and microphone. The keyboard does flex quite a bit as you type on it, which raises questions as to its durability.The interior of the 15R looks a little less cheap than the outside, thanks to the slate gray brushed-aluminum keyboard deck. The keys are small, but widely spaced and slightly indented, which makes for comfortable, accurate typing. The 15R has a full-size keyboard with island-style keys, which sit against a shiny black plastic backing. Plates cost around $30 and are sold separately on the Dell website. The cover features rounded corners, silver plastic edges, and a shiny, brushed-aluminum-look cover plate that you can snap out and exchange for another Dell-branded plate. The Dell Inspiron 15R 5520 is housed in a sturdy, if somewhat bulky-looking, plastic chassis.
By comparison, the Alienware M14x gets 5 hours and 3 minutes, while the HP Envy Sleekbook gets 6 hours and 35 minutes. In our tests we managed to get 5 hours and 2 minutes of battery life, which is what we expect from a laptop of this size. For example, the Alienware M14x, which sports an Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics card, manages frame rates of between 46.5 and 99 on the same tests.īattery life on the Inspiron 15R is about average for the category.
While this is not too bad for integrated graphics after all -32.5 fps is playable -it’s nowhere near what a dedicated, discrete graphics card will give you. In our Crysis 2 graphics tests, the 15R managed frame rates of between 13.7 (high-quality settings, 1366-by-768-pixel resolution) and 32.5 (low-quality settings, 800 by 600 pixel resolution) frames per second.
It also performed well in our storage performance and content creation tests, though it failed to start up quickly (43.1 seconds) compared to Ultrabooks’ startup times (the Lenovo starts up in less than half the time).īecause the 15R relies on Intel’s integrated HD 4000 graphics, its graphics performance is lacking. In our Web performance tests, the 15R managed 13.8 frames per second, which is higher (better) than most Ultrabooks and AMD laptops, but still lower than the Alienware M14x. The Inspiron 15R performed competently in individual performance tests, for the most part beating out the Lenovo IdeaPad U410 (an Ultrabook) and the HP Envy Sleekbook.