Dell Inspiron 15

Design and construction

Despite the more premium grade hardware, the outer shell of this device is built with the same plastic materials as the cheaper Inspiron 15 3567. Moreover, everything except the lid panel looks identical – rough plastic with some texture to it. The lid, however, is more reminiscent of that of the Lenovo V330 – glossy plastic, super prone to smudges and scratches. Inspiron 15 3576 measures at 380 x 260 x 23.65 mm (14.96″ x 10.24″ x 0.93″) and weighs 2.13 kg (4.7 lbs), thus being slightly bulkier.

We liked the keyboard’s layout and the fact that it’s spill resistant and can be removed super easily. However, the typing experience is nothing spectacular as keystrokes are a bit shorter than optimal. In contrast, it is going to suit you well if you like a clicky response. Further below, we find the touchpad which… is not terrible. Yes, it is Windows Precision certified but acceleration is relatively sluggish, and buttons are not easily distinguishable from one another.

Ports

The I/O panel features only the essentials. On the left, there is the charging plug, RJ-45, an HDMI port, as well as two USB 3.0 Type-A ports. Right in the middle of this pack, you can see the exhaust vents for the cooling fan.

On the other side, Dell has put the optical drive, a USB 2.0 Type-A port, a 3.5 mm audio combo jack and an SD card reader.

Dell Inspiron 15 3576 left black

Display

Dell Inspiron 15 is equipped with a Full HD TN panel with a model number AUO B156HTN03.8. It has a diagonal of 15.6 inches and a resolution of 1920 x 1080p, leading to a pixel pitch of 0.18 x 0.18 mm and a pixel density of 142 ppi, thus making it appear as “Retina” when viewed from at least 60 cm.

Battery

As always, the battery tests were run with Windows power saving setting and Wi-Fi turned on, and the screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits. Inspiron 15 3576 features the same 42Wh battery as its budget version – the 3567. Despite the small battery, you can extract around 7 hours and a half of web browsing. Unfortunately, the image is not that bright with only 4 hours and 10 minutes of video playback. We doubt that you’re going to play games away from the plug, however, you can do so for around 3 hours on battery power.

Performance

The Intel Core i7-8550U is part of the new 8th Generation Kaby Lake Refresh and it’s a direct successor to the Intel Core i7-7500U from the Kaby Lake generation and the Intel Core i7-6500U from the 6th Skylake generation. Intel doubles the core count from 2 to 4 and retaining the so-called Hyper-Threading technology, keeping the same 14nm manufacturing process and feature the same 15W TDP.

Radeon 520 is AMD’s entry-level dedicated graphics card, based on the 2014 28nm Polaris technology. It features 5 CUs, 4 ROPs, 20 Texture Unites and 320 Stream processors. This card can run on a maximum of 1030 MHz, reaching 660 GFLOPs. In addition to that, Radeon 520 is sold with a maximum of 2GB of DDR5 memory with a 64-bit interface and a memory bandwidth of 48 GB/s.