Dell Inspiron 14 5000 2-in-1 5491 with 10th Gen Intel Core i7-10510U (i5491-7265SLV-PUS)

Dell has upgraded their 2-in-1 convertible lineup for the year 2020. Dell Inspiron 14 5000 series just got the latest 10th generation Intel chips upgrade. Lets put this laptop through 10 rounds of grueling tests and find out if its worth the price tag!

Round1: Overview

I love 2-in-1 laptops. They are so convenient and versatile. In 2020, if you are thinking of buying a laptop, my recommendation is to go with a 2-in-1 convertible form-factor. So, Dell Inspiron 5000 comes in 2 screen sizes: 14 inch and 15 inch. The model that we are looking at today is the 14 inch model. It has the latest intel CPU and GPU and it competes with other 2-in-1 convertible laptops like Lenovo Flex 14, Acer Spin-3 and Spin-5. Now, compared to Lenovo and Acer, Dell Inspiron 5000 is tad more expensive. But unlike them, Dell is using the latest 10th gen intel processor. There are some cheaper versions of Dell Inspiron 5000 2-in-1 convertible laptops available on Amazon, but these are using the older 8th generation Intel processors.

Round 2: Build Quality

Let's talk about the build quality. Dell Inspiron 5000 comes in stylish Urban Grey color with a metallic finish. This gives it a very premium look and feel. The top lid is made of aluminum and feels solid while holding in hands. The palm rest under the keyboard is also made from aluminum. While the rest of the body appears to be metallic, it's actually injection molded Polycarbonate. But you could be easily forgiven for mistaking it as a unibody aluminum design. This design choice keeps the laptop relatively thin at 0.78 inches while weighing around 3.6 pounds. So the mostly aluminum chassis provides excellent support making both the base and the lid of the laptop sturdy.

Dell Inspiron 5000 comes with a 360 degree hinge mechanism. There are 2 hinges that hold the screen in various arrangements. Typically hinges on a convertible laptop are not all that sturdy and they have some play in them. But this hinge holds the screen in place quite rigidly and I did not notice any screen wobbles. You can use this laptop in traditional clam-shell orientation, or tablet mode by flipping the screen all the way back 360 degrees. In tablet mode, the keys are deactivated and you don't have to worry about accidental key presses. There is also a presentation or tent mode which is great for sharing slides, spreadsheets or documents with a colleague, business partner or client.

I personally prefer the mode where you tilt the screen back 180 degrees and lay it flat. This is great when you are chilling in your bed or couch watching videos while the laptop is comfortably resting on your lap. The tablet mode is great for drawing and taking notes because it fully supports an Active Pen. But unfortunately dell does not include this active pen with the laptop which is a bummer. Overall, I am very impressed with the build quality of Dell Inspiron 5000.

Round 3: Display

Now let's talk about the display quality of this laptop. Dell Inspiron 5000 has a 14 inch Full HD 1920 by 1080 display. Since this screen has an aspect ratio of 16:9, the pixel density comes to 157 ppi. So borrowing Apple’s marketing jargon, I would call this screen a Retina Display when viewed from about 22 inches. At this distance the average human eye will not be able to discern individual pixels. The screen uses an LED backlit IPS Panel which comes with a glossy finish. It is plenty bright maxing out at 234 nits of brightness. You will have no problem using this laptop in bright-lit environments be it a classroom or a conference room.

The contrast level is also good and the screen produces deep inky blacks and punchy colors. Dell has calibrated this display for multimedia consumption. Dell calls this profile: CinemaColor. It produces saturated, vivid and vibrant colors which makes videos from youtube and netflix pop. Dell Inspiron 5000 has thin bezels on the sides and top, but the bottom bezel is chunky. During full screen video playback there was no annoying backlit bleeding from the bottom bezel. BTW, the screen fully supports all windows 10 multi-touch features. It also supports an active pen which is great for note taking and sketching. I think students and working professionals will find it very useful. Overall, this is a great display for reading text, watching movies, jotting down notes or sketching with active pen.

Round 4: CPU

OK, now let's talk about the CPU. Dell Inspiron 5000 comes with a 10th Generation Intel Core i7 processor. Specifically this is the Core i7-10510U CPU from Intel Comet Lake family. This is the latest and the greatest CPU from intel targeting the 2-in-1 hybrid laptop segment. But note that this is not the 10nm icelake chip which is only available on very high end premium laptops. But performance wise this chip is very close to icelake, and that's why Intel is calling both Comet Lake and Ice Lake chips as their 10th generation chip.

This is a quad core processor with 8 execution threads. The base clock frequency is 1.8 GHz and Max Turbo frequency is whopping 4.9 Ghz. Intel has accomplished this high turbo frequency by optimizing the hell out of their 14nm process node. Interestingly, the newer 10nm process technology used in Icelake processors does not support this high turbo frequency. As a result, this CPU delivers snappy performance while remaining cool and operating at 15W TDP.

In passmark CPU benchmark this CPU scored 7395 points in multi-threaded workloads and 2320 points in single threaded workloads. If we compare this performance with the top 10 commonly used laptop CPUs, Core i7-10510U is sitting in the middle. But notice that all the CPUs ranked above it have a ‘H’ in their model names. This ‘H’ denotes the high-performance power hungry nature of these CPUs. So unlike Core i7-10510U which runs cool and gives long battery life, these processors eat up battery very quickly. So for a thin and light 2-in-1 laptop, Dell has picked the perfect CPU in my opinion. You will have no trouble running any kind of applications on this laptop be it chrome browser, Microsoft word, excel, powerpoint, outlook or video and photo-editing softwares.

Round 5: GPU

OK, now let's talk about the GPU. Dell Inspiron 5000 is using integrated Intel UHD 620 Graphics. This is a pretty capable GPU and it produces 37 frames per second on the Dirt 3 benchmark. That is above the playability threshold of 30 frames per second. You will be able to do casual gaming on this laptop without any issues. It also supports hardware acceleration of all popular codecs like h264, AVC and vp9. This means smooth 4K video playback on youtube and netflix with no dropped frames. But remember this is an integrated GPU. Dont expect Nvidia & AMD discrete GPU class performance. If you plan to do hardcore gaming, you are probably better off buying a gaming laptop. I have reviewed plenty of awesome gaming laptops on this channel.

Round 6: RAM & SSD

Next up RAM and SSD. Dell Inspiron 5000 comes with 8 gig of DDR4 system memory. While this is adequate, I would have preferred 16 GB RAM. To get the best performance on any modern laptop you need 16 gig RAM. But the good news is that RAM is easily upgradeable. Dell provides 2 DIMM slots. The first slot is housing the existing 8GB RAM while the 2nd slot is empty. You can easily bump up the total RAM to 16GB by adding another 8GB RAM stick. If you want top performance, you can add 16GB RAM in each slot for a grand total of 32GB system RAM. If you are planning to run high memory intensive jobs like software development, video or photo editing, or scientific applications then you will see a massive performance boost with RAM upgrade.

👉 Buy 32GB Kit (16GBx2) RAM
👉 Buy 8GB RAM

Ok, now let's talk about SSD storage. Dell Inspiron 5000 has a generous 512 gig of fast PCIe NVMe SSD storage. 512 gig of storage should be sufficient for most folks, but if you want to increase storage you can easily add another SATA3 SSD. The laptop provides an empty SATA3 slot with associated adapter and cables to easily add a new drive. Both RAM and SSDs are cheap and they are the best investment you can make to get top performance from your laptop

👉 500GB SATA SSD
👉 1TB SATA SSD
👉 2TB SATA SSD
👉 500GB M.2 SSD
👉 1TB M.2 SSD
👉 2TB M.2 SSD

Round 7: Battery

OK, now lets talk about the battery life. Dell Inspiron 5000 comes with 3-cell 42Whr battery and a 45W power brick. Even though the 42Whr battery capacity is nothing spectacular, this laptop delivers kickass battery life. This is largely due to the 10th gen intel CPU which is very power efficient. With screen brightness set to 120 nits and WiFI turned ON, I was able to get an amazing 9 hours of battery life doing typical web browsing. With continuous HD video playback, the laptop lasted about 7.5 hours. That would easily qualify as all day battery life in my opinion.

Students and working professionals would find this laptop a perfect work-horse for all their computing needs. The thermal heat dissipation on this laptop is also pretty good. After watching videos on Netflix & YouTube for about 30 mins, the laptop body still felt cool. Also the solitary fan inside the chassis was spinning quietly and keeping the CPU and GPU cool. Overall I am very impressed with the battery life and thermal engineering on this laptop

Round 8: Keyboard and trackpad

OK now let's talk about the keyboard and trackpad. The keyboard is what makes or breaks a laptop in my opinion. For e.g. the butterfly keyboard on macbooks have disqualified Apple’s entire laptop lineup for me. Thankfully Jony Ive is gone, and Apple is finally returning back to a good keyboard design. Dell Inspiron 5000 has an island-style keyboard which is backlit enabled. It's a full-sized keyboard with 16 by 16 mm keys that are well-spaced. The keys offer slightly roughened keytops which give good tactile feedback. They offer 40g grams of actuation force and the key travel is about 1mm. This is good enough for a thin and light convertible laptop, and I was able to type at my normal speed after some practice.

The keyboard deck is made of aluminium and feels very comfortable when your palm is resting on it. Now, let's talk about the trackpad. The trackpad measures 105mm by 68 mm and is slightly roughened for good tactile feedback. Although it's made of plastic, it is very clicky and responsive. It comes with windows precision drivers that handles swipes, gestures, taps, and palm rejection really well. Whether you're zooming in or scrolling through webpages, windows 10 gestures work like a charm on this trackpad

Round 9: Audio

So what about the audio? Dell Inspiron 5000 has two bottom firing stereo speakers. When the laptop is placed on a solid surface like a wooden table, the speakers produce loud and clear sound. I would have preferred front facing speakers, but since this is a 2-in-1 convertible laptop, the bottom firing speakers are a better choice because they sound good in both laptop and tablet orientation. For a laptop speaker, these are pretty decent, producing good low, mid and high tones. They will suffice for watching videos and movies, but I will recommend using a Bluetooth speaker, headset or plain old-school wired speaker or headphones. BTW this laptop has a universal audio jack which also supports mic input. So any old-school earbud with a builtin microphone can be used for skype conference calling.

Round 10: Ports

Ok now let's talk about something that often gets overlooked. It's the port selection. Just because a laptop is thin and light doesn't mean it should skimp on ports. Apple gets a pass because their customers don't mind dongles. Well, I do. I cannot stand these thin and light laptops which don't offer basic ports and expect their customers to walk around with dongles. Fortunately Dell Inspiron 5000 has got plenty of ports. It comes with one USB Type C port which supports USB 3.1 Gen 1 protocol. So that means a theoretical data transfer speed upto 5 Gbit/s. This USB Type C port also implements Display port and Power delivery. So that means you can charge this laptop using the same cable that you use to charge your smartphone assuming you are not using an iphone.

In addition you can also connect this laptop to an external monitor via USB-Type C cable assuming your monitor supports it. In addition to USB type C, you also get 3 old school USB-A ports. 1 of them is USB 2.0 and the other two are USB 3.1 Gen 1. I love the fact that Dell Inspiron 5000 has included an SD card reader which is great for transferring videos and photos from your camera. In addition to these ports, you are also getting an HDMI port for connecting the laptop to an external monitor. So that means you can easily set up a 3 monitor workstation. So that will be 2 external monitors powered by HDMI and USB Type-C cable, and the internal 14 inch laptop screen. I think that's a cool setup for maximum productivity or gaming. Last but not the least, you also get an audio jack along with bluetooth connectivity. So that's a comprehensive set of ports which Dell is offering with this thin and light laptop

Conclusion

OK, so what do I think of this laptop? I think that for 800 dollars this is a really nice 2-in-1 laptop. I love the performance and battery life of this laptop thanks to the 10th generation intel CPUs. I also appreciate the ease of RAM and SSD upgrade that Dell offers. Plenty of 2-in-1 convertible ultrabooks are very user-unfriendly when it comes to upgradability, but that's not the case with Dell Inspiron 5000. While there are some cheaper 2-in-1 convertible laptops from Lenovo and Acer, they do not match the performance and battery life of this laptop. BTW, there are some cheaper models of Dell Inspiron 5000 available on Amazon. These use the 8th generation intel processors and should be a good fit for folks who are on a tighter budget.

Purchase links:

Buy Dell Inspiron 14 5000 (non-touch)

👉 With AMD Ryzen 3500U
👉 With 10th gen Intel Core i7
👉 With 10th gen Intel Core i5

Disclosure: Some links may be affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases

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