Dell Inspiron 15 5593 Review

Inspiron 15 5593 is a mid-tier laptop from Dell. It's powered by the latest Intel Icelake CPU. Up till now the only way to get a laptop with an Icelake processor was to go with a premium brand like Dell XPS 13 or Microsoft Surface laptop. But with this new Inspiron laptop, Dell is bringing Icelake CPUs to their mid-tier lineup. In the video below I will put Dell Inspiron 5593 through 8 rounds of gruelling test. By the end of this video we will know if this laptop is worth its price. So let's get started!


Build-Quality

Inspiron 5593 largely remains unchanged from last year’s model in terms of build quality. So that means you are getting a laptop predominantly made from plastic but Dell has used some aluminium to beef up the chassis and the top lid. When looking at a laptop at this price point, one needs to calibrate their expectations. You are not going to get a unibody aluminium design or some fancy magnesium alloy construction.

However this laptop’s silver colored body mimics a brushed metal finish which looks very premium. Inspiron 5593 weighs about 4.5 pounds and is 0.8 inches thick. So that's not bad for a full size laptop sporting 15.6 inches screen. I think this laptop is reasonably portable and you should have no trouble dropping it in your backpack and carrying it around with you. Overall Dell Inspiron 5593 is a fairly well built laptop that feels solid in hands.

Display

Moving on to the display. This laptop comes with a 15.6 inch Full HD widescreen display. It's an LED backlit IPS panel with an anti-glare matte coating. I am a big fan of matte finish on laptop screens because they help reduce glare and reflections. This makes a big difference when using the laptop outdoors or indoors in a bright lit room. The screen is fairly bright, maxing out at 229 nits of brightness. The color reproduction is more natural and less vivid. That means pictures and videos don't have that oversaturated artificial look. On the downside, the sRGB color gamut on this display is only 54%. This should not bother you unless you are a professional artist who paints & color corrects pictures and videos on photoshop and adobe premier.

For these folks, a surface laptop or an imac pro would be a better choice. The side bezels on this display are pretty thin and look very modern. The top bezel is wide enough to house a 720p webcam which is great for holding video chats and conference calls on zoom and skype. My only beef with this display is that it is not touch enabled. This is a bummer since Windows10 operating system has excellent multi touch support. If you are looking for a touchscreen laptop, I would recommend checking out the Dell Inspiron 5491 2-in-1 series. I have already reviewed that laptop here on this channel and I will drop a link to that review in the video description below.

CPU

OK, now let's talk about the CPU. Inspiron 5593 comes in 2 flavours: core-i5 and core-i7. Both these models are powered by a 10th generation Intel Icelake CPU. For 699 dollars you get a Core i5-1035G1 model while 899 dollars gets you a Core i7-1065G7.  Here is a chart showing the details of both these processors.
Both these CPUs are built using Intel’s latest 10nm process node. Both are quad-core processors and have 8 execution threads. Core i7 offers a higher base clock frequency as well as a higher max turbo clock frequency. It also comes with 8 MB cache which is higher than core-i5’s 6 MB cache. Both CPUs draw 15 watts of power, but Core-i7 is faster in raw performance as evident in these synthetic benchmarks.

First let's take a look at the Passmark benchmark. In single thread rating Core-i7 is about 6.8% faster than Core-i5 and in multi-thread rating its about 26.1% faster than core-i5. Similarly in PerformanceTest V9 rating we see that Core-i7 is 8% faster in single thread rating and 21.5% faster in multi-thread rating. Now guys, keep in mind that the core-i5 processor is no slouch. At 15W TDP, both these CPUs are among the best laptop processors out there in the market. Here is a chart showing the relative performance of top 10 common laptop CPUs.


This Core-i7 processor is sitting at 4th position which doesn't look very impressive until you realize that the top-3 CPUs in this chart are more power-hungry gaming CPUs. These are rated at 45W TDP which is 3 times more than both the core-i5 and core-i7 icelake family CPU. So for the 15W thermal envelope, Dell has picked the best CPU in the market. You will have no trouble running any application on either of these laptops. I was able to open more than 20 chrome browser tabs and seamlessly switch between them without any stuttering or buffering. Whether you are doing casual internet surfing, watching youtube videos or running productivity apps like microsoft office, this laptop will breeze through all these tasks

GPU

Now lets talk about the GPU. The 699 dollar core-i5 model uses Intel’s integrated Gen11 GPU from Icelake family. This is actually a brand-new GPU architecture from Intel and it is built on 10nm process technology. The 899 dollar core-i7 model ships with a discrete Nvidia MX230 GPU. Both Intel UHD Gen11 and Nvidia MX230 are excellent GPUs and will do a great job with casual gaming and multimedia playback. If you are looking for  superior gaming performance, then MX230 is a better choice. It is based on nvidia’s new Pascal architecture which is significantly faster than Nvidia’s older MX130 GPU. Another reason for picking Nvidia MX230 is that it comes with dedicated 4GB of fast GDDR5 video RAM. Intel UHD integrated graphics on the other hand does not possess dedicated video RAM and it piggybacks on system RAM. Here is a comparative GPU centric benchmark rating of both these graphics cards.


As expected, Nvidia MX230 comes out ahead, scoring 1989 points while Intel Gen11 UHD scores 1128 points. So that means the Nvidia MX230 is 76.3% faster than the Intel UHD. Gaming performance on MX230 was very good. I was able to play games like Fortnite, Overwatch, Rocket League in high detail and 1080p resolution without any issues. BTW Intel’s Gen11 integrated GPU is no slouch and will do just fine in casual gaming and multimedia playback. When it comes to streaming video playback, both these GPUs support hardware acceleration of multimedia codecs like h264, h265 and vp9. So that means smooth video playback from services like youtube, netflix and disney plus with 0 dropped frames. Both these GPUs also support accelerated video encoding, so if you are into making youtube videos, you will get excellent performance from both these laptops

RAM & SSD

Now let's talk about the system memory and on board storage. Both these laptops come with 8GB system RAM. Dell has done an excellent job with memory upgradability. Once you open the back of the laptop after removing few screws, you have direct access to 2 DIMM slots. DIMM1 is housing the existing 8 GB RAM while DIMM2 is empty. You can easily add another 8 GB RAM stick in the 2nd slot thereby doubling the total RAM to 16GB. This will also enable dual channel memory configuration which is faster than the factory default single channel configuration on this laptop. When it comes to SSD storage Inspiron 5593 offers a generous 512 GB of fast PCIe NVMe SSD. 512 GB of storage should be sufficient for most folks, but if you want to increase storage you can easily add a 2nd SSD drive because Dell offers an empty SATA 3 slot. Just like the RAM upgrade, you will have to open the back of this laptop to access this SATA3 slot. All the cables and adapters are already provided by Dell, so SSD upgrade is very easy.  

👉 Buy recommended RAM upgrades
👉 Buy recommended SATA3 SSD upgrades
👉 Buy recommended PCIe NVMe SSD upgrades

Battery

Let's talk about battery life. Inspiron 5593 comes with a 3-cell 42wh battery. This is definitely not a huge capacity battery, it's more of an average size for a 15.6 inch laptop. I was able to get about 6 hours of battery life doing typical web browsing with wifi turned ON. By disabling the wifi and running a full screen video playback with brightness turned to 50%, Inspiron 5593 lasted little over 7 hours. Regarding the thermal heat dissipation, Dell is using a single heat pipe solution with one solitary fan for cooling both the CPU and the GPU. I was a little worried about overheating when I saw just one heat pipe, but my fears were unfounded.

The thermal engineering employed by Dell did a good job, and the laptop never overheated during long gaming sessions. The fans were relatively quiet until I pushed the CPU to full load, then they were cranking at top speed and making audible sound. In my testing both core-i5 and core-i7 chips never throttled and always operated at or above the base clock frequency. So overall I think Dell has done a good job with their thermal engineering on this laptop. But I wish they had put a bigger capacity battery, something like 55 or 60 WH would have been really nice.

Keyboard & Trackpad

Inspiron 5593 has an island-style keyboard which is backlit enabled. Dell has designed this keyboard island to sit slightly lower than the palm-rest. This allows the keys to have a good travel distance while still not touching the screen when the laptop is closed. These keys are quite responsive and offer an actuation force of about 80 grams. This results in a nice tactile feedback during typing which makes long typing sessions more enjoyable. This is a full size keyboard with number pad and directional arrows keys. So both gamers and Excel sheet warriors will love this keyboard.

The keyboard deck is made of smoothly textured plastic and feels nice when your palm is resting on it. Overall this is one of the best keyboards that I have seen in a laptop at this price point. Moving on to the trackpad, it's made of plastic and has a matte finish. I felt that the clicking mechanism required more pressure than usual. But this didn't bother me, since I always use double taps on the trackpad instead of a hard click. The trackpad is using windows precision drivers, so all the swipes, gestures and taps work really really well. Overall I would say that this is a decent trackpad and gets the job done.

Audio and ports

Inspiron 5593 comes with bottom firing stereo speakers which are located at the corner edges. These are 2.5 watts each and produce decent sound. They sound louder and fuller if the laptop is resting on a hard metal or wood surface but the sound gets muffled when the laptop is resting on your laps. For casual youtube videos, they will suffice but for anything serious I would recommend using either a wired or bluetooth headphones. OK, now let's talk about the ports. Dell has left no stone unturned when it comes to port selection. You get 2 modern USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports and 1 old school USB 2.0 port. You also get a fast USB Type-C 3.1 Gen 1 port. In addition, you get an HDMI port, Gigabit LAN, audio jack and last but not the least a full size SD Card reader for transfering pictures and videos from your camera. So, I think Dell has hit the ball out of the park when it comes to port choices. No dongles needed, I hope Tim Cook is watching this video

Conclusion

OK, so what do I think of this laptop? For 699 and 799 dollars I think Dell has a winner with Inspiron 5593. I personally prefer the 799 dollar core-i7 model because it not only comes with a faster processor, it also has a superior GPU. Both laptops offer good keyboards, display and port selection. The battery life is also decent. I like the fact that Dell has designed this laptop with upgrades in mind. It's very easy to expand memory and SSD storage on this laptop. I hate it when companies solder the RAM and don't offer any way to expand SSD storage. But thankfully Dell is not pulling an Apple on its customers and keeping these upgrade choices alive.

Purchase Links

👉 Buy Dell Inspiron 15 5593 with 10th Gen Intel Core i7-1065G7 & Nvidia MX230

👉 Buy Dell Inspiron 15 5593 with 10th Gen Intel Core i5-1035G1

👉 Buy Dell Inspiron 14 5000 2-in-1 touchscreen laptop
👉 Buy recommended RAM upgrades
👉 Buy recommended SATA3 SSD upgrades
👉 Buy recommended PCIe NVMe SSD upgrades



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