DELL G15 5525 - A laptop that gave me a headache after just 2 days

Recently I was thinking of getting myself a new laptop since I travel sometimes I want to have a portable machine that I'm able to work on my blog, my server and of course play video games whilst taking to friends. I decided to go with DELL G15 5525. I bought used one from reputable, local company that sells used, company laptops. I really liked how it looked, it was quite cheap so I bought it.

Here are the specs: Ryzen 5 6600H / RTX 3050 4GB/ 120Hz / RAM: 32 GB / SSD: 1 TB

On the surface it sounds like a decent laptop but literally on the second day, after buying it, while trying to play Overwatch with friends I got this error:

After about 2-3 hours of fighting with this laptop - updating drivers, changing relevant settings, rebooting, making sure the game runs on the lowest settings, has the correct GPU picked from the list, changing power plans - it would still crash and I would get an error after 10-15 minutes of play time. It was really frustrating.

I decided to change the game to Timberborn - very casual and not demanding game to play... and so I thought. About the same amount of time passed, as with Overwatch, that my game would freeze, say that "Program stopped working" and I had to force quit an unsaved game. Just like earlier I changed settings to the lowest possible. Nope. Still crashed. It sucked and I got pissed so I decided to switch laptops soon and splurge a bit more on the new one. My theory is that there isn't enough VRAM to handle any of these modern games so I'm making sure to look out for that in the future once I get everything sorted out.

Pros:

• Great speakers. Listening to music is very nice
• Sharp and big display
• Pretty design
• Fan design and the fact it pushes hot air in the back
• Cool to touch even under heavy load

Cons:

• As many of the gaming laptops this one also has a pretty weak battery
• A need to download external programs just to change your power plans
• Dell bloatware
• Heavy (this one doesn't bother me as much but it may others)
• Gaming? Forget about it. 4GBs of VRAM ain't enough these days

Conclusion: If you want to browse internet, watch movies, play very very non-demanding games like Osu! or just do some programing - sure, go for it. Otherwise I advise to stay away from this laptop if you want to game on the go. Games like Battlefield, Overwatch, Fortnite will work... for about 10 minutes before it crashes your laptop.

Strong 6/10