17.3″ Dell Inspiron 17R-5737 via Amazon
Bronze Dell Inspiron 17R-5737 is a brand new 17.3 inch laptop with a sophisticated design, a HD+ bright display, the fourth generation Intel i5-4200U processor, quite a lot of memory and standard hard drive storage space and long battery life. It has enough power and capacity to handle daily multimedia, office and internet related tasks as well as running and multitasking of those harder applications and programs. As it doesn’t come with a mid-range and above dedicated graphics card you’ll be limited with your ability to play the modern 3D games at high resolutions and settings. Dell Inspiron 17R-5737 has the Haswell dual core ultra low voltage Intel i5-4200U processor (3M L3 cache) between 1.6 and 2.6 Ghz speeds with turbo boost and hyper threadin (2 cores/4 threads), 8GB DDR3L SDRAM memory at 1600MHz, 1TB SATA hard drive at 5400rpm speed and 64-bit Windows 8.1 Home Premium operating system.
17.3 inch LED-backlit Trulife HD+ display with 1600 x 900 pixel resolution offers clear and crisp visuals for when you’re editing photos, streaming videos and more. Intel HD 4400 graphics card performs up to 30% better overall than the older HD 4000 but much less than the HD 4600 and 5000 graphics cards which you can commonly find on some ULV processors and compares well to the dedicated ADM Radeon HD 7550M graphics. You get to hear studio quality sound with warm lows and crisp highs via the Technical Grammy recipient Waves MaxxAudio 4.0 through the stereo speakers. Bronze Dell Inspiron 17R with brushed aluminium finish and rounded corners weighs 6.35 pounds and has the measurements of 12 x 1 x 9 inches (slimmer and lighter than the previous 17 inch Dell’s, is only 1 inch thick- pretty good for a 17 inch screen laptop and is portable for around the house). For connectivity you have the 8X DVD +/- RW Drive that reads and writes to DVDs, Gigabit Ethernet with RJ-45 connector for fast wired internet connection, 802.11bgn wireless, Bluetooth 4.0, an HDMI 1.4 output to connect to HDTVs and modern monitors but no VGA output, 7-in-1 Memory Card Reader, 2 x fast USB 3.0 ports and 2 x USB 2.0 ports and a HD webcam with digital microphone.
Conclusion: Bronze Dell Inspiron 17R-5737 comes with the quarter two 2013 release dual core Intel i5-4200U with a Passmark benchmark score of 3276 and TDP- Thermal Design Power of just 15 watts as a ULV processor (U at the ends of i5-4200 stands for Ultra Low Voltage) to help with better power efficiency and longer battery life. It is ideal for home users- entertainment, home office workers or students and business professionals for its smooth overall performance when multitasking, helped with both the superior performance of ULV Intel i5 CPU and 8GB memory that is plenty for most customers and there is no need for a RAM upgrade unless you are a very advanced computer user. We don’t have the information on battery life but our guess is that the 65WHr 6-cell battery should give you up to 4-5 hours if just web browsing and screen brightness at 50%. If you are one of those many computer users that dislike Windows 8 and 8.1 you will soon be able to replace it with Windows 10 and free of charge as a current Win 8.1 user with this computer. Keyboard is not backlit but spill-resistant and very comfy and ergonomic with spaced out keys, 10 key numeric pad for easy data entry and a decent touchpad with separate right and left clicks- all feel nice to use. It is tested for reliability and durability like the other Dell laptops and you know this will last you for several years to come.
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