2016-05-02

If you thought notebooks can’t get any cheaper, think twice. In the last few months, we did reviews on some ultra-budget notebooks that cover the bare minimum for your daily activities and costing just a fraction of what other laptops cost. You can check out Lenovo’s Ideapad 100, Dell Inspiron 5545, Acer Aspire E15 (E5-573) and even the most affordable Lenovo Yoga 500 that features roughly the same hardware but costs a little bit more due to the 360-degree rotating hinge.

Anyway, the laptop won’t surprise you with spectacular hardware but the provided quad-core Pentium N3700 CPU will handle most of your daily work and even multimedia as the laptop offers HDMI connectivity so streaming movies won’t be a problem. Also, the build quality isn’t bad at akk and the input devices are one of the best we’ve seen in this price range. Here’s how the laptop performed in our thorough tests.

You can find more about the notebook’s price and availability here: http://amzn.to/1VWA1rM

Contents

Retail package

Design and construction

Display and sound

Pulse-width modulation (PWM, Screen flickering)

Specs sheet

Software

Battery

CPU – Intel Pentium N3700

GPU – Intel HD Graphics (Braswell)

Temperatures

Verdict

Retail package

The laptop comes in a standard box with the usual user manuals, AC charger, charging cable and the notebook itself.



Design and construction

The laptop is entirely built out of plastic but with a different finish. It’s relatively light (2.4 kg) for a budget model and pretty thin (21.7 mm) so it can easily compete against other alternatives on the market like the Lenovo’s Ideapad 100 and Acer Aspire E15 (E5-573). But the overall design is much different than those two.



Typically for Dell, the Inspiron 3552 looks pretty strict and minimalistic without many design features. The lid features textured black plastic with Dell’s logo in the middle and also bends a little bit too much under pressure, but that’s quite common for this price range. Fingerprints are also pretty visible, unfortunately. The hinges are really tightly pulled so opening with one hand is impossible. The bottom holds a big service lid that gives easy access to the HDD, the single RAM slot and the Wi-Fi module.

On the contrary, the sides are flat and feature glossy finish while providing the bare minimum of ports and quite good distribution. The left side holds the DC charging slot, the main exhaust vent, SD card reader, HDMI and the USB 3.0 port. And this leaves only the 3.5 mm audio jack and the other two USB 2.0 ports on the right side.

This leaves only the interior, which is covered in the same textured plastic as the lid. It feels pretty solid and the keyboard tray isn’t as flexible. Unfortunately, the problem with the easily visible smudges persists but more importantly, we have excellent keyboard and touchpad experience at hand. The keys offer long enough key travel, good spacing and you’ve also got the usual media player buttons at your disposal. The touchpad is just perfect or “perfect” for this price range. Still, the touchpad doesn’t wobble, it registers all gestures and swipes pretty accurately and clicking is just a delight – it’s not stiff and most of the surface register left mouse click. It’s pretty funny how Dell managed to implement an excellent touchpad while some other high-end models on the market can’t even get close to that one in terms of comfort and usability.

Display and sound

Dell Inspiron 3552’s screen uses a TN panel with HD (1366×768) resolution in a 15.6-inch diagonal, which means that the pixel density is 100 ppi and 0.253 x 0.253 mm pixel pitch. It’s manufactured by CHI MEI with model number 53 MPX-156BGE. The screen can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal or greater than 86 cm.

Of course, viewing angles aren’t good due to the use of a TN panel.

We measured a maximum brightness of 257 cd/m2 in the center of the screen and 232 cd/m2 appeared to be the average on the surface. This means that the maximum deviation is -17%. At least, the color temperature is pretty close to the optimal – 6550K as D65 is 6500K. So the maximum color deviation (dE2000) compared to the center of the screen with 100% sRGB and 100% brightness, is 4.4 in the upper-right corner and in the upper-middle. Anything above 4.0 is considered to be a big deviation but since this notebook isn’t intended for optimal color reproduction, we can let it pass.

Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. Starting with the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy. Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that has been used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used by professional cameras, monitors and etc. for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

The Inspiron 3552’s display covers only 49% of the sRGB color gamut before calibration and reached 54% after calibration. Since more than half of the colors are missing, you can’t expect vivid colors.

Below you will see practically the same image before and after calibration. Color circles represent the reference colors and white circles being the result. You can see main and additional colors with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut. The profile has been set to 140 cd/m2 and optimal white point – D65 (6500K).

The contrast ratio before calibration was 380:1 and got down to 320:1 after calibration.

Below you can see the results from the accuracy color checker with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. The results are before and after calibration.

Gaming capabilities (Response time)

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.

We’ve measured Fall Time + Rise Time = 20 ms, which is a tad slower than most TN panels on the market.

Pulse-width modulation (PWM, Screen flickering)

Unfortunately, the panel uses PWM from 0 to 99% with what’s considered to be aggressive pulsations at 260 Hz. Higher the frequency, the better. This means that most users will feel the negative impact from the screen flickering.

Conclusion

The TN panel presented in this model has nothing too special but given the price point of the product, the results from our tests were definitely expected. We’ve seen some mid-range laptops with almost identical specs to the one presented here so we can’t really get too picky on this. You will be met with uncomfortable viewing angles, low maximum brightness, more than half of the sRGB gamut is not covered and the contrast ratio is sub-par. However, the color temperature aligns almost perfectly with the optimal one. And last, but not least, the screen appears to have PWM across all brightness levels, except 100%, of course, and the frequency of the pulsating light is quite low – 260 Hz, which is considered to be aggressive.

Sound

The loudspeakers provide excellent clarity in high frequencies but lack the that crisp sound in the mid and lows.

Specs sheet

The specs sheet may vary depending on your region.

Check price

CPU

Intel Pentium N3700 (4-core, 1.60 – 2.40 GHz, 2MB cache)

RAM

4GB (1x 4096MB) – DDR3L-1600

GPU

Intel HD Graphics (Braswell)

HDD/SSD

500GB HDD (5400 rpm)

Display

15.6-inch (39.62 cm) – 1366×768 (HD) TN, glossy

Optical Drive



Connectivity

LAN 10/100 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0

Other features

2x USB 2.0

1x USB 3.0

webcam

microphone

loudspeakers

HDMI

RJ-45

card reader (SD, SDHC, SDXC)

Kensington lock slot

Battery

4-cell, 40Wh

Thickness

21.7 mm (0.85″)

Weight

2.14 kg (4.71 lbs)

Software

We used a freshly installed Windows 10 (64-bit) for the writing of this review and you can find all the needed drivers on Dell’s official support page.

Battery

You can definitely count on the big battery in this thing. Well, 40Wh might not seem a lot but it sure does the job for the energy-efficient and not so powerful processor with iGPU and the simple HD TN panel. Those two are the main power consumers and the battery unit holds off pretty well. You can see the runtimes below – they are considerably above average for the price range.

All tests include were run using the same settings as always – Wi-Fi turned on, power saver switched on and screen brightness set to 120 cd/m2.

Web browsing

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.

Surprisingly good result – 458 minutes (7 hours and 38 minutes).

Video playback

For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.

Almost an hour lower than the previous test but still an excellent result – 396 minutes (6 hours and 36 minutes).

Gaming

We recently started using F1 2015’s built-in benchmark on loop in order to simulate real-life gaming.

Even when it comes to gaming, the laptop is durable – 172 minutes (2 hours and 52 minutes)

CPU – Intel Pentium N3700

Intel Pentium N3700 is a mobile processor suitable for budget notebooks and Chromebooks. It is part of the Braswell generation from Intel and it’s a successor to the Bay Trail CPUs. The most notable improvement is the manufacturing process – it shares the same technology as the Broadwell family CPUs, 14nm FinFET manufacturing process. The new Braswell family aims to bring more power-efficiency and lower thermals in the lower-end segment of the notebook market.

The Pentium N3700 CPU has 4 cores ticking at 1.6GHz and thanks to the Burst Frequency technology can go up to 2.4GHz. All four cores are designed upon Airmont microarchitecture and share 2MB of L2 cache size. The CPU also integrates 8th generation Intel HD Graphics GPU with a normal frequency of 400MHz and can go up to 700MHz. That makes TDP of 6W for the whole SoC, including the memory controller that can handle up to 8GB of DDR3L-1600. The CPU also supports Virtualization technology, as for the GPU – Intel has implemented support for DirectX 12 and Open GL 4.2. Furthermore, the GPU can handle up to 3 external displays up to 4K resolution, while internally the display must be at 2560 x 1440 via eDP.

You can browse through our top CPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-cpu-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this processor: http://laptopmedia.com/processor/intel-pentium-n3700/

Cinebench 11

NovaBench CPU

Photoshop

Results are from the Cinebench 11 test (higher the score, the better)

Laptop

Results

Result
difference

Price

Price
difference

Dell Inspiron 3552 Intel Pentium N3700 (4-cores, 1.6 - 2.4 GHz)

1.72

Dell Inspiron 5551 (15 5000) Intel Pentium N3540 (4-cores, 2.16 - 2.66 GHz)

0.96

-44.19%

Lenovo Ideapad 100 (15) Intel Pentium N2840 (2-cores, 2.58 - 2.58 GHz)

0.83

-51.74%

Acer Aspire E15 (E5-573) Intel Pentium 3825U (2-cores, 1.9 - 1.9 GHz)

2.14

+24.42%

Results are from the NovaBench CPU test (higher the score, the better)

Laptop

Results

Result
difference

Price

Price
difference

Dell Inspiron 3552 Intel Pentium N3700 (4-cores, 1.6 - 2.4 GHz)

275

Dell Inspiron 5551 (15 5000) Intel Pentium N3540 (4-cores, 2.16 - 2.66 GHz)

397

+44.36%

Lenovo Ideapad 100 (15) Intel Pentium N2840 (2-cores, 2.58 - 2.58 GHz)

117

-57.45%

Acer Aspire E15 (E5-573) Intel Pentium 3825U (2-cores, 1.9 - 1.9 GHz)

316

+14.91%

Results are from the Photoshop test (lower the score, the better)

Laptop

Results

Result
difference

Price

Price
difference

Dell Inspiron 3552 Intel Pentium N3700 (4-cores, 1.6 - 2.4 GHz)

43.26

Dell Inspiron 5551 (15 5000) Intel Pentium N3540 (4-cores, 2.16 - 2.66 GHz)

44.8

+3.56%

Lenovo Ideapad 100 (15) Intel Pentium N2840 (2-cores, 2.58 - 2.58 GHz)

46.5

+7.49%

Acer Aspire E15 (E5-573) Intel Pentium 3825U (2-cores, 1.9 - 1.9 GHz)

29.80

-31.11%

Fritz

Fritz is a chess benchmark which tests the computing capabilities of the CPU with various chess moves. The Intel Pentium N37000 managed to get 4.068 million moves per second. For comparison, one of the most powerful computers, Deep(er) Blue, was able to squeeze out 200 million moves per second. In 1997 Deep(er) Blue even beat the famous Garry Kasparov with 3.5 to 2.5.

GPU – Intel HD Graphics (Braswell)

An integrated GPU used in all CPUs part of the Braswell generation. The GPUs frequency can vary a lot – from around 300MHz to up to 700MHz, depending on the model of the processor. It has 16 EUs (Execution Units) and its architecture is almost the same as the one on the Core M CPUs (while the Core M’s graphics integrate 24 EUs).

The GPU can support up to 3 displays with a maximum resolution of 4K, but internally can handle only 2560 x 1440 (QHD) via eDP. The external displays can be connected via HDMI or Display Port. Other major features include the support of DirectX 12 and Open GL 4.2.

You can browse through our top GPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this GPU: http://laptopmedia.com/video-card/intel-hd-graphics-braswell/

3DMark Cloud Gate (G)

3DMark Fire Strike (G)

3DMark (Sky Diver)

Unigine Heaven 3.0

Results are from the 3DMark Cloud Gate (G) test (higher the score, the better)

Laptop

Results

Result
difference

Price

Price
difference

Dell Inspiron 3552 Intel HD Graphics (Braswell)

3091

Dell Inspiron 5551 (15 5000) Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail)

1590

-48.56%

Lenovo Ideapad 100 (15) Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail)

1382

-55.29%

Acer Aspire E15 (E5-573) Intel HD Graphics (Broadwell)

3786

+22.48%

Results are from the 3DMark Fire Strike (G) test (higher the score, the better)

Laptop

Results

Result
difference

Price

Price
difference

Dell Inspiron 3552 Intel HD Graphics (Braswell)

324

Dell Inspiron 5551 (15 5000) Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail)

-

Lenovo Ideapad 100 (15) Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail)

-

Acer Aspire E15 (E5-573) Intel HD Graphics (Broadwell)

442

+36.42%

Results are from the 3DMark (Sky Diver) test (higher the score, the better)

Laptop

Results

Result
difference

Price

Price
difference

Dell Inspiron 3552 Intel HD Graphics (Braswell)

1271

Dell Inspiron 5551 (15 5000) Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail)

512

-59.72%

Lenovo Ideapad 100 (15) Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail)

445

-64.99%

Acer Aspire E15 (E5-573) Intel HD Graphics (Broadwell)

1544

+21.48%

Results are from the Unigine Heaven 3.0 test (higher the score, the better)

Laptop

Results

Result
difference

Price

Price
difference

Dell Inspiron 3552 Intel HD Graphics (Braswell)

114

Dell Inspiron 5551 (15 5000) Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail)

57

-50%

Lenovo Ideapad 100 (15) Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail)

49

-57.02%

Acer Aspire E15 (E5-573) Intel HD Graphics (Broadwell)
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