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Dell’s affordable stealth gaming laptop gets a budget solid state drive

By Jon Martindale March 17, 2016

dell inspiron 15 7000 ssd option 850 skylake — Image used with permission by copyright holder

When we took a looked at Dell’s Inspiron 15 7000 model at the tail end of 2015, we praised it for its slick design, powerful processor and impressive gaming performance for under $800. One area it really fell down though was in storage, where the slow, mechanical hard drive really caused it to chug.

Fortunately, Dell has taken that criticism in stride and is now offering a new version of the laptop, with a 256GB solid state drive (SSD), for just another $50. While this means sacrificing a lot of storage space — the base model’s hard drive has 1TB — the SATA SSD will improve day-to-day performance and reduce game load times.

The best part about this option is that it’s an option. The original $800 model, with the 1TB hard drive (HDD), is still available, and for just a few hundred dollars more ($1,200) you can have both the SSD and the HDD.

That $1,200 model also offers a more powerful Core i7 CPU from the same Skylake generation as the i5 in the $850 model and bumps the display resolution to 4K (3,840 x 2,160).

Just focusing on storage though, having both an SSD and HDD in that set up would certainly be preferable for a lot of users. While 256GB is plenty of space for the operating system and a few games, it could become full quite quickly if you installed just a handful of AAA games on it, or are a big media consumer and want to store your collection of films and shows on there.

For those that don’t plan to do that though, or don’t need a lot of storage space, the $850 model is going to be a much more cost effective route to take and certainly preferably over a larger, much slower hard drive solution.

Better yet, if you order one now using Dell’s financing system, you can get a further $80+ off of your purchase as cashback, and free shipping.

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