Jan 28, 2016 01:58 AM
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The Inspiron 15R N5010 runs an Intel Core i5-430M CPU with two cores, Hyper-Threading and a clock speed of 2.26GHz, but the most impressive specifications are the notebook's 6GB of DDR3 SDRAM and 640GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue hard drive. This is more RAM and hard drive space than we're used to seeing in a mid-range notebook, and it gives the Inspiron 15R N5010 excellent multitasking abilities as well as lots of head-room for image manipulation and other memory-intensive tasks. It runs Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit edition, so all the memory is available.
Performance tests showed the Inspiron 15R N5010's speed to be adequate for office and multimedia pursuits. Its 2.27GHz frequency is the lowest of all the available Core i5 CPUs(except for the low-voltage models), but the difference between 2.26GHz, 2.4GHz and 2.53GHz will be negligible in real-world tasks. In our Blender 3D test, the Inspiron 15R N5010 recorded a time of 60sec, which is only 5sec slower than the Dell Vostro 3700 and Samsung R580, both of which use the 2.4GHz Core i5-520M CPU. Its iTunes MP3 encoding time was 4sec slower than the Vostro 3700.
You won't really lose too much time when performing everyday encoding tasks, and even more taxing tasks such as DVD ripping will be accomplished in reasonably good time. It took us 1hr 10min to compress our test DVD to a 1.5GB Xvid file, which is only 5min slower than a high end laptop such as Fujitsu's LifeBook E780, which runs an Intel Core i7-620M.
Graphics performance out of the installed ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 adapter is only middle of the road; it recorded a score of 4572 in 3DMark06. It's a low score for a 15in laptop with a$1500 price tag — even the Samsung R580 recorded a quicker score of 7412 in the same test with a GeForce GT 330M graphics adapter. Nevertheless, it's more than enough graphics performance for HD video processing and it will even be able to run some older games.
The hard drive recorded a fast transfer rate of 29 megabytes per second, thanks in part to its high density. Once it gets substantially filled with files, that figure will drop slightly. We're not fans of the way Dell has partitioned the large drive, leaving only 60GB free for the operating system and applications on the primary partition. We had only 20GB free after installing our benchmarking software.
