Finding the best laptop with i5 processor and the best laptop below one grand is a daunting task for sure. If you’re also looking for something similar, the Dell Inspiron 3000 17 inch laptop is a fantastic option. It sports a quad-core Intel Core i5-8265U and overall performs very well for a budget laptop.
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Why We Like It – Dell Inspiron 3000
The Dell Inspiron 3000 is an excellent laptop on the lower end, especially for students. Even though it comes with a fairly low price tag, it’s actually very much performant and durably built for a 17-inch laptop. And most users will really like the big display for media consumption.
- Big Full HD IPS display
- 128GB NVME SSD included as a boot drive
- 1TB HDD
- The keyboard isn’t backlit
Power & Performance
As we’ve mentioned before, it comes with a quad-core i5-8265U and an AMD Radeon 520 GPU inside with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM. For OpenGL applications, this graphics card is going to be a great performer. And the 8GB of DDR4 RAM is not a lot, but it’s perfectly fine for the price, considering the fact that it’s rated at 2666MHz.
Battery
Out of all, the battery life section is the one part where this laptop fails to deliver quite a bit. It doesn’t suck outright, but it’s not good either. It both charges slow, and doesn’t retain the charge all that well for a longer period. You’d be lucky to get more than an hour’s worth of battery life with normal use. If you need a laptop with good battery life for your work, definitely get the ASUS VivoBook S14 instead.
Ports & Expandability
Even though it’s on the cheaper side, this laptop does come with all the necessary ports built-in. You get two USB ports on the left side (USB 3.1) and one on the right (USB 2.0). And you also get HDMI, combo jack, ethernet, all the usual stuff. Best of all, there’s an SD card slot too. And if you still use DVDs, there’s also an optical drive on the right side. Unfortunately, unlike the Acer Aspire 5 A515, it doesn’t have a USB type C port.
Build Quality
The overall build quality is excellent. However, the keyboard and the trackpad are pretty bad. Even their own Dell G5 15 Gaming Laptop, which starts at a slightly lower price, has a better keyboard and trackpad than the Inspiron 3000.
Value
The Dell Inspiron 3000 sports a pretty good CPU (not an Intel Core i3 processor like others, a Core i5), 128GB NVME SSD, 1TB hard drive for extended storage, and especially a big 1080p display. On top of that, unlike other laptops at this price that rely on integrated Intel HD graphics, this laptop comes with a dedicated AMD GPU with a pretty good amount of fast VRAM. So overall, at almost $900, the value of the Inspiron 17 3000 is very enticing, to say the least.
Dell Inspiron 3000 Wrap Up
The Dell Inspiron 3000 is a fantastic laptop overall that delivers on most fronts. The battery life might not be that great, and the keyboard & trackpad might be subpar, but pretty much everything else is very well made and capable.
