AMD Radeon HD 7730M

AMD Radeon HD 7730M

Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Dell Ac Adapter

A 1TB 5,400rpm hard drive provides plenty of storage for all of your media files and the 32GB mSATA drive provides speedy access to frequently used data. Windows 7 Home Premium, Dell Stage media software, and Dell DataSafe backup software are preinstalled along with a few useful apps such as Dell Webcam and Skype. Unfortunately you also get a few not so useful apps in the form of trailware and gameware.

The Inspiron 15R Special Edition serves up impressive productivity and multimedia performance, thanks to a potent combination of components including Intel's third generation Core i7-3612QM processor (2.10 GHz), 8GB of system memory, and the aforementioned mSATA drive. Its PCMark7 score of 3658 eclipsed the IdeaPad Y580 by more than 750 points and the HP Envy 17 (2012)$1,489.50 at Amazon Marketplace by almost 1600 points. The 15R's with battery such as Dell Inspiron M501 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 17R Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 15R Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 14R Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 13R Ac Adapter, Dell 9T48V Ac Adapter, Dell XPS M1730 Ac Adapter, Dell PP06XA Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude 2100 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 1320 Ac Adapter, Dell R893R Ac Adapter, Dell J024N Ac Adapter lofty PCMark7 comes by way of the mSATA drive, which is known to improve performance on this particular test.

Scores from the Cinebench R11.5 benchmark test are not as skewed; the Inspiron 15R Special Edition's score of 5.56 lagged the Lenovo Y580 (6.22) and the Dell 17R Special Edition (6.15) but trounced the second generation Core i5-based Toshiba Qosmio X775-Q7170$1,199.95 at Journey Ed(2.70).

The 15R Special Edition's Photoshop CS5 (3:34) and Handbrake (1:24) encoding scores are evidence that it can handle your multimedia tasks with relative ease and are right in line with the Y580 and the 17R Special Edition.

Switchable graphics are supplied by a discrete AMD Radeon HD 7730M GPU and the integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 circuitry. The Radeon engine produced solid 3DMark06 scores of 11,185 (1,024-by-768) and 7,897 (1,920-by-1,080) but could not match the Y580's scores of 15,486 (1,024-by-768) and 12,720 (1,920-by-1,080). Results were similar on our Lost Planet 2 DX9 and Crysis DX10 gaming tests; neither laptop hit the 30 fps mark on the high quality tests but the Y580 produced much higher frame rates on the medium quality tests.

The Inspiron 15R Special Edition had trouble completing the MobileMark 2007 battery benchmark test, so we used our comparable 10-hour DVD rundown test to test the 48WHr battery. It lasted 3 hours 10 minutes, which is almost an hour longer than the 2:20 of the Dell Inspiron 17R Special Edition$1,099.99 at Dell using the same anecdotal test.

The Dell Inspiron 15R Special Edition has a lot going for it. For a little over $1K you get impressive productivity performance, switchable graphics, and a first rate HD display. The addition of a Blu-ray drive sweetens the deal. Its battery life isn't newsworthy but it isn't terrible either, and you can always delete the preinstalled bloatware if it bothers you. That said, as good as the Inspiron 15R's graphics performance is, it can't match the overall graphics power of our reigning Editors' Choice, the Lenovo IdeaPad Y580.