PC World - USA (2020-06)

90 PCWorld JUNE 2020

FEATURE IS UPGRADING A LAPTOP’S SSD & RAM WORTH IT?

That’s a huge bandwidth increase, most of

it resulting from adding a second stick of

RAM. You probably won’t notice the

additional speed, but it will make the Inspiron

15 7000 a little bit more responsive across the

board.

For instance, when we ran our usual Hand

Brake test, encoding a 30GB MKV file down to

the “Android Tablet” preset, our upgraded

Inspiron 15 7000 finished the task approximately

a minute faster than the default hardware.

The same pattern played out in

Cinebench, which tests the CPU over a much

shorter period of time.

The trend repeated in 3DMark, where we

used the Sky Diver benchmark to simulate

some basic gaming performance, as well as

some real-world testing with Counter-Strike:

Global Offensive at 720p, where the

performance bump from a memory increase

could better come into play. Across the

board, our in-house upgrades performed

better than the stock Inspiron 15 7000.

Upgraded (RAID 0)

Upgraded hardware

Cinebench R15.038

17 1

1,025

Multi-core performance Single-core performance

170

938

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

Stock hardware

167

905

Upgraded (RAID 0)

Upgraded hardware

Stock hardware

HandBrake Total Encode

Time

Seconds

2,215

2,272

2,222

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

Upgraded (RAID 0)

Upgraded hardware

Stock hardware

19,471

21,822

22,529

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

3DMark Sky Diver

Graphics score

Upgraded (RAID 0)

Upgraded hardware

Stock hardware

233.1

17 1.4

236.7

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

Counter-Strike

Fps