Top 5 reasons to BUY or NOT to buy the Dell Inspiron 15 3505

With the laptop market experiencing massive hunger, manufacturers are looking at their past generations, in order to find something usable and affordable, that will satisfy the customers. Dell might have picked the perfect time to release the device that we’re talking about today, with the Inspiron 15 3505 featuring an IPS display with enough power under to hood so that it offers a pleasant experience. As this is an older platform, the design is a proven one, which means minimal investment from Dell, which in turn can actually yield massive results if the laptop actually sells a lot, which it probably will.

Without further ado, here are LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the Dell Inspiron 15 3505.

Dell Inspiron 15 3505: Full Specs / In-depth Review


3 reasons to BUY the Dell Inspiron 15 3505

1. Upgradeability

Starting off with a huge W, the upgradability here is simply great. Whatever type of memory/storage you can think of, it probably is upgradeable on the device in question. There are two SODIMM RAM slots, which can fit up to 32GB of DDR4 memory running in dual-channel. As for the storage, there two ways of expanding it. First off, we have an old-school 2.5-inch SATA drive bay, as well as an M.2 PCIe x4 slot.

In case you want to upgrade the memory but it’s your first time and you generally don’t know what to do, here is our detailed teardown video, which shows all the necessary steps, in order to safely get access to both the SODIMM and SSD slots.


2. Display

Considering that this is a budget device, it is great to see an IPS panel, where even to this day, some modern notebooks are using TN panels, which for us is inexcusable, unless we’re talking about dirt-cheap devices. The Inspiron 15 3505 has a 15.6-inch Full HD IPS screen with comfortable viewing angles, average maximum brightness, and a quite high contrast ratio of 1070:1. Furthermore, its backlight shows no usage of PWM across any brightness level. The color coverage, however, is quite poor, sitting at just above 50% of the sRGB color gamut.

As for the color accuracy, the values that we got, didn’t match the standard but weren’t that bad at the same time. You can see the results of the test with both the factory settings (left) and with our Design and Gaming profile applied (right).


Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for Dell Inspiron 15 3505 configurations with 15.6″ FHD IPS AUO K1MP9-B156HAN (AUO23ED).

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

Health-Guard

Health-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

Get all 3 profiles with 33% discount


3. I/O

The I/O is both good and bad. You get a MicroSD card slot, which can be pretty valuable, as well as an HDMI 1.4 connector, an RJ-45 connector, two USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) ports, and an audio jack, which are placed on the left side. Furthermore, on the opposite side, you get one more USB Type-A 2.0 port and the already mentioned SD card slot. Unfortunately, it lacks a USB Type-C connector, which is “the port of the future” as you know.


2 reasons NOT to buy the Dell Inspiron 15 3505

1. Design and build quality

For now, this notebook feels like a solid choice, however, there are some things that could have been better. For example, the build quality and the design in general. The Inspiron 15 3505 has a fully plastic body, which is both cheap and flexes like crazy, with there being significant bends in the base when using the keyboard, which was fine actually, due to its clicky feedback and medium-short key travel. Weighing nearly 2 kilograms and being almost 20 mm thick, it is not the most portable laptop out there, but it is definitely fitter than what the budget market could offer in the past.


2. Performance

Considering the age of this device, there are several options for AMD hardware that you can pick from, which include the Athlon Silver 3050U, Athlon Gold 3150U, Ryzen 3 3250U, Ryzen 5 3450U, Ryzen 5 3500U, and the Ryzen 7 3700U. Our unit had the Ryzen 5 3450U, which honestly performed okay, but nowhere on the level of modern processors. The Ryzen 5 3450U shares a resemblance with the Ryzen 5 3500U and if we have to compare it to the latest available Ryzen CPUs, it is somewhere around the level of the Ryzen 3 4300U.

Here are some CPU and GPU results, when compared to other devices in its class.

CPU benchmarks

Results are from the Cinebench R23 CPU test (the higher the score, the better)


GPU benchmarks

The results are from 3DMark Time Spy (Graphics). Higher is better.

Results are from 3DMark Fire Strike (Graphics) benchmark (higher the score, the better)

Results are from the Unigine Superposition benchmark (higher the score, the better)


All Dell Inspiron 15 3505 configurations:

Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments