hi this is david at mashit now we've
recently reviewed both the m15r4
and the m17 r4 so i thought whilst i've
gotten both
in the office let's put them together
and take a look at them side by side
see what the differences are between the
15 and the 17 inch on both a size aspect
but also
more importantly a thermal aspect what i
want to look at is
does the 17 inch with its larger body
size cool better
than the more compact 15 inch logically
you would say yes but we're going to put
it to the test to start with what i'm
going to do
is look at them side by side look at the
size differences
and then check them over see what
differences they've got between buying
the 17
15 inch and then we're going to look at
the performance so
first things first specs wise they're
very similar
they've both got the intel 8 core 16
thread cpu just the i7 not the i9
and they've both got the 140 watt 30 70.
the 17 inch has a 360 hertz screen and
the 50 inch has a 300 hertz screen
the 17 inch has 16 gigabytes of ram
whereas the 50 inch has 32 gigabytes of
ram but that's not going to make a
difference in these tests
and lastly the 17 inch came with a
single
512gb ssd whereas the 15 inch came with
two 256 gigabyte ssd in a raid 0
configuration so let's look at the sizes
first of all
so 17 inch this is still a slim and
light
and you can still pick up one hand it's
not overly heavy
but when you compare it to the 15 inch
this is much easier to pick up and wield
with just one hand
the seven inches is more of an effort
the 15 inch is really quite easy just to
pick up and wave around
i'm going to quickly place them on top
of each other
and you can see that there is quite a
difference in size for the actual form
factor of each
now personally i do prefer a 7-inch
laptop
but the way i use a laptop or a gaming
laptop in particular is i will take it
from place to place i pop it on the desk
and i prefer that 17-inch screen
but if you do want the mobility the 15
inch you can see there's quite a big
difference and it's so much easier to
just
pick up and throw in a bag than the 17
inch
not this 17 inches big this is still a
nice slim and light seven inch laptop
so you can see the side view
there we go rear view you can see there
is quite a difference in size between
the 17 inch and the 15 inch laptop
okay so let's open them up look inside
see the differences
so 17-inch it's got a stiffer hinge
there isn't one hand opening
whereas a 15-inch i think because it's a
bit lighter the hinge is a bit easier to
open
you've got the one hand opening option
so now that both the laptops are open
you can see straight away a couple of
differences obviously
the seven inch is bigger on the desk
you've got a bigger screen when you're
using the laptop if you're using it as a
desktop replacement and you're gonna be
looking at the screen a lot i prefer
having that seven inch screen especially
when you're gaming i find it more
immersive looking at
this 17 inch screen that i do a 15
screen when i'm actually playing the
game
i feel with a 50 inch i'm leaning right
in to see the details of the game that
i'm playing
now other than the actual size of the
laptop you'll notice that the actual
keyboards themselves are different now
the 15-inch has a centered keyboard
with no number pad i have to be honest
that is my preferred keyboard style
because i like the fact that it's
centered
right above the middle of the touchpad
is nice and sensitive when you type
you're not resting
on the touchpad on the 17-inch you've
got a full-size keyboard
with a number pad and it's obviously
shifted the keyboard across more to the
left to fit obviously the number pad in
so your hands are more over the left
hand side if you're typing
again a lot of people prefer that number
pad so they will prefer this keyboard my
personal preference
is without a number pad and when we look
at the actual
touch pads themselves you'll see that
the 17 inch has a much larger touch pad
now it's not much more wide than the 15
inch but it's a lot
taller than the 15 inch so it's a lot
more comfortable scrolling around
on the 17 inch touch pad now these both
1080p
high refresh displays this is a hertz
display
this is a 300 hertz display they're both
brilliant displays they're both
incredibly fast and both got low input
times so they are great machines for
gaming on
with both of these displays though
they've got the intel integrated gpu
disabled so
neither of these machines have decent
battery life they're both two to two and
a half hours
on light use so if you want
a longer battery life make sure you buy
the 144hz display that that still has
optimus
but these with the high refresh displays
they don't have optimus so you will have
poor battery life
there's not even any point me comparing
them because they're both poor they've
both got great speakers
they've both got the same very average
webcam and microphones as you get most
gaming laptops
so this is all pretty much a wash so
it's all really realistically down to
do you want the number pad with a
slightly larger touchpad or do you want
that extra mobility
with the center keyboard and a smaller
touchpad
all the ports are the same on both these
machines so if you're buying a smaller
laptop you get the same number of ports
so that's not an issue
they both have pd charging so you can
use your own power bank
or usbc charge if you're on the go and
all the internals are the same depending
on which you actually buy
but what we are going to do now is we're
going to open it up and we're going to
look at the actual internals and see if
they're the same with regards to the
batteries in the vapor chamber
and then we're going to look at
performance right so just looking inside
the laptops now
we've got the m17 r4 on the left and the
m15 r4 on the right so just to show you
the similarities between the two
uh although the 17 inch is slightly
bigger they've both got 86 watt hour
batteries
they've both got the same four speaker
system so you can see
one of those on either side plus another
one underneath at the bottom there
that's where they sound the same where
the differences come into play
you see the fans are bigger on the
17-inch
it's not a lot but it does make a bit of
a difference to the cooling
you see that is about just about nine
centimeters
and that one is about seven and a half
centimeters so
a little bit bigger now the next thing
to to note between the two you can see
the
soldered on wi-fi card on both then you
can see the m.2 slots so now the 17-inch
you can see we've got the sort of the
copper plates
hiding a 80 millimeter 512 gigabyte ssd
and on the 15 inch you can see we've got
the two drives in raid now if you've
noticed they've used 42 millimeter the
smaller
ssds for those two 256 gigabytes ssds
now something that i get asked all the
time and it's really
is annoying with with these laptops for
some unknown reason and i got it wrong
myself on the last time that i did a
review
this 2230 slot here this is the third
slot
now in the 17 inch i've got here a 128
gigabyte
30 mil drive now if i pop that in
you can see on the 17 inch the 30
millimeter fits absolutely perfectly
so 30 to 30 millimeter ssd in the m17
right so now you think they'll be
exactly the same on the 15 inch but i'm
going to slide it in
on the 15 inch avoiding the camera so
there we go
on the 15 inch i've put it in and you
see the hole where it should be
but it's actually the screw hole is
actually a 42 millimeter
so m1794 the third bay
is a 30 mil m.2 m15r4
the third bay is actually a 42
millimeter m.2
so just be careful if you are trying to
populate that third bay
now lastly with both these machines as
you can see they've got some little
tool over here some of the heat but they
are both inverted motherboards so if you
do want to re-paste
you will have to take the entire
motherboard out
flip it to get to the actual heat sinks
to re-paste it
it is a real pain that's about all there
is to say obviously the ram is soldered
on so there's nobody even looking at
that
so having looked inside of these
machines we're now going to look at the
actual performance
we know that the m17 has got slightly
larger fans and a vapor chamber cooler
than the m15
so what we're going to do is we're going
to put the fans on maximum
so there's no variation between the two
fan profiles
and we're going to run a couple of
benchmarks first we're going to run city
bench on both of these machines
now i'm gonna put task manager and
throttle stub on the screen
so that you can see the sort of the
frequency and the wattage and the
temperatures for both of these machines
that's what's important here the scores
aren't as important
although the m17 does score higher the
m17 scores 3920
in comparison to the m15s 3731.
so you're only talking about sort of
eight percent difference between the two
but there is a difference there but what
is more important is when we look at the
actual wattage of the cpu
and the actual temperatures of the cpu
now the m17
it stays boosted between 100 and 405
watts
almost indefinitely you can just leave
scene bench running over and over again
and it will stay at about 105 watts
and whilst it's doing that on this max
fan without any under vaulting
it will stay at maximum of about 74c
that's a really quite an impressive
result for a slimming light
that's running 104 watt cpu eight core
16 threads
now in comparison the m15 with its
slightly smaller cooling system
after a while in cinebench it does start
to throttle it goes from 105 watts it
will start dropping down to about
90 watts as it starts heating up and the
cpu even at maximum fans will heat up to
100c
now there's a way that we can improve
this and we are doing another video
where we're looking at
tuning the performance of the m15 and
the m10 team by under vaulting and
and tweaking the actual system itself so
please like and subscribe if you'd like
to watch that in the future
but as it is being a smaller system
these are still pretty good results we
are we're running a 8 or 16 thread cpu
even at the throttle state at about 90
watts so really quite impressive results
even for the m15
although it definitely isn't good as its
bigger brother the m17
so now we're going to look at the 3d
side of things so we're going to look at
unigine valley
i think i like about unigine valley we
can just leave it running and we don't
have to worry about the actual test
finishing and therefore we can have you
know we can saturate
the the heatsink itself so we can see
you know how well it's doing
now the scores of these are much more
similar between the two the m17 scored
5177
in comparison to the m15s 5041
so although there is a little bit of
difference it's it's quite minor between
these two
what is more noticeable and is more
interesting is the actual temperature
difference between the two machines
the m17 runs between 10 and 20 c
cooler than the m15 now bear in mind
these are both on maximum thumb says no
difference in fan speeds the m17 is just
running that 10 to 20 degrees cooler
at all times than the m15 that's just
due to the slightly larger
chassis and the larger fans pumping that
hot air out easier than the m15
can so in conclusion on the performance
we can see that the m17 is definitely
quite a bit better than the m15
and obviously dell obviously realized
this as well because the m17 if you look
at its upper range
the 3080 will have a higher wattage
on the m17 than the m15s 3080 so they
know that it's got that extra
cooling capacity on the m17 now that's
not to say the m15 is bad these are
still great results for a slimmer night
laptop
but if you want the best of the best
you've got to look at the m17
so i went to the conclusion should you
buy the m15 or should you buy the m17
there's obviously no perfect laptop for
any one person
now me personally my favorite is always
going to be the 17-inch
i've never bothered so much about
portability i want to ever have the
biggest screen i can possibly have in a
laptop
because that's more useful to me if i'm
going to sit here gaming on an actual
gaming laptop itself
if you're somebody who values
portability and wants me to carted
around
pop it out on a desk and use it and
chuck it in a bag and go then definitely
the 15 inch
is the way forward you can see when we
put them side by side
that there is quite a difference in size
between the m50 and the m17
and not only the actual size laptop but
the weight it's so much easier to pick
the m15 up in one hand
and throw it in a bag i mean this does
sound a bit like first world problems
they're both slim and light laptops
but if you're comparing the two the m15
is definitely a lot more portable
also i do like the scented keyboard on
the m15 again this is personal
preference a lot of people i know
much prefer a number pad and they would
definitely have to go for the m17 if
that is the case
but me personally i love a centered
keyboard so the last thing i want to
talk about just before i sum this up
obviously we want to talk about battery
life we've got the high-end screen
models on both these machines
so therefore we don't have optimus on
either now the m17 does have g-sync with
its 360hz panel
and the m15 doesn't have g-sync so if
you're looking for the best of the best
gaming performance wise then the m17
with the 360 hertz
panel and the better cooling is the way
to go the m15 is still a great option
and say it's much more portable
if you want battery life though you need
to step yourself down to the 144 hertz
panel
which does provide advanced optimus now
unfortunately we haven't got one of
those in yet we will likely be getting
one in soon to test that model as well
but from what i've heard from other
people you're looking at about five to
seven hours of battery life
if you enable the advanced optimus well
hopefully that's answered your questions
hopefully this video has been useful to
you if there is anything i haven't
covered
please pop it down in the comment
section down below and i will get back
to you
we will be doing plenty more videos on
the m15 plus we have plenty more laptops
coming in over the next couple of weeks
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watching