Dell G5 SE 5505

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tlmiller
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Dell G5 SE 5505

Post by tlmiller »

It arrived!!

So first impressions are that it's reasonably nice looking, but it is BIG, and it is CHONKY. Both of which I knew when I purchased it. It's no high end nice metal deisgn, it's all plastic. So it's not slim, it's not lightweight, and it's not small. It's not as big as 15" laptops USED to be, but compared to something like the modern Razer Blade 15, it's massively larger and heavier. Also less than 1/2 the price new vs. new....

All the hardware seemed to work, Windows (10) was activated properly, so I started swapping equipment. So it currently sets as:

AMD Ryzen 5 4600H
Radeon RX-5600XT 6GB
32GB (2x16GB) DDR4
1TB Sabrent Rocket Q NVMe 3.0x4 SSD
512GB SK Hynix BC711 NVMe 3.0x4 SSD
Killer 1650 wifi-6 + BT 5.x (Intel AX200)

Currently running Endeavour. Seems less than stable so far, but not sure if it's Endeavour, the laptop, or just I need certain boot parameters to be stable. The issue I'm having is DEFINITELY the soft lockup that's talked about for this model in the Arch Wiki. Right now I'm testing one of the potential fixes. Advantage of having multiple spares is that I don't NEED it to function flawlessly right out of the box.

The LCD is...very cheap compared to some of them available on this model. They make it available with a 120Hz and 144Hz panels, this one is just a low brightness (probably 300 nits, MAYBE 350) 60Hz panel. Functional, but nothing impressive. Still, it's an entry level build of this laptop, so it's not really a surprise. The keyboard, however, is surprising. I hate that it has the +10 keys, but otherwise it's REALLY nice. Genuinely pleasant to type on as far as laptops go. The touchpad works so far. Nothing special there. Could be a little larger given the size of the laptop, but it's adequate.

It has 2 full size NVMe m.2 2280 slots on the inside, so this thing can be outfitted with SERIOUS storage. I've got it with 1.5 TB, which is more than adequate for me. The system SEES the Radeon card, but I haven't tested yet to see if it actually switches to it when 3d apps start up.

I did have to install ryzenadj to try to keep a lid on the thermals. Compiling software the CPU temps were getting well above 90C. I know it's safe for short duration, but I set a CPU Temp cap of 90C in ryzenadj. Gets scary seeing temps higher than that.

For ports, this is definitely an outlier for modern laptops. Lots of ports. Over on the left hand side it has a barrel connector (240-watt PSU!!!), mini DP, HDMI 2.0, USB 3.0, ethernet, and a USB-C (does not work with a dock that only outputs 35-watts, to be expected, but still had to try). On the right side it's got a few more ports, with a security lock, 2xUSB 2.0 ports, a headphone jack, and a SD-card slot.

Overall, while I won't say this is a FANTASTIC laptop so far, for the price I can see the appeal, doubly if you like 15" laptops. It's got MASSIVE potential for a sub $900 laptop when new. And hte price I paid used (<$600 AFTER tax and shipping) is definitely fantastic for this much power, I have a feeling once I figure out what's causing the instability that this thing would compete with older quad core DESKTOPs of the mid core years (3rd-6th gen) and early Ryzens (zen1/zen+)...it really is that beefy.
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Re: Dell G5 SE 5505

Post by wove »

Sounds like one heck of nice machine. Take your time getting all configured properly and running like you want it, for you know that not long after that you will get bored again and have to start all over.

At one point I picked up a 16" Toshiba laptop and your "big and chonky" really made me smile. It is the perfect description for a big screen all plastic laptop. With that size power adapter what kind of run time does it get on batteries?
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tlmiller
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Re: Dell G5 SE 5505

Post by tlmiller »

Haven't tested very long yet, but according to reviews it's actually capable of 5-7 hours, which is REALLY good for a gaming laptop.
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tlmiller
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Re: Dell G5 SE 5505

Post by tlmiller »

Holy $#^$!! I just benchmarked the drives in this thing, and the BC711 is a SHOCKER. I knew it was siginificantly faster than the predecessor the BC511, but I wasn't expecing this type of number from a m.2 single sided 2230 drive. Yes, 2230, which means a SINGLE NAND and DRAMLESS!!

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dai_trying
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Re: Dell G5 SE 5505

Post by dai_trying »

I wanted to test my latest acquisition, but cant find the benchmark tool you use, I guess its because I'm not using Plasma...
So I decided to go old school and performed a dd test with the following

Code: Select all

sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024; sync
results:

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1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 0.388518 s, 2.8 GB/s
and then

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dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
results:

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1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 0.0546705 s, 19.6 GB/s
My new system is an Asus G713QM and I've really never had a system so high spec'd I mainly use it for playing online with my son/grandkids and it is pretty darn awesome! inxi results below

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dai@RogStrix:~$ inxi -F
System:
  Host: RogStrix Kernel: 5.16.0-6-amd64 arch: x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: Xfce
    v: 4.16.0 Distro: Debian GNU/Linux bookworm/sid
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: ASUSTeK product: ROG Strix G713QM_G713QM v: 1.0
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: ASUSTeK model: G713QM v: 1.0 serial: <superuser required>
    UEFI: American Megatrends LLC. v: G713QM.316 date: 11/26/2021
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT0 charge: 56.1 Wh (64.0%) condition: 87.6/90.0 Wh (97.4%)
    volts: 15.8 min: 15.9
CPU:
  Info: 8-core model: AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX with Radeon Graphics bits: 64
    type: MT MCP cache: L2: 4 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 1244 min/max: 1200/4889 cores: 1: 1234 2: 1208 3: 1201
    4: 1200 5: 1214 6: 1249 7: 1198 8: 1205 9: 1380 10: 1324 11: 1201 12: 1200
    13: 1403 14: 1303 15: 1198 16: 1199
Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA GA106M [GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile / Max-Q] driver: nvidia
    v: 470.103.01
  Device-2: AMD Cezanne driver: amdgpu v: kernel
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.3 driver: X: loaded: amdgpu,nvidia
    unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,nouveau,vesa gpu: amdgpu
    resolution: 1920x1080~144Hz
  OpenGL: renderer: AMD RENOIR (DRM 3.44.0 5.16.0-6-amd64 LLVM 13.0.1)
    v: 4.6 Mesa 21.3.7
Audio:
  Device-1: NVIDIA driver: snd_hda_intel
  Device-2: AMD Renoir Radeon High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
  Device-3: AMD Raven/Raven2/FireFlight/Renoir Audio Processor driver: N/A
  Device-4: AMD Family 17h HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
  Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.16.0-6-amd64 running: yes
  Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.0 running: yes
  Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.49 running: yes
Network:
  Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
    driver: r8169
  IF: enp2s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: 7c:10:c9:26:8b:a9
  Device-2: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 driver: iwlwifi
  IF: wlp3s0 state: down mac: be:07:47:a1:f3:9c
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: Intel AX200 Bluetooth type: USB driver: btusb
  Report: hciconfig ID: hci0 state: up address: B0:7D:64:D6:DB:BA bt-v: 3.0
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 953.87 GiB used: 26.55 GiB (2.8%)
  ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Samsung model: MZVLQ1T0HBLB-00B00
    size: 953.87 GiB
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 97.87 GiB used: 26.52 GiB (27.1%) fs: ext4
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p8
  ID-2: /boot/efi size: 96 MiB used: 29.9 MiB (31.1%) fs: vfat
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 14.9 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%)
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p5
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 45.0 C mobo: N/A gpu: amdgpu temp: 45.0 C
  Fan Speeds (RPM): cpu: 0
Info:
  Processes: 315 Uptime: 33m Memory: 15.12 GiB used: 1.62 GiB (10.7%)
  Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.15
As you can see I had to go with testing due to a few known bugs, the worst and most noticeable one being the machine shuts itself down sometimes when you start typing on the keyboard!!! That really worried me to start with. Also I have now managed to get all the ausa sync stuff to work and the battery charge limit also now works so I'm much happier.

I'm still using Xfce as my desktop as I prefer to keep all my systems matching to make installation and configuration easier (for me at least) and also I keep the software the same across all machines.

I have hardinfo installed which I use for keeping a general comparison of my machines by saving the report and transferring the relevant data into /usr/share/hardinfo/benchmark.conf so I get the comparisons from within hardinfo itself, but wondered what other benchmark software others are using, any suggestions?
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tlmiller
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Re: Dell G5 SE 5505

Post by tlmiller »

I use Geekbench 4 & 5 (free versions) for general system benchmarking.
As pictured, I use kdiskmark for SSD benchmarking (yes, because it's pretty and looks/acts just like CrystalBenchMark on Windows)
I have used the Phoronix Test Suite in the past, but I simply don't NORMALLY need that in depth testing and results. It's a GREAT suite, but more than I generally have need for.
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crosscourt
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Re: Dell G5 SE 5505

Post by crosscourt »

Thats all I use my Ryzen system for, gaming. Geekbench is a great app as Ive used it quite a bit. My older systems need a bit more monitoring due to hardware and driver issues.

You think the G5 is chunky, I use to use the Alienware gaming laptops similar to the ones Leonard and Sheldon used in Big Bang. Those were big, chunky, a lot of plastic and 17in screens. They performed very well but more recent gaming laptops are prone to heat issues and failures of capacitorss, ICs and mofsets.
Ill warn Dai ahead of time that Asus products have the highest failure rate among OEMs presently and the issues are widespread.
The repair shop in my area gets 5 times as many Asus laptops in for repairs, most recent models, versus other brands.
Older laptops werent as thin and recent models appear to be havng far more heat issues, particularly gaming laptops and ultrathin models.
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dai_trying
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Re: Dell G5 SE 5505

Post by dai_trying »

I'll take a look at geekbench as I recall using it in the past so should be straight forward.

As for hardware failures, I follow a few repair shops on youtube and have seen the amount of asus machines getting repaired, and you're dead right it is a lot! I don't push this machine too hard though so I'm hoping to have an easy ride with it, time will tell ;)

I've also just picked up an MSI machine, again a big 17" screen but a lot older i7 7th gen, which seems to run pretty good and I'm thinking it might be good enough for me to use and then sell the Asus... have to wait and see how well that one actually performs once I play a few games on it though. It has a Gtx 1050 Ti which should cope with what I use it for.
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tlmiller
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Re: Dell G5 SE 5505

Post by tlmiller »

Yeah, Geekbench is easy. Just extract and run. Phoronix Suite is as well, just requires PHP (but none of the rest of the LAMP stack that isn't already there). If you want a REALLY thorough look at your performance, phoronix suite is really good, and it's all GPL v3.
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tlmiller
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Re: Dell G5 SE 5505

Post by tlmiller »

So the G5 came with a 2230 length copper SSD heatsink (as it came with a BC511 2230 SSD). I transferred that over to the BC711, and ordered a few Graphene/Copper heatsinks for 2280 drives. This is one of the laptops that got one. While the Rocket Q "sticker" does double as an EXTREMELY slim heatsink, I removed it and added a graphene/copper heatsink for better performance. So both SSD's on here now have a heatsink (mind you, the "stock" copper one for the BC711 isn't attached with thermal pads or anything, it's just physical contact). Also added a heatsink to the SP 34A80 (not that it'll do much good since that's double sided but can only add to the front), the Verbatim Vi3000 2TB (although it's a moderately "low" performance drive, I have a feeling it may help it a little since it is 2 TB storage with prior just a sticker, no heatsink of any form. I have several left over if I wanna try to put one on the XG6 in my desktop, as it probaboy would also benefit from one.
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