Dell vs HP laptop

HtoO

A friend has the HP and when I saw it I liked it. He picked it for the price, £649.00 (It's £699.00 now), the RAM & SSD. Not much else. I'm ready for a new laptop but I thought I'd best check the other models before handing over my money for the HP. I'd decided on a 17" / 17.3" screen. When I saw the Dell compared to the HP specs, I was puzzled why the Dell is far more popular, looking at how many reviews it has. Plus there are quite a lot of negative reviews for the Dell. To me the HP is clearly the better buy. I thought I might have missed something about the Dell hence my OP. I've been thinking on it and I reckon it could be as simple as Intel being far more widely known than AMD. There are 188 Intel and only 78 AMD on Currys Windows 10 Laptop pages. Personally I prefer AMD. One negative point about the HP that isn't obvious when looking at images on websites; the HDMI & USB ports on the left side are far too close to each other. It won't take 2 SanDisk  flash drives side by side.

getmore4less

neilmcl said:

Have you looked on the Dell Outlet page to see what they have there?

There's currently the exact same spec for £520 (albeit it's categorized as Scratch & Dent) but there's another for £620 with an i7 1065G7 processor and 512GB SSD.

https://www.dell.com/en-uk/dfh/shop/dell-refurbished/cp/outlet

Those look like pre VAT prices. 

Were_Doomed

getmore4less said:

neilmcl said:

Have you looked on the Dell Outlet page to see what they have there?

There's currently the exact same spec for £520 (albeit it's categorized as Scratch & Dent) but there's another for £620 with an i7 1065G7 processor and 512GB SSD.

https://www.dell.com/en-uk/dfh/shop/dell-refurbished/cp/outlet

Those look like pre VAT prices. 

They are ... try Add To Cart and you'll find VAT and shipping added to the final cost.

getmore4less

Were_Doomed said:

getmore4less said:

neilmcl said:

Have you looked on the Dell Outlet page to see what they have there?

There's currently the exact same spec for £520 (albeit it's categorized as Scratch & Dent) but there's another for £620 with an i7 1065G7 processor and 512GB SSD.

https://www.dell.com/en-uk/dfh/shop/dell-refurbished/cp/outlet

Those look like pre VAT prices. 

They are ... try Add To Cart and you'll find VAT and shipping added to the final cost.

For someone looking at retail outlets best to compare/mention the equivalent to avoid disappointment from seeing the low price. 

Neil_Jones

HtoO said:

I've been thinking on it and I reckon it could be as simple as Intel being far more widely known than AMD. There are 188 Intel and only 78 AMD on Currys Windows 10 Laptop pages. Personally I prefer AMD.

AMD laptops used to be total crap, slow as hell and the lower price point wasn't worth it, for the performance you didn't get compared to the Intel equivalents.

It's only been relatively recently that they've finally caught up, but Intel have ruled the roost in this department for a very long time performance wise.

J_B

neilmcl said:

Have you looked on the Dell Outlet page to see what they have there?

There's currently the exact same spec for £520 (albeit it's categorized as Scratch & Dent) but there's another for £620 with an i7 1065G7 processor and 512GB SSD.

https://www.dell.com/en-uk/dfh/shop/dell-refurbished/cp/outlet

And remember to look for the 10% new customer discount - in my experience, it's easier to phone for this rather than wait for them to email a code!

neilmcl

getmore4less said:

Were_Doomed said:

getmore4less said:

neilmcl said:

Have you looked on the Dell Outlet page to see what they have there?

There's currently the exact same spec for £520 (albeit it's categorized as Scratch & Dent) but there's another for £620 with an i7 1065G7 processor and 512GB SSD.

https://www.dell.com/en-uk/dfh/shop/dell-refurbished/cp/outlet

Those look like pre VAT prices. 

They are ... try Add To Cart and you'll find VAT and shipping added to the final cost.

For someone looking at retail outlets best to compare/mention the equivalent to avoid disappointment from seeing the low price. 

To be fair as they're listed on the "Home" section rather than business it was entirely reasonable to assume the advertised prices included VAT, clearly this wasn't the case.

[Deleted User]

HtoO said:

Were_Doomed said:

If the OP is set on choosing between those two, and expected usage doesn't involve gaming (neither is suitable for proper gaming), then on balance I'd choose the HP due to the bigger SSD and more RAM. The real world difference between the CPUs is marginal for everyday usage.

You're spot on with your post. Pretty much it in a nutshell.

Personally I'd disagree, the RAM and SSD can be upgraded at a later date if needed, the processor can't in a laptop so I'd always choose the better processor for a long term investment.

Benchmarks show the processor in the Dell laptop as 26% faster, that is not marginal for everyday use. Single and dual core performance is 44 - 46% better in the benchmarks - really important because not all applications can make use of 4 cores, many still only use 1 core for certain tasks so single core performance is significant.

In "real world" speed tests, the Intel processor in the Dell is way ahead of the AMD in the HP, especially for the "desktop" tests.


Bigger SSD only matters if the OP is likely to need more than 128 GB for applications, I only use 40GB of my 1TB SSD for the OS, browsers, Office 2019 and various other work apps. the rest is photos, music and videos that don't benefit from SSD. 

16GB RAM isn't going to speed things up compared to 8GB for everyday usage, lots a gaming benchmarks done between 8GB / 16GB show little difference, only things like video editing will benefit and these laptops are not suitable for that anyway without a decent graphics card. I've got 12 Chrome tabs, Skype, MS Teams, Horizon VDI, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Netflix app open right now and I'm using only 6.9GB of 16 GB.

Were_Doomed

Real world isn't laboratory benchmarks. Yes, the Intel CPU may render a web page 250 ms faster (for example) ... in the real world a user is unlikely to notice this.

Also factor in that the Dell laptop is currently £30 more than the HP ... adding RAM and changing the SSD will add to that cost.

HereToday

Were_Doomed said:

Real world isn't laboratory benchmarks. Yes, the Intel CPU may render a web page 250 ms faster (for example) ... in the real world a user is unlikely to notice this.

Also factor in that the Dell laptop is currently £30 more than the HP ... adding RAM and changing the SSD will add to that cost.

The DELL is cheaper...