Dell Inspiron N5110 Review: An Old Laptop with Adequate Performance

Dell Inspiron N5110: At First Glance

Dell, as one of the industry’s oldest manufacturers, has been relentless in delivering laptops that meet or exceed expectations. Moreover, the ability to manufacture laptops with the right specs at a reasonable price demonstrates their dedication to satisfying their target audience.

Thus, to add to its large collection of laptops, in 2011, Dell released the Inspiron N5110. The Dell Inspiron N5110 is a well-designed laptop that bags a lot of reasonable hardware specifications.

To be more precise, this Dell laptop features a powerful processor and multiple GPU options. However, as most of us know, a laptop with lots of great features definitely comes with one or two drawbacks.

Therefore, to find out more about the Dell Inspiron N5110 and its drawback, you have to continue reading.

Dell Inspiron N5110: Design, Dimension, and Weight

Design-wise, the Dell Inspiron N5110 features quite a classy design, which isn’t particularly expected from a 10-year-old laptop – the laptop was released in 2011.

To give more details, this Dell laptop offers a glossy plastic chassis. Although this Dell laptop is mostly made of plastic, the overall build quality of the Dell Inspiron N5110 is quite solid.

In fact, the laptop is so solid that you will hardly notice any flexing around its chassis. To make things even better, the Dell Inspiron N5110 offers a wide range of colors to choose from including black, blue, red, and so on.

Uniquely, the lid of this Dell Inspiron laptop is exchangeable. To give more details, on the lower right corner of the lid, you will find a button.

When you press this button, it ejects the lid so you can change it to a more fancy or colorful one of your choice. Moreover, there is a “Dell” logo on the center of the laptop’s lid.

Furthermore, this Dell logo has a silver line accent. Although this is just about the only thing you will see on the surface of the lid, it still gives the laptop a rather appealing look thanks to its shiny surface.

Upon opening the lid, you will see a 15.6-inch display with a glossy coating and an HD (1366 x 768) resolution. Moreover, this glossy 15.6-inch display is made with an IPS panel.

Therefore, the display offers great viewing angles. As a result, the display’s color accuracy and picture quality will remain intact even when viewing the display off-center.

However, this laptop’s 15.6-inch display is surrounded by sizeable bezels. Furthermore, just like the entire body of the laptop, these bezels have a glossy finish.

Moreover, at the top bezel, you will find an “Inspiron” logo printed in the left corner. In addition to this logo, you will also find an HD webcam neatly placed in the middle of the top bezel.

This HD webcam is very okay for casual video calls and regular skyping. However, the webcam is not the best for taking pictures.

The reason for this is that the webcam tends to produce burry and grainy images. On a positive note, there is a shiny “Dell” logo nicely placed in the middle of the bottom bezel.

Moving on to the keyboard, the Dell Inspiron N5110 comes with a chiclet-style keyboard. This keyboard features matte-black keys with white lettering on the top.

Moreover, due to its decent key travel, this keyboard should offer an ideal typing experience. In case you are wondering, key travel is the distance between a key’s resting point to full depression.

Apart from its decent key travel, the keys on this keyboard are reasonably spaced. However, the keys make a lot of clicky sounds when pressed, which can be annoying sometimes.

On a bright note, just beneath the keyboard, you will find a sizeable touchpad. This touchpad features a set of dedicated click buttons that are adequate and efficient.

Also, the touchpad is responsive, enabling easy navigation and multitouch gestures.

In terms of ports, the Dell Inspiron N5110 offers a large number of ports. To start with, the laptop features a USB Type-A port, an HDMI port, a USB/eSATA port, and a SO-DIMM slot on the left side.

Meanwhile, on the right side, there is a DVD drive, two headphone jack ports, and another USB Type-A port. That’s not all, this laptop also features a Kensington lock, an Ethernet port, a USB Type-A port, a VGA port on its rear.

When it comes to dimension and weight, the Dell Inspiron N5110 measures 376 x 260.2 x 31.4 – 35.2 mm (W x D x H) and weighs 2650 g. With this amount of weight, this Dell laptop is quite heavy and bulky.

However, the laptop should be able to fit nicely in a backpack even though it won’t be particularly comfortable to carry around. Moreover, the Dell Inspiron N5110 weighs less than one of its closest competitors, the Medion Erazer X6817.

To give more details, the Medion Erazer X6817 measures 390 x 264 x 54 mm (W x D x H) and weighs a massive 3316 g.

In conclusion, although the Dell Inspiron N5110 is bulky and heavy, it features an appealing glossy design. Also, this laptop comes with a large number of ports all distributed around the laptop.

Therefore, I will rate the Dell Inspiron N5110 an eight out of ten in this design review section.

Dell Inspiron N5110: Processor (CPU) Performance

For the processor, the Dell Inspiron N5110 comes with an Intel Core i7-2670QM processor. In terms of speed, this processor offers a base frequency of 2.20 GHz and a boost frequency of 3.10 GHz.

Moreover, this laptop’s processor is a quad-core processor, which means it has up to four cores. In addition to its cores, this processor offers 6 MB cache memory.

Performance-wise, this processor should be able to handle basically anything you throw at it due to its high clock speed of 3.10 GHz. Therefore, the Dell Inspiron N5110 should be able to run demanding applications like Corel Draw and also multitask with ease.

That said, to further prove the performance of this laptop with its Intel Core i7 processor, I will briefly discuss its Cinebench R10 test results. Cinebench R10 is a benchmark tool that tests the processing power and core usage of a computer’s CPU.

Therefore, this test offers multiple test results which include the single-core test and multi-core test results. Basically, the single-core test measures the performance of the computer’s CPU when only a single core is in use.

On the other hand, the multi-core test measures the performance of the CPU when all of its cores are in use. Moreover, it is worth noting that a high score on both tests indicates a great processing performance.

Thus, on the Cinebench R10 test, the Dell Inspiron N5110 recorded 4823 points in the single-core test. On the other hand, the laptop recorded 17967 points in the Cinebench R10 multi-core test.

Impressively, the Dell Inspiron N5110 performed better than most of the laptops in its category. For example, the HP Envy 17 3D recorded 4628 points in the Cinebench R10 single-core test.

Also, this HP laptop recorded 17823 points in the multi-core test. Before concluding this section, it is worth stating that the Dell Inspiron N5110 and HP Envy 17 3D use the same processor.

After thorough consideration, I will rate the Dell Inspiron N5110 a nine out of ten in this processor review section.

Dell Inspiron N5110: Memory (RAM) Performance

The Dell Inspiron 5110 comes with two RAM slots and a standard memory of 4 GB RAM on one slot. Therefore, with the second slot, you should be able to upgrade the laptop’s RAM to the max size of 8 GB.

However, I don’t really think that would be necessary because the standard 4 GB RAM should offer adequate performance. Basically, with 4 GB RAM, the Dell Inspiron 5110 should be able to run most applications and also multitask with ease.

Speaking of multitasking, the Dell Inspiron N5110 should be able to run 15 chrome tabs simultaneously without lagging. Moreover, when these chrome tabs are running, you should also be able to stream two videos on YouTube.

Besides, switching between the chrome tabs and YouTube videos should be seamless and lag-free.

To further validate the performance of this laptop with 4 GB, I will now discuss the laptop’s PCMark 10 test results. Briefly, PCMark 10 is a benchmark tool that evaluates the memory performance of a laptop by imitating day-to-day productivity tasks.

Moreover, a high score on this test signifies a good memory performance. Thus, based on the PCMark 10 test results, the Dell Inspiron scored 4617 points.

Although this score isn’t up to the category average of 5000 points, it is still higher than the Lenovo ThinkPad L520’s 4300 points.

Therefore, I will rate the Dell Inspiron N5110 a seven out of ten in this memory review section.

Dell Inspiron N5110: Storage Option and Performance

For storage, the Dell Inspiron N5110 offers a 5400 RPM SATA HDD (Hard Disk Drive) storage type. This laptop’s storage drive offers a maximum storage capacity of 500 GB HDD storage.

In my opinion, 500 GB of storage space should be enough for most users to save numerous files. However, I doubt if I can say the same for storage-hungry users.

Nevertheless, if you are a storage-hungry user, you don’t have to panic because this laptop features an SD card slot for storage expansion.

With all that being said, let us now discuss how this laptop’s storage drive performed on a CrystalDiskMark benchmark test. CrystalDiskMark is a benchmark test tool that evaluates the performance of a computer’s storage drive by measuring the read and write speed.

If you are curious, read speed means the time that it takes a computer’s storage drive to open a file. Meanwhile, write speed means the time that it takes the storage drive to save a file.

Moreover, it’s worth mentioning that the higher the MBps value in this benchmark test, the faster the computer’s storage speed. Therefore, according to the CrystalDiskMark test, the Dell Inspiron N5110 recorded a sequential read speed of 63.69 MBps.

In addition to its sequential read speed, this Dell laptop recorded a sequential write speed of 57.51 MBps. Even though HDDs are typically slow compared to other storage drives, this laptop’s HDD has a very terrible read and write speed.

In fact, compared to other laptops in its category that use HDD, this laptop performed way less. For example, on the CrystalDiskMark test, the Lenovo ThinkPad L520 recorded a sequential read speed and write speed of 83.19 MBps and 82.23 MBps respectively.

Therefore, I will rate the Dell Inspiron N5110 a seven out of ten in this review section due to its poor storage performance.

Dell Inspiron N5110: Graphics Card Performance

Impressively, the Dell Inspiron N5110 offers two graphics card options. These graphics card options include an Intel HD Graphics 3000 and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M.

The Intel HD Graphics 3000 is an integrated GPU that lacks a dedicated VRAM. Also, this GPU offers a base frequency of 650 MHz and a boost frequency of 1100 MHz.

The NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M, which this review is based on, is a dedicated graphics card that offers 1 GB GDDR3 dedicated VRAM. Moreover, this graphics has a base frequency of 600 MHz and a boost frequency of 1200 MHz.

Furthermore, thanks to its dedicated VRAM, this NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M GPU should be able to handle a few graphics-demanding apps. However, the graphics card’s dedicated VRAM isn’t high enough to handle title AAA games.

Notwithstanding, the graphics card is powerful enough to run most outdated games with ease. For example, with the GPU, the Dell Inspiron N5110 should be able to deliver a frame rate of around 100 fps when playing Resident Evil 5.

Also, while playing FIFA 11, this Dell laptop should be able to deliver around 160 fps (frame per second).

That said, with its NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M GPU, let us now discuss the Dell Inspiron N5110’s performance on a 3DMark 05 test. Before proceeding, I would like to explain the meaning of the 3DMark 05 test.

Basically, the 3DMark 05 is a benchmark test that measures the graphics rendering and gaming capability of a computer. Furthermore, based on the setting of the benchmark test, a high score indicates an impressive graphics performance.

Thus, according to the 3DMark 05 test results, the Dell Inspiron N5110 scored 5548 points. Comparatively, this laptop performed slightly better than the Lenovo ThinkPad L520 which scored 5302 points on the benchmark test.

It is important to note that the Lenovo ThinkPad L520 uses a dedicated ATI Mobility Radeon HD 565v graphics card.

In conclusion, for a non-gaming laptop, the Dell Inspiron N5110 offers decent graphics performance. Moreover, this laptop offers multiple graphics card options including a dedicated graphics card.

Therefore, I will be rating the Dell Inspiron N5110 an eight out of ten in this GPU review section.

Dell Inspiron N5110: Battery Life and Performance

For the battery department, the Dell Inspiron N5110 comes with a 6-cell 90 Whr Lithium-ion battery. Dell claims that this laptop’s battery has a runtime of up to 9 hours.

Could this claim be true? Well, one way to find out is to discuss the laptop’s results on a web-surfing battery test.

Basically, this battery test involves surfing the internet continuously using a WIFI connection until the laptop dies. Moreover, the laptop’s display brightness level is usually around 70% during this test.

At the end of this battery test, the Dell Inspiron N5110 delivered a battery life of 4 hours and 20 minutes. Even though this battery life is decent, it is way less than Dell’s 9 hours claim.

On a positive note, according to the web-surfing battery test, the Dell Inspiron N5110 has a better battery life compared to the Dell Vostro 3750. Specifically, the Dell Vostro 3750 lasted only 3 hours and 11 minutes on the web-surfing battery test.

To conclude this battery review section, I will rate the Dell Inspiron N5110 an eight out of ten. This rating is due to the fact that the laptop performed better than one of its competitors on a battery test.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

The Dell Inspiron N5110 is a ten years old laptop that is still very much adequate in today’s world. To give more details, this laptop offers a powerful and fast processor that can handle most computing tasks.

Also, the laptop offers multiple color options to choose from. Asides from its multiple color options, this laptop comes with a reasonable amount of ports and multiple GPU options.

However, this Dell laptop is somewhat bulky and heavy. Nevertheless, if you value performance more than portability, the Dell Inspiron N5110 is an ideal choice!

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