Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (7610)

A laptop built to a precise budget, and that shows in places-but there's no disputing its bang per buck

- TIM DANTON

PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk

I'm not sure what a collective noun of Dell XPS laptops is - a luxury? - but the Inspiron 16 Plus breaks away from this month's pack to focus on value. And in terms of spec, it's hard to criticise. Yes, it's an 11th gen Intel Core processor rather than 12th gen, but you also get RTX 3050 graphics, 16GB of memory, a 512GB SSD and a 3K 16in display. Quite a haul for £999.

For most people, the eight cores of the Core i7-11800H will be plenty. A score of 6,219 in PCMark 10 hammers that home, as does 7,273 in Geekbench 5's multicore test, 9,673 in Cinebench R23 and 265 in the PC Pro benchmarks. An equivalent laptop with a Core 17-12700H - such as the identically priced Huawei MateBook D 16 (see issue 336, p62) - will return around 11,000, 12,000 and 340 in those tests, but the Inspiron is one nippy machine.

There's gaming prowess here, too. At 1080p with settings set to High, the RTX 3050 pushed the Inspiron to 46fps in Metro Exodus, 66fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and 52fps in Dirt 5. Switch to native resolution and those figures drop to 25fps, 38fps and 35fps, but you can get playable frame rates if you drop quality settings to Low.