Dell Vostro 5481 Review

Historically speaking, Dell hasn't really putting much effort to their design on their machines especially for the lower end line up. The flagship XPS lineup looks great and performs great, but for the other series like the Inspiron and the Vostro lineup design is usually quite dull.

During the late 2018, Dell had launched a few new models to the Inspiron and Vostro lineup and this time around, it seems that Dell had really put some effort to make these 2 series looks way better than the last model, especially for the Vostro 5481.

Tech Specification

• 8th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-8265U Processor (6M Cache, up to 3.9 GHz, 4 cores) (Whiskey Lake)
• 4GB DDR4 2666Mhz RAM
• NVIDIA® GeForce® MX130 with 2GB GDDR5 graphics memory
• 1TB 5400 rpm 2.5" SATA Hard Drive
• 14.0-inch FHD (1920 x 1080) Anti-glare LED Backlight Non-touch Narrow Border IPS Display
• TPM 2.0

Overall the specs for this model is pretty standard for a mid-low tier machine. It is nice to see that Dell is eager to use the latest Intel CPU architecture at the time of this machine launch. The original RAM supplied by Dell is rated as 2666Mhz speed, however in real like scenario this machine only able to support up to only 2400Mhz so there is no point for you to get 2666Mhz RAM for this machine.

For the GPU side, the previous model of Vostro (5471) uses the AMD Radeon 530 GPU. This time however, Dell decided to jump to the green team, slamming this machine with a NVidia MX130 mobile GPU. The performance of this GPU is quite similiar to the AMD Radeon 530, so there are not much to shout out about.

This machine have a 2 drive support, it comes with a M.2 slot with NVMe storage support and a traditional SATA drive bay. As usual, I prefer to save some cost on the M.2 drive as I am pretty sure that the original supplied 128GB NVMe storage won't do much good for me. But, doing this will comes with a caveat, which will be explained later on.

The screen is an IPS panel display, supplied by Chi Mei. Yeah.. I know, Chi Mei again disappointingly. It may be a well known display manufacturer but so far, it's lower end IPS display didn't give much hope to me. In a dimmed environment, this display suffers a great amount of edge bleeding and there is nothing much Dell can do about it.

Design

Design wise, it had a great upgrade from the previous Vostro 5471 (which you can check it out here) the whole form factor had been massively reduced to almost an old Macbook 13" size thanks to it's cut down on the display bezel, giving it a relatively modern looks. There is a 720p web cam located on the top of the screen (THANK God, it is not on the bottom), the chin is quite thick, but overall I don't mind it at all as it gives a nice lift of the screen.

The outer shell for top and bottom is made of aluminium coated with dark grey color finish which gives a great premium look and feel to it.

On the bottom we have some ventilation vents, speaker grills but there are no quick access maintenance latch, which is quite expected for a laptop like this.

On the left side, we have a D/C input, USB-C running on USB 3.1 Gen1 with Display Port and USB Power Delivery, which means you could hook up a USB Power Delivery certified adapter and charge it, a full HDMI port, 2 USB 3.1 Type A and last but not least, a headphones jack.

On the right side, it has a lock slot, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a USB 2.0 port (bummer) and a full sized SD card slot.

Overall I am quite satisfied with the ports apart from the barbaric USB 2.0 port. There is no thunderbolt support over USB-C. But hey, it is just a RM3,000 machine, are you really expecting it to have thunderbolt support?

The keyboard is quite different this time, it does have a backlit keyboard, but the key travel is much more shallow now, it feels like it is trying to be like the newer Macbook. Let's just hope it will not get sticky keys like the Macbooks. But overall it is quite comfortable to type on once you had get used to the short travel keys feel.

The touch pad is much more accurate than the Vostro 5471, it is still using the Windows precision drivers and it works quite flawlessly. There are no chrome beze around the touch pad this time, so you will not need to worry about light reflecting it directly to your eyes.

It still comes with a finger print scanner that works really well with Windows Hello. reading my finger print is quite accurate and snappy, it just takes less than 1 seconds for it to recognize my finder print. Oh yeah, by the way, the inner panel it made of plastic, unlike the previous Vostro 5471 is made from aluminium panel. Slightly disappointed, but it feel quite alright.

My unit comes with a minor defect on the plastic keyboard frame, there is a bulge on the frame at the left top Right Shift Key.

Called up Dell, they came to me and replace the frame together with the keyboard and all is good now.

Under the hood

One of the great things about this Vostro 5481 model is that it is upgrade-able from the storage, to the WiFi card, you can upgrade to the specs that you wanted. The RAM is upgrade-able to the maximum of 32GB, I had no idea why do you need 32GB RAM on a machine with i5 8265U but you are able to if you wanted. There is a 4 lanes PCIe NVMe M.2 slot for you to boost your machine storage with the fastest SSD possible in 2019.

Speaking about the SSD, if you ordered this model without a SSD, you will face an issue. You will not able to directly slot in your own SSD without a SSD bracket from Dell. I had to contact Dell, send them a photo of the SSD compartment and explain to them on how I can't fit in my SSD without their screw bracket.

After paid for the bracket, which is quite reasonably priced (RM 11.41) and a whole month of waiting for shipping to get a small screw bracket.

After fitting the screw bracket, then only you are ready to deploy your SSD. Oh wait, did I mentioned you need to buy the SSD screw separately if your SSD seller didn't supply you with the screw?

Usability

The Vostro 5481 packs with a 3500mAH 42Wh battery, which could provide up to 4-6 hours of battery life with light Internet browsing. Not bad for a machine with dual storage, they could have fit a larger battery if there is no secondary SATA drive installed.

This machines comes with a nVidia MX130 GPU, but how well can it perform and most importantly can it run Crysis? For Crysis 2, the answer is Yes, but sadly, barely. To run it smoothly, all graphical settings needed to be cranked down to the lowest as well as the resolution.

What about 3DMark Time Spy? Well, it probably just a waste of time but just for the fun of it, here is the result..

Conclusion

Pros:

• Lots of upgrade-ability
• Great design
• IPS display
• Great selection of input ports
• Great keyboard and touch pad

Cons:

• Hidden "tax" for not opting SSD included model
• Terrible bleeding on IPS panel
• Not great with graphics intensive workload

So in the end, is it worth the price? Specification wise, probably not. You could easily get a better specs with the Inspiron 5480 for a better GPU (MX150) which could run games better than you would expected from a MX series GPU. But you will lose the TPM crypto chip which is not much of a big deal to most of the people. If you don't mind opening up to other brands like the Illegear, which could give you much better gaming specs for the price.

So which market is suitable for this Vostro 5481? I would say it is quite suitable for the small business startup company, where you might not have the budget for the XPS or latitude lineup but still want to have the business peace of mind as the Vostro lineup does comes with Dell ProSupport.