Ben Madilynn
Dell’s Inspiron 16 Plus we liked a year ago has seen a minor refresh, moving from Intel’s 13th Gen Core chips to first-generation Core Ultra processors. The Inspiron 16 Plus model 7640 (starts at $949.99; $1,499.99 as tested) is available with or without discrete graphics, but the latter is limited in potency. While the laptop promotes utility as a clear focus, it’s overshadowed by flashier systems that aren’t much more expensive, like Lenovo’s Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 9, and even cheaper systems like the Acer Swift Go 16 handily keep up. The 2024 Inspiron 16 Plus is also outstripped by midrange gaming laptops that, again, aren’t much pricier, making it a difficult recommendation unless you can find our test configuration for under $1,000.
Configurations and Design: Unassuming Inspiron
Dell’s Inspiron 16 Plus configurations start at $949.99 with integrated graphics, but component options also change the port variety, speakers, display, dimensions, and weight. Models with dedicated GPUs start $450 higher for a system with a Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4050, 16GB of DDR5-5600 memory, a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive, and a 16-inch IPS display with 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate.
Our test configuration, priced at $1,499.99 but on sale at this writing for $1,199.99, bumps the GPU to a GeForce RTX 4060. You can order an upgrade to 32GB of memory and 2TB of storage, though the options aren’t available separately. You’ll also find an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H model that’s only available with integrated graphics.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Inspiron 16 Plus is a genuine hunk of a laptop. Its expansive 16-inch aluminum chassis is relatively thick and heavy to support discrete graphics and fit two large exhaust vents at either side of the base. Though the aluminum is sturdy, its expanse still results in some deck flex around the keyboard and wiggling in the display hinge. The laptop measures a hair more than 14 inches across, just shy of 10 inches deep, and 0.78 inch thick. It also weighs a ponderous 4.87 pounds. The whole thing sits stably enough on two tiny rubber feet in front and one wide foot in the rear.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The keyboard is disappointingly small for a 16-inch laptop. The same layout on an Inspiron 14 qualifies as a fine keyboard with flat and square keys and simple white backlighting, but Dell doesn’t use the extra space here to offset the arrow keys, add a numeric keypad, or include any extras. Dell also misses the space at the sides of the keyboard since the four speakers are above it and on the laptop’s underside, adding to the list of design downers.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Similarly, the touchpad is a decent size but feels small when considering the available space. It’s big enough for me to use four fingers at once, but I’ve used 14-inch laptops with larger pads.
The laptop’s 16:10 aspect ratio IPS screen isn’t overly fancy but just decent. Its 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution provides sharp visuals, and the 120Hz refresh rate keeps everything looking extra smooth. The screen is rated to hit 300 nits of brightness, and it overachieved slightly, hitting 318 nits in our testing and, thanks to a matte finish, proving easy to see even under some direct light. While its utility is clear, I’d be happy to see a brighter or more colorful panel at this price.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The webcam records in 1080p instead of lowball 720p resolution, but it won’t mean much unless your lighting conditions are ideal. The camera struggles to balance out light and shadows even in favorable conditions, which can see lighting shift frequently. Its viewing angle is wide, which can at least help get multiple people in the shot. The laptop includes a sliding lens cover, though its black and white stripes look like glare; a red dot would have been a clearer indicator of a disabled camera.
The webcam doesn’t support Windows Hello facial recognition, but you can log in quickly thanks to a fingerprint reader on the keyboard. The mics paired with this setup captured my voice well enough but do little to cancel out background noise. You’ll want to optimize your setup with even, consistent lighting and little ambient noise to pull off presentations.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Despite its bulk, the Inspiron 16 Plus’ port selection is modest. You’ll find one Thunderbolt 4 port and an HDMI 2.1 monitor port on its left side. The right flank includes a microSD card slot, a 3.5mm audio combo jack, and two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports.
I’d be happy with that on a 14-inch laptop, but a big notebook like this could have done better. The space taken up by the cooling vents on either side of the laptop cuts into the room for ports, but many laptops (including some Dells) have solved this dilemma by moving the cooling to the back, so this is a letdown.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
It’s also bizarre that the Inspiron 16 Plus has a DC barrel port but ships with a USB-C charger. Considering that the laptop has only one USB-C port, connecting the AC adapter will keep you from using a USB-C peripheral without a dongle, which owners of a 16-inch productivity laptop should not have to put up with.
You won’t get bleeding-edge Wi-Fi 7, but the Inspiron supports Wi-Fi 6E with 2×2 multiplexing from an Intel Wi-Fi card, which ought to be plenty for years to come. Bluetooth 5.3 is also on board.
Using the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus: Acceptable But Unimpressive Utility
The laptop uses the same keyboard that you can find on several other Dell devices, which is a plus in the typing department. It’s reasonably snappy, and the keys are stabilized well. The keys’ surfaces are flat, which can make feeling them out tricky, but their square edges and decent spacing help. In Monkeytype, I average a typing speed of 110 words per minute with decent accuracy, and I once hit 119wpm with 99% accuracy. The keyboard itself is less of an issue next to the size of the laptop, which yields a large wrist rest to reach over. I find my watch scuffling with the front edge of the laptop while I type, and the leading edge snags my wrists, though it’s relatively gentle because of its smoothly curved front lip.
Dell’s touchpad is smooth and pleasant to swipe around on, though its click is firm and doesn’t feel as intuitive. At least tap-to-click is reliable on the laptop. Given the size of this Inspiron, it still feels as if Dell should have gone with a bigger touch surface, especially as the choice here also means reaching further away from the keyboard to use the touchpad.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The IPS display is ideal for productivity, too. While it could stand to be brighter, it’s sunny enough for most indoor conditions and doesn’t struggle with glare and reflections. It’s sharp and smooth, making work easy on the laptop. The sRGB coverage also makes it decent for watching content, avoiding the drab color seen on some cheaper laptop displays.
Dell’s speakers can pump up the volume but are not the most impressive in frequency response. They’re pronounced in the midrange, which lends well to voices and vocals, but the bass response is quite thin.
Dell includes software for managing the laptop in various ways, such as charging and performance profiles. It also includes background noise removal for the microphones that are not enabled by default. It’s pretty effective, though it doesn’t prevent my voice from sounding echoey. Beyond the MyDell app, Dell doesn’t preinstall much beyond what’s included with Windows 11.
Testing the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus: Just Can’t Catch a Break
The Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (7640) is no rare bird in the market, presenting fairly standard specifications for a laptop in the $1,000 to $2,000 range. The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 9 ($1,899 as tested) proved excellent in our testing while presenting upgrades in hardware and design, such as a sharper mini LED display and far more ports while weighing less. It’s pricier than the Inspiron as tested, but a similar configuration is available for less if you drop the mini LED panel. If discrete graphics aren’t necessary, the Acer Swift Go 16 (2024) ($899 as tested) is a much cheaper and lighter alternative with a higher-tier CPU.
Another threat to the Inspiron comes from some mid-tier gaming laptops, which have recently seen significant reductions in size and weight and strike a fair value as work machines when they’re not busy gaming. The Gigabyte Aorus 16X (2024) ($1,629.99 as tested) and Lenovo Legion Pro 5i 16 Gen 9 (starts at $1,449) both fit this bill, featuring high-performance processors and GeForce RTX 40-series graphics while priced close to the Dell laptop as tested. Gigabyte’s system even jumped up to an RTX 4070.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.
Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Inspiron 16 Plus proved potent in some areas but ultimately landed in the middle of the pack. Its performance in PCMark 10’s productivity test showed it’s up for everyday operations with little struggle, though its storage bandwidth was unimpressive. In our CPU-intensive benchmarks, the Dell predictably fell behind the Core Ultra 9-powered Yoga Pro and Swift Go.
The Legion Pro 5i carried the day for the gamers, dramatically outclassing the Inspiron in all productivity tests. If photo and video editing is your aim, its Nvidia GPU didn’t give the 16 Plus any advantage due to its limited power ceiling (more on that below), as the integrated-graphics Acer proved more than competitive.
Graphics Tests
We test the graphics inside all laptops and desktops with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
To further measure GPUs, we also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
In the graphics department, the Inspiron 16 Plus proved especially weak. While it handily beat the Swift Go’s integrated graphics, it uses a power-limited GeForce RTX 4060 which only has 60 watts (W) to tap; Lenovo’s Yoga Pro 9i allows the CPU and GPU to share 130W, while the Legion Pro 5i allows 140W for the GPU alone. This explains the considerable gulf between the Inspiron’s performance and that of the other RTX 4060 machines here.
Battery and Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
Generally, high performance comes with a significant trade-off to battery life, and that’s perhaps the Inspiron’s big saving grace. Because it runs with a limited power profile and a simpler display, the Dell laptop reported longer battery life than the competition. It ran for three hours longer than the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 9 and more than doubled the runtime of the Gigabyte Aorus 16X, trailing only the Acer with its lower-resolution screen and lower-power graphics.
Of course, the Yoga Pro flaunts a much sharper 3,200-by-2,000-pixel mini LED screen that’s also faster at a 165Hz refresh rate. It blew away the Dell’s worst-in-class screen brightness and produced the widest color gamut of the test group, with the Inspiron scoring a distant second. The gaming laptops’ displays aren’t bad, but their weaker color palettes hurt them slightly in comparison.
Verdict: Outpaced and Outstripped at This Price
To be fair, Dell didn’t set out to build the most exciting machine with the practical and affordable Inspiron 16 Plus. Regardless, the company neglects to fully exploit the 16-inch size in terms of ports and keyboard layout, and the laptop’s performance trails at nearly every turn short of battery life.
Performance-hungry users should consider mid-tier gaming laptops first, as they don’t suffer from the GPU power limit that holds this Inspiron back so noticeably. Among other alternatives, the Acer Swift Go 16 is much less expensive and nails the utilitarian role better, while the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 9 is pricier but presents major performance and display advantages. If your heart is set on the Inspiron brand, we’d suggest waiting for a larger discount on this one.
Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (7640)
The Bottom Line
Dell’s latest Inspiron 16 Plus (model 7640) is a fair all-around utility laptop but not a leading one, with underwhelming performance only partly offset by long battery life.
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About Mark Knapp
Contributing Writer
