Dell G16 7630 review: A gaming laptop with powerful desktop vibes

Best Prices Today: Dell G16 7630

$1900

The Dell G16 7630 is big and has plenty of muscle to run your favorite games. Its display is exceptional, and it runs media with very smooth motion.

It’s also priced to be affordable. But the gaming laptop’s sheer size means it’s not that portable. If you’re looking for a desktop experience but don’t want to shell out on an 18-inch laptop, then this ripper fits the bill exactly.

Further reading: See our roundup of the best gaming laptops to learn about competing products.

Dell G16 7630: Specifications

There was only one unit that I could find available at the time of writing this review, and it shares my review unit’s specifications. They are as follows:

• CPU: Intel Core i9-13900HX
• RAM: 32GB / 4800MHz
• Graphics: RTX 4070 GPU
• Display: 16-inch 2560×1600 QHD+ LCD, 240Hz refresh rate, 100% DCI-P3 color gamut, 3ms response time, ComfortView Plus low blue light, Nvidia G-Sync
• Storage: 1TB PCIe NVMe Gen 4 SSD
• Webcam: HD 720p camera with single arrange digital mic
• Connectivity: Thunderbolt 4 port, 3x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, HDMI 2.1 port, RJ45 Ethernet port, 3.5mm audio jack
• Networking: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2
• Battery capacity: 84WHrs
• Dimensions: 14.05 x 11.37 x 1.01 inches
• Weight: 6.59 pounds (2.99kg)
• Cost: $1,737 on Amazon

Dell G16 7630: Design and build

The Dell G16 7630 is unashamedly a laptop for gamers that like a large space to play on. Its generous dimensions measure 14.05 x 11.37 x 1.01 inches, so it has a desktop replacement feel to it.

The chassis features an aluminum cover that makes it sturdier than if it were just made of plastic, but I did notice a bit of give there compared to laptops with solid CNC-milled aluminum chassis. The lid is similar, in that it will flex with firm pressure, but not with moderate pressure.

The display is a sight to behold. It may be only 16 inches on the diagonal, but its16:10 aspect ratio means you benefit from extra vertical space than in the laptop’s forbears. It gives the illusion you’re using an even larger laptop. That’s helped along by very thin left and right bezels that make every inch of screen space a prize to savor.

The top and bottom bezels are a lot thicker than the sides, especially the bottom bezel which sits atop a tall hinge. That’s a fact I was very happy for, since it meant I could look almost straight on at the screen without having to crane my neck downwards.

As to styling, the Dell G16 7630 eschews gamer-centric touches like RGB logos, or flashy Tron lights like the kind you’ll find in Alienware laptops, in favor of a simple Dell logo on the lid instead. I wasn’t unhappy about that since it meant the G16 7630 was one of those rare gaming laptops I could use in the office without anyone blinking an eye.

At least that was the case when the laptop was fully charged. When it was time to charge it, the huge 330W power brick was kind of a giveaway — it’s probably the chunkiest and biggest charging brick I’ve seen.

My review unit was a smart Nightshade Black color, which has a kind of charcoal hue. It also blended in nicely with my office environment.

Dell G16 7630: Keyboard and trackpad

The keyboard’s single-zone RGB backlighting was a brilliant blue color on startup, which was quite mesmerizing to see. The keyboard is full-sized and has a useful key layout for gamers, including full-sized arrow keys and a collection of media shortcuts down the right-hand side.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

The laptop also sports a Game Shift Key that lets you change and maximize the laptop’s fan speeds for heavy tasks. The ADSF keys are outlined by a white border, which gives the keyboard the battle station look many gamers like.

Unsurprisingly for a laptop this size, the keys feel a bit mushy, but they fire off rapidly and with a satisfying low audible click. They are also nicely sized for my medium sized fingers — spacious but not trampoline-sized.

One hitch is the trackpad’s smallness. It plays second fiddle to the G16 7630’s keyboard and could do with an extra half inch in each direction. Its clicks are nevertheless fast, and the trackpad tracks well, so it’s not a total loss.

Dell G16 7630: Connectivity and audio

A useful assortment of ports line the G16 7630’s flanks, allowing me to plug in my normal array of peripherals. There’s a Thunderbolt 4 port for transferring my essential game files at a quick speed of up to 40Gbps and an ethernet port for when I want the lowest latency in games.

The laptop’s Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth functionality are also snappy — although, Wi-Fi 6 is rapidly becoming an older standard now, with laptops like the 2024 Razer Blade 16 now sporting the updated Wi-Fi 7 standard.

The Dell G16 7630 is a large laptop and it projects sound really well in a large room. The laptop’s two speakers are well tuned for mid-tones, so you get a nice neutral sound in games. I only noticed slight vibrations at higher volumes. Dolby Atmos support gives the audio an appealing immersive quality.

Dell G16 7630: Display and webcam

I made a promise to myself when the 2024 Razer Blade 16 came out that I wouldn’t play games in 2650x1600p with anything less than a 240Hz refresh rate. Thankfully my Dell G16 7630 came with the same refresh rate and resolution combination, which made for really fast and smooth game action.

Indeed, playing games like Battlefield I and Cyberpunk 2077 was a real pleasure — my frame rates were high enough to stay competitive with the best players. The screen resolution was also very detailed, but I’ve seen richer colors on OLED displays. Still, the Dell G16 7630’s 100 percent DCI-P3 color display produces a good enough picture to look bright and texture-rich.

The laptop’s brightness was also never an issue. I measured a peak brightness of 497 nits, which I used to my advantage to keep the display visible in very bright rooms of my house.

The 720p webcam impressed me less than the display. It’s adequate for chats and meetings, but some images came out looking a little orange at times.

A single microphone array also didn’t do my voice much justice in game chats. The sound lost some detail at different moments, which made me sound a little robotic.

Dell G16 7630: Gaming performance

The Dell G16 7630 features a fast high-end Intel i9-13900HX processor made for gaming. It belongs to the Raptor Lake family, and sports 24 cores and 32 threads and a maximum turbo frequency of 5.4GHz.

Compared to the older Alder Lake CPUs, this ripper has a more efficient P-Core microarchitecture and larger caches. It also supports faster DDR5 RAM (up to 5,600MHz), so it’s really designed to shred in games.

To test its performance, I first ran the Cinebench Multi-Threaded benchmark. This test flexes all the CPU cores to give an indication of how well the processor fares when it’s really pushed to the maximum.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

My review laptop clocked a score of 10,658 in this test, which was quite decent; to be honest, though, there are now a bunch of laptops with 14th-generation Intel CPUs that will muscle out a score like this. But for an Intel 13th-generation CPU, the i9-13900HX is well up to the task of running your most demanding games.

With plenty of thermal headroom in the hefty chassis, the laptop’s CPU also performed admirably in a bespoke test that uses the free HandBrake utility. The CPU managed to keep rising thermals at bay when tasked with encoding a 30GB MKV file to the MP4 format. It took just 828 seconds to finish.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Anything under 850 seconds is quick and snappy. It bodes very well for carrying out tasks that really tax the G16 7630 CPU, like video editing or encoding. You can be sure the G16 7630 won’t just chug along, it’ll keep processing effectively even if it gets hot.

Moving on to the graphics performance tests, the 3DMark Time Spy 1.2 Overall test showed that Nvidia’s mid-range 4070 mobile CPU has a lot of muscle, placing third among its peers in our performance charts.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

In the Rise of the Tomb Raider gaming test, the Dell G16 7630 performed very respectably, placing just behind the Razer Blade 16 2024.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

The performance in the Shadow of the Tomb Raider gaming benchmark was even better. Here, the Dell G16 7630 toppled the field, opening up a can of whoop-ass on laptops like the Razer Blade 16 and the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

These scores suggest that the Dell 16 7630 can be expected to perform capably and produce smooth action to keep you competitive in games.

The benchmarks reinforce what we already know about the RTX 4070 GPU, too — it’s a great video card that provides performance like Nvidia’s top-tier RTX 3080 GPUs.

What’s more, if that last score is any indication, this laptop offers a few performance surprises against laptops with RTX 40 series GPUs too.

Dell G16 7630: Battery performance

To test the laptop’s battery life, I started by charging the review unit up to 100 percent. The volume was set to 50 percent and a cheap pair of headphones was plugged in to control sound.

I also switched off the keyboard backlighting and the laptop’s Wi-Fi was switched to airplane mode. Finally, a 4K movie was set to run on repeat and the power cord was unplugged.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Dominic Bayley / IDG

The G16 7630’s 84WHr battery ran for 5 hours and 35 mins. That’s the length of time you can expect a lightweight task like running a video to last on this laptop. For gaming, which uses more power, you can expect about half that time — so about 3 hours of battery life.

That’s not great, but the laptop charges quickly when you plug it in. The only problem is the charging brick is so big you won’t want to take it with you when you leave your house.

Should you buy the Dell G16 7630?

The Dell G16 7630 is a seriously big laptop that really fills a niche market. For me that feels like gamers looking for a desktop replacement but who don’t want to shell out on a more expensive 18-inch gaming laptop.

There’s a solid argument why you’d want that, too. The configuration I reviewed costs just $1,899, which is a lot cheaper than say, the Razer Blade 18, which has a starting price of $2,599. That makes it a particularly good buy if you can get by without a lot of portability.