Why does my Inspiron 15 7000 perform so dismally?

[WIPGamer]

I've got a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 gaming, I think it's this model-https/www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/dell-inspiron-15-7000

It seems to run really poorly compared to all the good reviews it gets, when i'm playing fortnite on just medium settings (except for view distance, that is on epic) it has these really annoying frame drops and these usually last for like 20 seconds and happen frequently when playing.

Anyone got any possible reasoning as to why my laptop is running so poorly?

 

[Peter Martin]

Resource Monitor while gaming and see whats going on for CPU, Network, Memory etc

 

[WIPGamer]

Ok I opened resource monitor and here is what I've got, I don't actually know how exactly to interpret this so i'll just tell you what i see, cpu seems to be nearing 100% most of the time, and the disk section had peaks all the up on the graph (labeled 10MB/sec) As for memory it just had a single high peak and then the rest seems to be fairly low...

 

[WIPGamer]

Side note- When I try to use other applications when using fortnite, the rest of my pc lags as well... this is especially obvious when i alt-tab out of the game. The whole laptop seems sluggish and really bad.

 

[sizzling]

Can you monitor cpu usage and each core while gaming and when these FPS drops happen do any cpu cores hit 100% usage?

 

[Peter Martin]

What is maxing it out? What app?

 

[WIPGamer]

I'm quite new when it comes to monitoring pcs, but it seems to be maxing out CPU usage and also disk/memory seem to have very high spikes at times.


I dont have access to my laptop at the moment, so when I do I'll post about the rest of the questions you asked.
Sorry if I'm not giving you clear answers, I'm not very good when it comes to this stuff...

 

[WIPGamer]

also should I be gaming full screen then I alt-tab to see resource monitor or should I be gaming windowed and having resource monitor open next to it?

 

[sizzling]

Best to use a program like MSIAfterburn. It will monitor and record everything which gaming. My suspicion is you are reaching the limit of a laptop cpu, they are just not as strong as desktop cpu’s And some modern games are very heavy on the cpu.

 

[WIPGamer]

Now that you mention MsiAfterburner, I had overclocked my gpu before just to mess around with settings, and now that i put it back to normal the game seems to be fuctioning better... It's still not perfectly fine when i start putting everything at high/epic it still has some of those previously mentioned lag spikes.
Also it does seem cpu usage is almost always near the 90s range jumping up to 100 quite a bit

 

[sizzling]

Ok don’t overclock a laptop, they are not designed to take the extra heat and power. Put everything back to stock settings. You didn’t say what game but your laptop isn’t going to run modern AAA games on high/epic settings, even a desktop with a 1060 6Gb will struggle with that at 1080p.

Once you have done this try your games again and monitor cpu & gpu temperatures. Ideally you don’t want them over 85c and that’s on the high side but gaming on a laptop always runs high temperatures.

 

[WIPGamer]

Yeah I put it back to normal, no over-clocks. Also, the game is fortnite and I've seen videos (albeit old ones) Where a 1050ti can get like 40-50 frames on almost max settings... so for my laptop to have these weird drops to like 15 fps only some of the time is annoying and doesn't seem like it should be happening...

Side-note, when having fortnite in full-screen it locks at 60 frames and won't go any higher, I've tried a method where you go into the files and make it so one of the files had full-screen optimization off, but that causes me to sometimes get locked in full-screen when I alt-tab and it takes like 2 seconds to actually minimize the game. Even with those issues aside, having the in-game settings set on 120 frames i actually do get up to 80-90 frames but even though the frame lock is gone, it does not consistently stay above 60 frames anymore and drops to 30 at times.

 

[Peter Martin]

you should post pics of Resource Monitor for CPU, Network, Memory and Disk so we can look at it since you can't explain it. Pictures' worth 1000 words