Dell’s G16 is its first crack at making a 16-inch, 16:10 gaming laptop

Dell heard our call in 2021 for more laptops with tall displays and finally answered it a year later. It’s launching the Dell G16 (model 7620) on July 21st, starting at $1,399.99 and going up, and the display seems to be most of the story here. Instead of a 15.6-inch 16:9 aspect ratio display that Dell has traditionally used in its prior models, this is its first crack at a 16-inch model with a taller 16:10 aspect ratio screen. Most everything else is a known quantity from April’s G15 launch, but I’ll go over it again a bit later.

Like displays that we’ve seen before in gaming machines from Lenovo, Acer, and more, this is a QHD Plus display sporting a 2,560 x 1,600 resolution, along with a 165Hz refresh rate. Are 160 extra vertical pixels really worth all of the hubbub? Yes. Indeed, it’s a very small change, but I can’t imagine that anyone would turn away extra screen real estate. Depending on your use cases, that could mean seeing more tweets at a glance during your free time and seeing more of a critical spreadsheet without scrolling during work. Plus, the bottom bezel is significantly smaller than on the G15, as seen here. Settling for 16:9 aspect ratio becomes very difficult to go back to once you get a taste for 16:10.

While the Dell G16 model can be configured with up to Nvidia’s RTX 3070 Ti (140W maximum graphics power), the base model ships with an RTX 3050 Ti and a smaller 56Whr battery. Each model includes Intel’s Core i7-12700H processor, along with the same 16-inch non-touchscreen display. There are choices in terms of RAM and storage, though, with configurations starting at 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage (it supports up to 32GB and 2TB, respectively). One other thing to note is that the base model with the RTX 3050 Ti lacks Thunderbolt 4, whereas the higher-end options have one. Dell has not shared pricing for the individual configurations.

Image: Dell

I’m surprised that Dell didn’t take this opportunity to also broaden the size of the G16’s trackpad. Compared to how spacious the display and its keyboard are, the trackpad looks almost comically small.

Hopefully, this change to vertically lengthen its screens bodes well for sweeping alterations to the Alienware lineup of gaming laptops later in 2022. It’s true that not every game ships with support for 16:10 aspect ratio (at worst, you’ll see some black bars at the top and bottom of ones that don’t), but support is good enough that most gamers should see a benefit to their gaming experience.