Quote from: jayg30 on May 06, 2019, 17:29:19
I just received my first 5490 with an i7 8th gen, , 8GB RAM, and 256GB SSD, 1920x1080 screen, optional backlit keyboards, and fingerprint reader . Our company moved to these from the previous 14" 7000 series. Seems plenty fast but I am greatly disappointed. The screen is definitely WAY worse then even the 7450 and 7470 machines I have here. And just sitting here on my desk idling I've heard the fan rev up multiple times and it's very audible. In comparison the 7470 I'm typing on right now with a bunch of stuff open hasn't even made a peep. And the speed difference is negligible for office use. This was clearly a move by our department because the old models have been discontinued (they don't buy old hardware) and desire to save a buck on the lower model, but at least for the next few years if you have the option I'd much rather buy a 7470 on the 2nd hand market at a discount instead.
It's a sad reality of this range of the market. Midrange business laptops across the board for the past ~5 years had horrible screen options. Even the "upgrade" screens were usually junk (and were still better than the base 1366x768 TN panels).
At least in the last year or so, some of the options started picking up again. HP has much brighter screens as an option for their midrange corporate laptops, Lenovo finally offers something with more than 60% sRGB coverage for their 1080p displays in their T series, etc. Dell... hasn't got the memo. Their current gen 5000 series (5400 and 5500, just released) actually kept the same, bad display options, and regressed in terms of GPU (the Radeon RX540, notoriously inefficient and hot running in the few laptops it's in, to the point of being useless - notably, the workstation version of the 5500, the Precision 3541, uses a Nvidia Quadro P620 instead).