Dell XPS 15 (2017) review: One of the best 15.6 laptops is now better - ramirezcappitst68

Dingle's XPS 15 is proof that iterations—No matter how bantam—even so matter. Outwardly, flat owners of the previous XPS 15 would be hard-pressed to tell the deviation between revolutionary and noncurrent.

The ports are the same, the keyboard and the trackpad are the synoptical and, good, just about outward thing with the XPS 15 looks identical. Yet the internal changes make this year's XPS 15 a markedly better laptop than endure year's.

dell xps15 5 — The keyboard on the XPS 15 appears unrevised, which isn't a good thing because it's still slightly too small.

It's what's wrong that counts

The main deviation with the latest generation XPS 15 is, of course, interior. While the preceding version sported a 6th-generation quadrangle-core Intel Skylake CPU paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M, the latest iteration notches adequate a quad-core 7th-gen Kaby Lake chip, and graphics upgrades itself to a GeForce GTX 1050.

Besides the CORE i7-7700HQ CPU and GTX 1050, Dell has also given the XPS 15 an optional Windows Hullo-compliant finger photographic print reader. It's not the atrocious swipe-style reader of yesterday that always took four attempts to employment. It's a Bodoni font, full-fingerprint pad reader similar to what you'd find connected phones and tablets.

del xps15 6 — There's no Windows Hello camera, just a fingerprint proofreader (seen just below the right cursor key) lets you use Windows 10 Hello.

Our mental testing unit comes equipped with a 15.6-edge in 4K UHD test. With its close edge-to-border "InfinityEdge" display, and smooth Gorilla Glass NBT protective layer, the IGZO impanel is truly stunning to behold. The about bezel-little design does, unfortunately, banish the integrated webcam to the butt of the panel, as well as prevent the XPS 15 from desegregation a near infrared (IR) camera for Windows Hello support. Consider the fingerprint reader your consolation prize.

Besides conspicuous in our test unit are 16GB of DDR4/2400 in dual-channel mode and a 512GB Lite-On CX2 NVMe M.2 SSD. The drive uses MLC flash rated at 2.5GBps reads and 1.2GBps writes. Happening CrystalDiskMark 5.2 we saw most 2.1GBps reads and 1GBps writes.

The other change from the prior generation is an gain in battery capacity, to about 97WHr from the previous model's largest battery of 84WHr. That's just shy of the largest lithium ion cell you can carry connected a plane legally.

dell xps15 8 — The port survival is unchanged from prior to current multiplication. This view of the right side shows an SD card reader, USB Group A, and Kensington lock port.

Ports

Dingle doesn't pull an Apple and skimp on ports. The parvenu XPS 15 offers the same basic ports as the 2016 model, including a full-size HDMI 1.4, two USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gbps) Type A ports, an analogue combo jack for headphones, and a Thunderbolt 3 interface. That Thunderbolt 3 ports supports DisplayPort finished USB-C Eastern Samoa well as charging using USB-King Delivery. On this last signal, we applaud Dell's decision to abide some a longstanding barrel charger and USB-C for charging.

Yes, we know, using USB-C for charging is the future (and IT's already hither for a lot smaller premium laptops) but at that place's something to follow same for having a dedicated port for a charger. Connected other "pro" laptops with two ports, if unitary is used for charging and united for your monitor, you'll be plugging and unplugging all the clock unless you happen to buy a new monitor that's natively USB-C. That's just not the world we live in.

For kicks, we ran the XPS 15 on the 87-watt charger Apple ships with its MacBook Affirmative 15 and had no issues. During a GPU load (which uses the near power on the XPS 15), the Malus pumila power brick supplied up to 60 Isaac Watts of its 87 watt-rated output.

The genuine power brick Dingle ships is 130 Watts, which should let the XPS 15 charge even under heavy wads where the GPU, Processor, SSD, and monitor lizard are all running hard.

dell xps15 9 — The left side of the Kaby Lake-settled Dell XPS 15 (top) features a traditional charge port, a USB-A port, full-size HDMI 1.4, Bombshell 3, a USB-C port, and an linear headphone port. That's same from the previous rendering (bottom.)

Half the lanes

Uncomparable negative: Dell opted to implement Thunderbolt 3 using a deuce-lane configuration, which cuts the fancy port from a supposed 40Gbps over four PCIe-lanes to 20Gbps. Because DisplayPort is carried separately from information, the excogitation determination won't impact most masses today. In three years, though, if you're running an external SSD Foray into PCIe inclosure, Dell's choice English hawthorn haunt you.

Functioning

Big, wicked laptops aren't used to look "cool" pretending to write the Bang-up Terra firma Scientific discipline Fabrication novel at the corner cafe. They're wont to catch work done, sol performance matters. For our tests, we compared the XPS 15 to a stack of quad-core gaming laptops, last year's XPS 15, and HP's Spook x360 15, which has an totally different take on how to build a 15.6-inch laptop computer.

The first test is Maxon's Cinebench R15. It's a free benchmark that measures a laptop's power to render 3D modeling. It's about a pure CPU benchmark.

The new XPS 15's performance basically ties with that of Gigabyte's slightly larger Aero 15 gambling laptop, and it's roughly vii percent faster than last twelvemonth's XPS 15. It too shows you impartial how much Sir Thomas More performance you bum get for multi-threaded applications compared to the quad-core Core i5 in the Inspiron 15 7000. Even mentation that Core i5 is a Kaby Lake chip, the lack of Hyper-Threading really hurts it. The slowest of the pack is HP's Spectre x360 15T, but it's just a dual-core.

dell xps 15 kaby lake cinebench r15 mt — The 7th-coevals Core i7-7700HQ offers some a 10-percent improvement in carrying into action over the 6th-gen silicon chip and nearly a 15-pct bump over the 4th-generation Haswell quad-Congress of Racial Equality.

3DMark Sky Frogman Public presentation

Gaming matters for the XPS 15, also. Imputable its size and specs, IT often gets lumped into the same category A gaming laptops. Running Futuremark's 3DMark Toss Frogman, however, the XPS 15 delivers decent carrying out, but its GTX 1050 holds it back compared to the larger, heavier gaming laptops. So much for category ties: The affordable (and practically, much thicker) Dell Inspiron 15 7000 elbows aside the XPS 15 as substantially.

dell xps 15 kaby lake 3dmark sky diver — In 3DMark Sky Plunger, the XPS 15 amost matches the thicker Inspiron 15 in overall performance because this particular test also factors in the Processor performance.

The good news program for the XPS 15 is that it's not that off the beaten track away from an older MSI GS60 laptop in graphics performance. By analytic the GTX 1050 graphics chip in 3DMark Sky Diver, we can see IT edging up to the performance of a GeForce GTX 970M, which is still a same decent play GPU.

dell xps 15 kaby lake 3dmark sky diver graphics — The GTX 1050 offers a marked kick downstairs over the GTX 960M chip in pure graphics loadand gets pretty close to GeForce GTX 970M performance.

Handbrake Carrying into action

Oncoming back to the CPU, we also ran our standard encoding test using Handbrake 0.9.9 to convert a 30GB 1080p MKV file victimization the Humanoid Tablet Preset. The Kaby Lake quad-core chip again comes out on top with the Gigabyte Aero 15. Both Kaby Lake quad-cores also offer a decent bump over the late Skylake quad-cores.

Our encoding test can take 45 minutes on a quad-core and usually reveals natural spring throttling or noise issues on laptops trying to counterbalance speed, heat, and fan noise. Our results demo there's no choking problem with the XPS 15, but we will say information technology gets pretty loud during dense testing.

dell xps 15 kaby lake handbrake — Although its GPU can't remain firm with the gaming laptops, the quad-core CPU is among the fastest therein classify of laptop.

Battery Carrying into action

Our last test is maybe the most important of all: battery life. After all, how long you can use your laptop computer betwixt charges defines dead on target portability. For our mental test, we set the display brightness at an office-typical 250 nits and melt down the battery past looping a 4K video, with a pair of earbuds obstructed in and the laptop set to airplane mode.

The XPS 15 gave us 331 minutes of run fourth dimension. On its side, that may not appear bad considering the computer hardware IT packs, but closing year's XPS 15 organized with the smaller 65-watt-hour battery pulled in 312 minutes. Remember that this year's model features a huge 97-watt-hour battery, yet we're visual perception barely 20 proceedings' more run time.

Many factors determine bombardment life in a laptop, but we're fingering the power-hungry 4K test—even though information technology's an IGZO panel which should, in theory, practice little power. The SSD was besides reasoned, only Lite-On's spectacles show IT uses just 1.3 watts when active, not enough to suck the battery down that fast.

dell xps15 7 — The XPS 15 is the natural competitor to Apple's MacBook Pro 15, but information technology hind end't sense of touch Apple's flagship in television run-down tests.

For compare, the Gigabyte Aero 15, with a smaller 94-watt-hour battery, quad-core Kaby Lake, and GTX 1060, yanked down 408 minutes. The Gigabyte's main difference (besides weight and sized) is its screen: sporty 1920×1080 in resolution, not-touch. The upshot is if you want longer consort time, you may want to configure your XPS 15 with a 1080p shield.

To constitute fair to the XPS 15, we should point out that if you opine you're going to encode a TV or do any opposite Mainframe- Oregon GPU-intensive tasks on any quad-core laptop, wear't expect to do that on assault and battery for more more than an hour or indeed. Even the 2016 MacBook Pro 15, which can fun the same video for 9 hours, will go semi-dry quickly under heavy CPU OR GPU loads.

dell xps 15 kaby lake battery run down — Battery life on the 4K version of the XPS 15 is OK but considering how large its battery is, a little disappointing.

Conclusion

The PC industry often gets flak for holding people happening the "engineering science treadmill" and "updating for updates' sake." But unless you're the kind of person who wants to buy in a brand-new laptop computer in 2017 packed full of computer hardware from 2015, we think the updates are worthy changes.

Is it fast plenty that you'll drain and replace the XPS 15 you have? No, but we don't opine Dingle expected you to do that anyway. This XPS 15 is aimed at someone who wants a fairly compact power station without back-breaking weight and size. Our only real gouge is the average battery life from our try out unit (your mileage May vary depending on configuration and use). For today, though, the XPS 15 is still clearly one of the transcend dogs of the 15.6-in laptop pack.