Dell XPS 15 Review

Dell is continuously upgrading its XPS line-up and the latest one boasts a fresh new design and a little more screen. The revamped InfinityEdge display has a very thin bezel offering an immersive experience. The next-gen XPS has got multiple smart tweaks to the keyboard, touchpad and chassis that make this workhorse more comfortable to use.

Built and design

The new laptop has a slim chassis with a smooth silver aluminium lid and sharp 0.71-inch edges. It has big keys, a much larger touchpad and slim front-firing speakers. The display has the major change, the new 4-sided Infinity Edge display, which doesn’t have a thick bottom bezel. The webcam is embedded on the top bezel, yet Dell kept is incredibly thin.

The XPS 15 packs a total of three USB-C ports for charging and other connections. Dell included USB-C to USB-A v3.0 & HDMI v2.0 adapter to connect external displays and peripherals. Rest two USB-C are Thunderbolt 3 for extra-fast connectivity, plus a full-sized SD card reader as well as a headphone jack.

Display

The Dell XPS 15 has a truly 4-sided InfinityEdge 15.6-inch with 92.9% screen-to-body ratio touchscreen that enables you to work, play and enjoy whatever you love to without any distraction. The touchscreen has a UHD+ (3840 x 2400p) 500-Nit display, made of Corning Gorilla Glass 6, produces quite vivid colours. I enjoyed the screen a lot while watching movies, playing games and other rich contents.

With so much screen space, I was able to work comfortably for hours at a time. Toggling between apps, documents, videos, etc. was a breeze. It produces deep blacks making reading and editing amazingly comfortable. It is bright enough for work and play, even in outdoor conditions.

The touch screen is fluid and responsive, I had no issues while playing with the screen, scrolling through web pages or pinching to zoom into pictures and documents.

Speakers

XPS 15 got top firing stereo speakers which are one of the best equipped on any laptop. It is loud enough to fill your room. Whether you play music, video or game, the speaker was awesome with both low and high volumes. The base is also a highlight of the XPS 15, I played different genre music and it sounded bright and crisp.

Performance

Dell XPS 15 is equipped with a 10th Gen Intel Core i7 processor with 32 GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti 4GB GDDR6 graphics and a 1 TB SSD. The power-packed machine let me work on various apps simultaneously. As we all are working from home, we are dealing with day-to-day productivity apps like Ms-Office, Adobe Photoshop, Chrome, etc. We are also involved with video calling apps like Zoom and Google Meet, etc. the laptop handled them breezily.

While browsing the internet and working on daily productivity apps, I didn’t notice any performance lag. It was super smooth to switch between the apps and work on the PC even for longer hours while using the PC for more than a month.

Packed with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti 4GB GDDR6 graphics, XPS 15 can deal with heavy applications such as Adobe Suite. We used Adobe Premiere to edit videos and it was snappy in handling the editing tasks and rendering the video. To test its capability, we opened two chrome browser with 10 tabs in each with applications like MS Word, Excel and Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. While operating the machine with all these applications running in the background, we didn’t notice any performance lag. We were able to switch between applications.

Also, I run some games that consume a whole lot of power, games like Shadow of Mordor and Thief. Though it’s not a gaming machine, yet these games can help us to understand real-world performance. The GPU handled both games brilliantly; there was no visible performance lag.

The laptop has a soft-touch coating, 9.7% larger keycaps and snappy 1.3mm travel which offer absolute delight to type on. The large touchpad is snappy, I was able to scroll through web pages and pinch to zoom with ease. As I mentioned earlier, video calls are so frequent nowadays, so I joined multiple calls on it. The speakers were loud and clear. Mic did a fabulous job and the webcam on the incredibly slim top bezel was good enough for everyday calls.

Battery life

Dell XPS 15 comes with a giant 6-Cell Battery, 86WHr battery that gives you juice to run for more than 8 hours with daily productivity. With some heavy usage, you can get over 5 to 6 hours of battery life. While using the Imtec Battery Mark it resulted in 2 hours 37 min, which I can expect when using 100 per cent CPU.