- Dell's updated the XPS 15 with a 9560.
Today, I'll tell you what's new and whether it's any good.
Stay tuned.
(upbeat music)
So if you've been following me for a few years now,
the XPS 15 is one of my favorite 15 inch laptops.
I've actually personally owned every every version,
even before they had that InfinityEdge display.
So I'm very excited with the 9560.
Let me tell you what's new
because I think it's pretty significant.
First, they upgraded the CPU.
So now it's Kaby Lake.
That's a Core i7, Core i5, or a dual-core Core i3
for the low-cost entry model version.
That's pretty good.
Now Kaby Lake is not a huge upgrade
but does give better thermals,
a little bit better performance,
a slightly better battery life,
so hey, I'll take it.
The RAM has also been improved.
So you still get the 18, 16, and 32 gig configurations
but now it can go up to 2400 megahertz
which is actually pretty fast RAM for laptop.
So it's always nice to have.
The other big feature here of course is the GPU.
So they went from a 960M to a 1050.
That's actually a pretty good upgrade
and you'll see later on in my benchmarks
just how much of a performance increase it really is.
They also upgraded the Wifi card
so now it's a Killer Wireless-AC 1535.
But I'll talk about how that may actually be a mistake.
And for an extra 25 bucks Dell's letting you add
a fingerprint scanner for Windows Hello logins.
All these small changes are very important
because what makes the XPS 15 such an outstanding laptop
is the sum of all it's components.
Before I get to that stuff though
let's give a quick tour of the device
and I'll show you about its design.
So you still here have of course the barrel plug
along with a USB 3.0 type A port,
HDMI 1.2 you also have a USB type C Thunderbolt port
which is a really nice port but they do still
limit the PCI to two lanes and not four
and that's important to some people.
You also get your headphone jack.
Coming to the other side you get a full SD card slot.
Now the SD card will stick out
so unlike the HP Spectre x360 15 inch
you could actually stick that card all the way in.
You also have another USB type A port for classic.
You also have your Dell battery meter here
which you can press and basically get a reading
of how much battery you have.
And a Kensington lock.
Coming around to the front here you have a small LED.
It turns white when you're charging the XPS 15
which I think is a really great addition.
It also turns amber when the battery is low.
There are also two microphones here in the front as well.
Alright let's check out the bottom.
Again no changes here.
You have two speaker, now they're on the edge
of the device so they're not upward firing
but they're not quite downward firing,
a little bit in between.
Not the most perfect design but they work well enough.
You also have the little boots here
to keep it off of a hard surface.
You have the XPS label and underneath there
you have the hidden FCC stuff which is always a mess
but good thing you could hide it there
with that neat little design Dell does here.
You also have the full venting here along with two fans.
You have to be careful to make sure this gets
enough clearance to basically take in air to cool the laptop
but as you'll see later this laptop doesn't get too hot
under normal load, so that's a good change.
And nothing has changed between
this year's model and last year's.
You're still getting machined aluminum on the outside
which is really nice.
Very clean, it only comes in silver though.
They are not doing what they did with the XPS 13
and offering it in that copper gold version.
I really like to kind of see that option available
as I think this is getting a little tiring
but you know it's still a good design.
Coming to the inside you still get the carbon fiber
look here with soft touch paint.
It's very warm and inviting
and just feels really really nice.
The only downside is, it will pick up oil over time
so you'll occasionally need to wipe it down.
Now let's talk a little bit about specifications.
Dell allows you to configure this in many different ways.
As I mentioned earlier you could get a
Core i3, Core i5, or Core i7 processor.
You also vary the RAM, the hard drive, the battery size.
There's all sorts of choices here.
So the version I am testing here
is a full HD display along with a Core i7 processor,
16 gigs of RAM, and 512 gigabytes of storage.
And that's with the new 97 watt hour of battery
which is huge, that's a big increase over
the 84 watt hour of last year.
I actually do have the 4K panel on the older version
of this laptop and it's fantastic.
It's one the best displays you're going to get.
But not everyone needs 4K including myself.
I love full HD and matte because it's
just easier on my eyes.
So here's a closer look at the full HD version.
You could still see it has the InfinityEdge display
of coarse which leaves no room for the web camera
which is still here on the bottom.
That is going to be a problem for some people,
if you don't ever use the web cam it's not a big deal.
The full HD version is very good.
You talk about brightness around 380 nits
but also gets dim enough to use say at night time
when you're laying in bed, which is a big deal.
Of course it is anti-reflective which I find
just super important.
You could see here we have a lot of bright lights on
and there's just nothing coming off this display.
And that's really good if you're going to be staring
at this for hours on end and writing.
Color calibration's also pretty good.
I did find the whites to be a little bit warmer
than I preferred so I made them cooler, more neutral.
The choice is up to you.
I should mention that the 4K version does come with
Dell Premier Color which is a really neat app
that allows you to change the color gamut
from everything from vivid to SRGB.
It's a really nice addition.
Let's talk about the keyboard here.
Nothing has changed from last year's model.
You either love the XPS 15's keyboard or you don't.
It's still a little bit mushy.
I don't hate it, I don't love it.
It's really just a keyboard and it works.
Now I had no issues typing on it,
I just don't feel very strongly about it.
If you remember my HP Spectre x360 videos
I really touted that keyboard,
it's just a phenomenal experience.
I can't say that's the same case here.
It's not a bad keyboard at all.
In fact I use this as one of my main devices.
It's just not exceptional.
I would still like to see Dell maybe switch to
a metal keyboard in the future.
But overall, hey it's a keyboard, it works.
Let's go down a little bit now and talk about
the fingerprint scanner.
If you have a hard time seeing it,
it's because it is really blended into the body.
Now I'm going to give a little criticism here to Dell.
I think first of all, great that they're offering a
fingerprint scanner.
I would've really dinged this laptop had they not.
And I think they knew that and that's why I think they
added this at the last minute.
And the reason I say that is that it looks like they
literally just carved a hole out here,
it's like a Synaptics fingerprint scanner in there
and called it a day.
Now don't get me wrong, it works very well.
It's one of the fastest fingerprint scanners I've used.
I wish they would've put maybe a little LED light here
so when Windows Hello kicks in, that lights up.
If you try to use this in the dark
you're really going to have a hard time kinda feeling it.
So it works, it works very well.
I think they could do better though.
It just feels like this is a little bit below
what the XPS standards are.
One of the most controversial areas on any laptop
is the trackpad.
Luckily the XPS 15 has one of the better ones out there.
More importantly it is precision.
You know my thought on these, I love precision touchpads.
Dell still sticks with that here.
That means you get all the Windows 10 gestures.
They're very fast, they're very quick.
I have no issues with this trackpad.
It's very soft to the touch.
It's right up there with the Surface Book in my opinion.
It has those precision drivers
which I think is just a great design.
Let's talk about these speakers and the quality of them.
As you can see they're on the lip of the device here.
They're not too bad, but I'm not blown away either.
I really wish Dell would somehow reconfigure this device
to put the speakers on top near the keyboard.
Which on 13 inch devices is hard to do
on 15 inches it's a lot easier.
That is where most devices put them these days
and it definitely sounds a lot better.
These speakers are rich sounding
so they're a little bit better and more rich than the
HP Spectre speakers but I'm still not like really
blown away by them either.
So as you can see, not much has changed physically
with the XPS 15 besides the optional fingerprint scanner.
Let's talk about benchmarks.
There's been a lot of improvements here
between the processor or the GPU and more.
Let's get to it.
Looking at Geekbench 4, the XPS 15 4,503 for a single core.
While it gets 13,587 for multi core.
And that's at top of our list for a laptop so far.
It's likely due to it being a Core i7 7700HQ,
that's a quad core processor, 7th generation.
Very impressive stuff.
Look at that GTX 1050 in Geekbench 4 scores.
You could see here for CUDA it does very well, 75,636.
To put that in perspective, compared to last year's XPS 15
the 960M only score 54,922.
This puts the 1050 right between a 980M and a 965M.
Pretty impressive.
Alright, putting aside raw benchmark numbers,
what does this mean for real world gaming?
So I like to play Doom and Gears of War 4.
Gears of War 4, you're looking at medium settings
and still getting 60 frames per second.
That's with VSync off.
If you used a custom setting though
it's going to get a little bit better.
As a big Gears fan, I think this looks fantastic.
I have absolutely no problems playing with this
on the XPS 15 and I highly recommend it.
If you were talking about Doom, it's even better.
You can basically play Doom at high,
still hit 60 frames per second with VSync on.
You can even set it to ultra but you're only going to get
about 40 to 45 frames per second
which is not nearly as good.
Overall gaming on a Dell XPS 15 is a fantastic experience.
It's much better than I thought it would be.
Now it's not nearly as good as a Razer Blade with its 1060,
that card really does outperform a 1050
by a significant amount.
But if you're a hardcore gamer with a desktop PC at home,
you could definitely take the Dell XPS 15 with you
on the road and still get a really good experience.
Let's talk about the SSD here.
I'm very excited.
Dell's included the Samsung PM961 in this device.
Now if that doesn't mean anything to you
maybe you've heard the Samsung 960 EVO.
I reviewed it a few weeks ago,
it's one of my favorite SSDs out there.
It's super fast.
You're talking about over 2000 megabytes per second per read
and about 1600 megabytes per second for writes.
That's really good for people who like to game,
video producers, and anyone else who needs
fast hard drives here.
Regarding fans and temperature overall very good story here.
Fans are pretty cool.
They do not get very loud.
Of course if you're playing a first person shooter,
you will hear them come on.
It's not nearly as loud as a Razer Blade
but you do hear them.
Regarding regular usage though,
say you're just browsing the web or running some apps,
they do not come on at all.
I really do not hear them very often.
For temperatures, you're talking about
130 degrees Fahrenheit maxed out.
That's about 54 degrees Celsius.
That's in the upper keyboard area
when gaming 10 to 20 minutes.
It is warm but it's definitely not
the hottest thing out there.
Once again, under a regualar usage, it's a very cool laptop
and you won't feel it in your lap at all.
Battery life on the XPS 15 is also very good.
Now Dell increased the battery frow an 84 watt hour
to a 97 watt hour one for this year's model.
It's just below the legal limit for flying
so you can't complain much there.
Now there's another version, also's a 56 watt hour,
that's in the lower tier versions
because they need to put in a hard disk drive
which takes up that space.
So you have two versions, make sure you get
the 97 watt hour if you want battery life.
Now I'm using a full HD display so of course
it's going to get better battery life.
I'm talking about eight to nine hours of real world usage.
I'm very happy with that.
It's a slight increase from last year, probably about 10%
but it helps a lot.
If you want to get the 4K panel
you could probably subtract a good
two to three hours off of that
which is still really good.
So six hours, maybe seven hours.
That's pretty impressive though for a 4K laptop
running a quad core processor with
all the other components on this device.
So far so good, there's really nothing wrong here
with this laptop.
But there is one thing I'm not happy with,
which is the Killer AC 1535 wireless card.
Now Killer is pretty popular with gamers,
it has a really good brand name out there.
But there's also a lot of complaints
and I've seen it both on the forums for this device
as well as my own personal experience.
The issue is this, under heavy load that card can fail.
So for instance, if you're downloading a large game
over Steam and you want to go watch a YouTube video,
your card may actually get the exclamation point
and then it exits out and it restarts the driver.
It's really inconvenient.
Now that can be probably fixed by a driver update
so I don't think the world is lost here.
You can also upgrade the Wifi card to say an Intel AC one
which I'll be doing here in a couple of weeks
and I'll show you how to do that.
It's a real simple change and you may actually prefer that.
But that is an issue to be aware of.
Now if you're just browsing the web
and using this as a normal device,
you won't experience this at all,
it's really not a problem.
And it may also be dependent on your router.
It's a complicated issue, but it is a hole right now
in the XPS 15 to be worried about.
Alright, finishing up here, I'm a huge fan of the XPS 15.
In fact these two devices behind me are both mine.
I even have a 4K version at home.
And Dell actually hasn't sent us a review unit yet,
so take my word here.
The 9560 is a solid upgrade,
you're going to get that improved processor.
The GTX 1050, which is a great GPU.
You'll get a faster SSD, faster RAM.
You even get a fingerprint option now
which is just really seals the deal for me.
Over the XPS 15 is still one of the best buys
on the market today.
It's perfect for prosumers,
for people who need to do video editing on the go
and who want a stylish device as well.
Plus it gets great battery life,
so it's still going to get my rating
as the best 15 inch laptop on the market today.
So that's my review of the XPS 15 for 2017.
If you want to see the full review
head to Windows Central for my full benchmarks and more.
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Take care everybody.
For this year and that's really impressive
because it comes just below the FCC limit.
Is it FCC?
No, what's the, who? (chuckles)
I'll just say limit for air travel.