Dell has long touted their XPS 13 is kind of the gold standard for ultrabooks
it's not gonna win over the hearts of mobile gamers or video editors but for
everyone else looking for a sleek laptop that packs a punch Dell's got a lot they
want to show you after using this thing for about two weeks I have to say I
think the XPS 13 is my favorite ultra book that you can buy on the market
right now I'm Robert Rosenfeld TechnoBuffalo and
here's why design is an important part of any laptop but I think that Dell
really did a great job with the design of the XPS 13 it's made out of an all
aluminum chassis it feels very premium lightweight in the hands and they said
that they were able to fit a 13-inch screen and what would normally be an 11
inch laptop form factor and they were able to do that though it did leave the
laptop of a little chunky not very fat but it's definitely not the thinnest kid
on the block as much as I love the design of the XPS 13 I'm not a fan of
how hard it is to get this thing open what looks like a little microscopic lip
on the front is just a charging leg which means that opening this thing is
really a two-hand operation luckily once I got the laptop open and I started
using it my frustrations really started to subside mainly because of that
display Dell really prides themselves in the whole XPS line are having these
super thin almost bezel s infinity edge displays and the one on the XPS 13
really does look fantastic our unit is running at a resolution of 3200 by 1800
it's a quad HD touch display and everything just looked really good on it
video was super sharp and clear colors really seemed to pop off the display
text was sharp and I really just loved using this display it also gets fairly
bright up to 400 nits which made it pretty usable outside and definitely
super usable anywhere inside you're getting a really beautiful display with
almost no bezels but with having those minimal bezels there were some
compromises made Dell move the 720p webcam that typically sits at the top
display down to the bottom left hand side which isn't a big deal for me but
for anyone who does a lot of video conferencing or Skype calls it's
probably in the most unflattering position possible this is an example of
the video and audio quality only built in HD webcam on the XPS 13 Audio sounds
very muffled very tinny even a little crackly
video is awful inside the XPS 13 there's kind of this carbon-fiber composite
kind of soft touch it feels super comfortable and it leaves you plenty of
room for your wrist when you're typing on it's pretty average keyboard I say
average because the keyboard was just okay for the most part it has good key
spacing it's got some pretty decent key travel though at times the keyboard just
felt a little mushy for my liking after a couple of days I got used to it
and it felt a little bit better below the keyboard is the XPS 13's pretty
decent trackpad it's an okay size it supports Windows 10 s precision drivers
you can swipe and scroll and zoom to your heart's content and we also had
optioned the Windows Hello compatible fingerprint reader which for 25
bucks it was a no-brainer it worked about 80 percent of the time but for the
price point it's an easy to use add-on that I definitely recommend before I
jump into performance I just want to mention something I kind of like about
the XPS line in general and that is kind of the price to performance ratio you
can get an XPS 13 starting at $799 and it's not going to be a powerhouse it's
got an i3 it's got four gigs of RAM but you can kind of customize along the way
and add options and add a little bit more price point to get yourself more of
a significant computer it's kind of nice that Dell allows for that customization
that you can start at a low price point and still get a really rock-solid
computer and go all the way up to and i7 with a 512gb SSD and get a really
beastly computer for a higher price it's just nice that there's a lot of options
along the way and I appreciate that but going back to that beastly XPS 13 the
review unit we have is pretty much spec'd to the gills with the best of
the best of Dell offers ours has an eighth generation Core i7 processor 16 gigs of
ram a 512 gigabyte nvme based SSD and intel 620 integrated graphics so that
last component might be a little worrisome of course this isn't a gaming
laptop it's not targeted to gamers though I will say that in my testings
with games and just performance overall I was surprised how well the integrated
graphics worked with that new eighth generation i7 the XPS 13 was able to
handle pretty much anything that I threw at it throughout the day
having that 16 gigs of ram is really nice even for the heaviest of chrome
users with lots of tabs open I didn't feel like the machine was running slowly
and having that 512 gigs of SSD storage space made me feel like I wasn't gonna
suffocate the machine by having a few games installed or having a few movies on
the drive I was able to jump between programs like Photoshop and Excel and
Word and Chrome and the XPS 13 just kind of stood the
test the time it handled anything that I threw at it and it never really seemed
to slow down or be bottleneck by anything so it handled the typical daily
workload really well but what about some like gaming and video editing for an
ultrabook I was really happy with how it handled
things like editing in Premiere Pro I was able to add at 1080p footage on this
thing just fine full play about quality no timeline issues it just worked out
really well it's not gonna handle 4k video editing but again this is an
ultrabook so keep your expectations to what this thing actually is of course
rocket League is not a game that's super GPU intensive and it's not gonna eat
away and a lot of that graphics processing power but I was still
surprised how well it ran on this thing I was able to run by default right out
of the box at 1600 by 1900 at high settings and got some really great frame
rate throughout playing again the XPS 13 is a very solid contender in almost all
the categories I've talked about before but battery life is where this thing
truly shines during my testing browsing the web watching some videos on this
thing I never once worried about draining the battery and I was able
easily to make it through an 8 to 10 hour day without having to plug this
thing in to charge and if you're even lighter user someone who just
occasionally browses the web and checks email I think you can make it 2 days on
this battery so battery life is great but when you're ready to charge the XPS
13 you might kind of look at the eye on this thing and start to scratch your
head a little bit on one side you have a full-size USB 3 port and an SD card slot
which is fantastic and on the other side you have a battery indicator light a
headphone jack another USB 3 port a USB C port and then something that brings
sadness to my heart Dell's proprietary charging port the speakers on the XPS 13
are just okay they get decently loud they give a little bit of volume and a
little bit of bass but I think you're gonna have a much better time plugging
in a good pair of headphones to this thing or using its built-in bluetooth
4.1 to connect in even better pair of headphones to get a better overall sound
experience and if you're in the market for a good pair of wireless bluetooth
headphones the fine folks at Sennheiser sponsored this video and they also sent
over their 4.50 Bluetooth noise cancelling headphones these things are
bluetooth noise cancelling headphones with phenomenal battery life you could
use them for up to 25 hours without that noise canceling feature and up to 19
hours if you have it turned on they have Bluetooth 4.0 built in and NFC for easy
pairing and exceptional sound quality as well as just a super lightweight
foldable and to carry around with you design I wore
these things for a long time during my testing they were very comfortable on my
ear I didn't get that weird kind of pressure sensation that you get when
wearing some headphones they also have track controls on the side of the
headphone so you can adjust the volume of the current track you listening to
and also skip forward and back as needed and they also have a detachable cable so
if you want to listen to these things plugged in and wired you can totally do
that but if you want that fully wireless experience you can unplug that cable and
do that as well if you guys want to learn more about these headphones check
out the link below in the video description alright so let's take a step
back and kind of wrap things up it's got great build quality really solid
performance and the battery life on this thing is phenomenal and over my days of
testing I really just enjoyed using this laptop so what do you guys think of the
Dell XPS 13 I know you guys had a lot of comments on my last video telling me to
check this thing out so now that I did what do you guys think is this gonna be
your next contender for an ultrabook leave your comment down below and let me
know always appreciate doing these videos for you guys thank you so much
for watching I'm Robert Rosenfeld from TechnoBuffalo see
you guys in the next one
you