- Hey guys, my name is Matt Johnson with whoismatt.com,
and today I'm gonna be reviewing the Dell XPS 17 90700.
And I'm gonna be telling you
if this laptop is a good choice, if you edit video.
And before we get started for the sake of ethics,
I want you to know that this video isn't paid
or sponsored by Dell in any way.
This is my XPS 17 laptop.
Now, if you've watched my previous videos,
you know that I made a video review
of the XPS 15 9570 laptop that I bought in summer 2018.
And I'm usually someone that wants to stick with a computer
for a pretty good amount of time.
So why would I want to upgrade to the XPS 17
only 2 1/2 years later?
Well, if you've edited videos for a while,
I'm betting this issue has happened to you,
or you may be experiencing this issue right now.
See, I bought a new camera in 2020, the Sony α7S III,
which is an absolutely fantastic camera
that has a gorgeous image that I love.
That said though, that gorgeous footage does come at a price
in the form of very high quality,
very high bit rate, 10-bit video files.
These video files require a lot of power to edit them.
And as you're going to see in this review,
my XPS 15, even with the best possible processor
that I could buy in 2018, an Intel 6-Core i9,
still wasn't enough.
And so when I saw the XPS 17,
and that I could get a laptop that was more capable,
especially when it comes to editing
higher quality video footage,
I was definitely interested.
So let's talk about the XPS 17,
starting with its build quality and features.
Let me start off by saying that I have for the most part
been very happy with the build quality of my previous XPS 15
over the past couple of years,
but this XPS 17 is on a whole other level.
I do not say this lightly
whenever I say this is one of the best built windows PCs
that I have ever used.
And I would say that it easily rivals
or surpasses Apple's MacBooks in many aspects.
The XPS 17 retains a lot of the design language
of Dell's earlier XPS models,
with an aluminum chassis and a carbon fiber hand rest.
But everything just feels more refined.
The lines are cleaner, everything is tighter,
there's no gaps, no chassis flex, no wasted space.
Open the XPS 17 with one hand
and the screen instantly comes to life.
The keyboard lights up and within a second,
Windows Hello face identification logs you in
with the new webcam,
that finally has better placement at the top of the screen.
Yes, this laptop has face identification,
which feels magical,
and I'm honestly kind of shocked
that Apple hasn't brought face ID to their MacBooks yet.
Looking down at the keyboard now,
this keyboard feels very similar to the XPS 15s,
which is already a stellar keyboard,
and one of the best that I've ever used on a laptop.
Because the XPS 17 is now a larger overall though.,
I find that the keyboard is even more comfortable to use
for extended editing sessions,
due to the extra room I have to rest my wrists.
Come on now though, just like whenever you look at my face
but you constantly find your eyes
drawn downward to the beard,
whenever you look at this keyboard
you're going to constantly find your eyes
drawn down to the track pad, which is impossible to miss.
This thing is massive.
And I'm so glad to see that Dell
has finally taken a page from Apple
with an oversized track pad.
This track pad is a joy to use,
and I haven't had any palm rejection issues
or unintended inputs.
I do want you to keep in mind though,
that unlike Apple
this track pad does not have any sort of
forced touch capabilities.
It is a traditional track pad with left and right buttons
that depress and the bottom left and right corner.
Back up to the keyboard now,
and to the left and right of it,
you'll see that the added width of the XPS 17,
means that Dell was able to put in
a much better set of speakers.
What's funny is that whenever I first turned on this laptop
and tested the speakers, I thought they sounded horrible.
It turns out though that Dell has this junky
pre-installed max audio pro software,
which was adding a really weird EQ to the audio mix.
Once I disabled that
the speaker sounded easily twice as good.
And in my opinion, these are some of the best speakers
that I've ever used on a Windows laptop.
They're also a huge upgrade over the XPS 15 speakers
which were downward firing,
meaning that they always picked up some form of echo
depending on what surface you had your laptop placed on.
With the XPS 17's upward firing speakers,
I actually enjoy listening to them.
But that said, if you're editing video
I would highly recommend using headphones.
Speaking of general sound while we're at it,
I've found the XPS 17's fan noise
to be much more pleasant than my XPS 15's.
Whereas the 15's fan sounded more high pitched
which you could definitely hear when editing
and rendering a video,
the XPS 17s are much lower in tone,
and while they are still noticeable
and I would still recommend wearing headphones,
the fan noise is much improved.
Looking at the sides of this laptop,
this is where things start to get more interesting.
Unlike my XPS 17 with its large quantity of ports
including USB-A, USB-C and HDMI,
the XPS 17 has taken a page from Apple's Book
and gone with four multifunctional USB ports,
that work for power, USB, Thunderbolt and external displays.
Welcome to dongle life.
But as a nice touch, Dell does include a USB-C,
to combo USB-A and HDMI adapter in the box,
which is quite compact and works very well.
And more importantly, I'm very thankful to report
that Dell did not do away with the SD card reader.
When Apple moved their MacBooks to all USB-C,
one of the biggest complaints,
filmmakers and photographers had
was the removal of the SD card reader.
I am so thankful that Dell opted to keep an SD card reader
on this laptop,
as it makes copying footage for editing so much easier.
I also really appreciate the laptop being powered
by USB-C now as well,
because it makes it much easier
to find a compatible power adapter
in the event that you say,
find yourself traveling to a foreign country
and forget your power adapter,
which may have happened to me recently.
Let's talk about something
that really matters to filmmakers now though, the screen.
Wow, I say this is somebody that has used and loved
my XPS 15 screen for years now.
The XPS 17 screen is a big jump up in quality
and easily one of the nicest screens
I've ever used on a laptop or anything else for that matter.
It's edge to edge,
and there's something so impressive
about opening up the laptop and seeing the screen
stretch all the way from the top to the keyboard.
It's very immersive.
This isn't just a jump
from a 15 inch to a 17 inch screen either,
Dell also chose to go from a 16 by 9
to a 16 by 10 aspect ratio screen.
Which means the XPS 17
has significantly more vertical real estate.
And this real estate is really important
if you're a video editor,
because once you start editing a complex video
and you have a lot of tracks on your timeline
you are going to want extra vertical room on your screen
to see those tracks.
Now that I've used a 16 by 10 screen,
I have zero interest in ever going back
to a 16 by 9 laptop screen.
Of course, just like the XPS 15,
this screen is also highly color accurate,
and very well suited for color correction
and color grading when editing video.
One interesting improvement that Dell has made
is the inclusion of their premier color software,
which actually lets you adjust which picture profile
you want your computer to use.
This is really cool,
because you can set your computer
to a more neutral color profile
when you want to edit and color grade a video.
But if you are just watching YouTube videos or gaming
and you want to boost the saturation and contrast,
you can do that using this app.
Now, I want you to keep in mind,
that while this laptop is beautiful,
it is also one of the heavier laptops that I've used.
Physically, it's still compact,
especially whenever you compare it
to my much older 17 inch gaming laptop,
which is approximately the size of an aircraft carrier,
but the XPS 17 is definitely dense
and feels noticeably heavier than my XPS 15.
One contributor to that weight is the battery,
which is 97 watt hours,
just shy of the max 100 watt hours
that you can put in a laptop
and still be able to legally fly with it.
And, let's talk about that battery life.
Dell has rated the XPS 17's battery life at 7 1/2 hours.
But if you're editing video using battery power
which is much more taxing,
I find that I get around four to five hours.
This is still enough to get through a quicker edit,
but you're definitely gonna want to bring along a charger
when using this laptop for most video editing.
All right, it's time to talk about
what you really want to talk about now,
video editing speed with this laptop.
Now I'm using the maxed out version of the XPS 17,
meaning that it has the Intel i9 10885H processor,
Nvidia RTX 2060, two terabyte SSD, and 64 gigabytes of RAM.
So if you have a different configuration
your editing speed maybe slower.
I have two aspects of video editing that I wanna talk about
whenever it comes to this laptop.
Of course, we're gonna cover render times and speed
because, that's a very simple metric to understand.
But, arguably more important than render times,
we need to talk about how this laptop handles
normal everyday video editing.
How fast and responsive is it
when it comes to scrubbing through
and playing back video on the timeline?
We'll talk about that timeline performance first.
As I said at the start of this review,
I upgraded to the XPS 17
because I wanted a more powerful laptop,
with more CPU cores for video editing.
My older XPS 15 is still quite powerful
and could easily handle editing
the 8-bit 4K video files
that I would shoot with my Sony a7S II.
But whenever I upgraded to the a7S III,
and it's beautiful 4K 10-bit video files
that play back it up to 120 frames per second,
I started to run into major slowdown on my timeline
in Premier Pro.
We're talking stuttering playback,
multiple seconds of waiting
with scrubbing around on the timeline,
and oftentimes after I started playing a video,
Premiere would freeze and then continue playing the video
after I told it to pause,
oftentimes for 10 seconds
before it would finally catch up and stop.
Thankfully, you can think of Premiere
kind of like a muscle car,
where you throw more horsepower things
and it's going to be faster,
except in this case it's CPU core,
it's not horsepower that make it faster.
When I upgraded to the XPS 17,
I went from six cores and 12 threads
to eight cores and 16 threads of performance.
And this is definitely noticeable on the timeline,
playback is much quicker, scrubbing is much smoother,
and I feel comfortable recommending this laptop
with this processor to you,
if you're editing 10-bit video footage.
I do want you to be aware though,
that when you're editing video,
you are definitely going to be able to tell
this computer is doing some heavy lifting.
The fan noise is going to crank up
and it's going to get very warm
near the function row of keys as the CPU does its work.
That said, though, I personally have not experienced
any visible signs of throttling,
and even after editing for hours,
the computer doesn't show any sign of slowing down
from thermal limitations.
Looking at overall render speed now,
when I tested exporting a five-minute wedding film
that I created complete with effects, color grading,
and my "Let's link" down in the video description,
I found that the XPS 17 was able to export
in two minutes and 53 seconds.
Compare this to the XPS 15,
which exported the same exact wedding film
in seven minutes and 24 seconds.
Meaning the XPS 17 is over twice as fast.
That is a stunning performance improvement,
especially considering the XPS 17
is only two years newer than the 15.
So as you can see from these tests,
the XPS 17 is a very nice speed upgrade overall,
both from a general timeline speed perspective,
as well as a render speed perspective,
and I have no qualms at all
recommending the i9 model of this laptop.
Keep in mind though, as I said earlier,
I have the maxed out version of this laptop,
which is definitely not cheap.
So let's talk about the price now
and where you can potentially save some money.
Fully equipped, a maxed out XPS 17
cost 3844 at the time of making this video.
This is literally what you would get
if you go through and select all the upgrades
when purchasing.
If you're someone with a larger budget
that doesn't want to stress
about what specific things you should buy,
and just wants a powerful video editing laptop,
you can pick all these upgrades and hit buy.
But let's say you want to be smart and save some money,
here are three things I would recommend doing
to potentially save yourself hundreds on this laptop.
First, I don't think you absolutely need to purchase
the top of the line, Intel i9, 10885H processor
for this laptop to edit 4K video.
From a power perspective, Intel's cheaper i7 100875H
is going to offer almost the same level of performance,
but it can retail for potentially hundreds of dollars less.
So this is a great way to save some money.
Now let's talk RAM,
because that is the next way to save money
when buying this laptop.
Dell currently lets you configure system memory
for this laptop from 16 to 64 gigabytes in size.
But, if you want the best bang for your buck,
you can save money by buying and installing your own RAM.
My recommendation to you,
would be to select the minimum amount of RAM
when configuring your laptop.
In the XPS 17's case that would be 16 gigabytes,
and then upgrade it yourself
to 32 gigabytes or 64 gigabytes.
In my opinion, the sweet spot for editing 4K video
is 32 gigabytes.
But if you're editing 6K or 8K, I would go up to 64.
The last recommendation I have for you to save money
is to wait for sales.
Dell is typically very aggressive
about putting their computers on sale.
So if you could wait a bit to buy,
I would be patient and check their site often.
Time to wrap this review up.
In conclusion, the XPS 17 is a fantastic laptop,
easily the best windows laptop that I have ever used,
with a lot of power crammed into a relatively small,
for its 17 inch screen size body.
In short, if you were looking
for one of the best video editing laptops
on the market today, this is it.
In fact, I really only have one hangup
when it comes to telling you to buy this laptop.
And this hangup has gotta be something
that you're gonna hear me repeat pretty often in the future.
See, at the time of making this video,
while this laptop is very powerful,
Apple is in the process of shaking up really
the entire computing industry
with their very impressively performing
Apple Silicon laptops.
So while at the time of making this video,
Apple has yet to release anything
more than their MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 13 inch.
If you do need a laptop right now
you may want to hold off until later in 2021,
whenever you can see what Apple has up their sleeve.
Their new computers have the potential
to be revolutionary for video editors.
So I want you to keep that in mind,
and I would consider waiting if you can.
With that, thank you so much
for watching this review of the Dell XPS 17.
I have many more videos about computers for video editors,
including build guides,
if you wanna build your own video editing desktop computer,
that is significantly more affordable than this XPS 17.
I will link to those videos below
if you wanna check them out,
and also it'd be a huge help to me
if you would consider liking this video and subscribing
if you wanna see more videos like it in the future.
I will also link to my Instagram below
where I will be posting more photos and videos
about this laptop, as well as others in the future.
Lastly, as I'm sure you saw from my render test,
I happen to film weddings.
And if you happen to film weddings like me,
you probably want to book more couples
and film more weddings.
To help you out with that, I've created a free guide
that's gonna walk you through some practical steps
that you can take right now in your business
to book more couples and film more weddings.
It's a completely free gift to you,
you can download it at the link down
in the video description.
Thanks so much for watching and have a great day.