- Hey guys, my name is Matt Johnson,
and today I want to review this,
the Dell XPS 15 9570 laptop.
And I'm gonna tell you if this is a good choice
if you want to buy a laptop for editing video.
I've been using the XPS 15 for about the past
seven months or so to edit video whenever I travel,
and I've really wanted to make a review about it
because I think it's a great choice for video editing
if you don't work from home or an office
or if you travel often and you don't want to build
a video editing desktop.
First thing you'll notice about the XPS 15
is this laptop is pretty thin and light.
And it's definitely giving off some MacBook Pro vibes here,
which I am not upset about.
I would say that the XPS 15 is one of the closest laptops
that you can get in terms of build quality
to a MacBook Pro while still buying a PC.
And to provide some context for where I'm coming from
as far as laptops go, I actually own two laptops
before buying the Dell.
The first is this big honking Asus gaming laptop
that I bought in 2013 that is definitely
nowhere near thin and light.
This thing is very chunky.
And an Asus 14-inch ultrabook.
Definitely more portable, but also not nearly as powerful
as the gaming laptop.
This G75 is definitely from the era of desktop replacements
where they say, hey, you can get all the power of a desktop
and it's still portable, kind of.
So I had a lot of power in this laptop.
But in terms of portability and battery life,
wasn't so good.
With a one to two-hour battery life on a good day,
I wasn't busting this G75 out on my coach seat on an airline
because it's bigger than the actual tray table itself.
I would have to wait until I could get to a hotel room
or coffee shop where I could actually plug it in to edit.
I also got married in 2013
and my wife brought along this 14-inch ultrabook.
This laptop has much better battery life
but a very slow CPU, so it made editing
videos virtually impossible even in 1080p,
and definitely not in 4K.
It's really only good for dumping footage
from a camera to back up, but it only has one USB 3.0 port.
So even that can be a pain.
So I would find myself in this predicament
whenever I traveled.
Do I bring along the massive laptop
that I can barely fit into my carry on bag
but is capable of letting me edit video,
or do I bring along the tiny light laptop
that's great for copying footage
but not actually capable of editing anything
until I get home to my desktop?
Enter the Dell XPS 15 9570.
I get the power of my bigger, bulkier gaming desktop
while the size and portability of the smaller ultrabook.
Are you beginning to see why I love this thing?
Now let's talk about the build quality of this laptop.
It's definitely premium and professional.
There's no gamer on it, there's no RGB anywhere.
It's definitely more subdued,
and I like that whenever I'm traveling.
The keyboard feels great to me with a good travel,
and it isn't at all clicky like the new MacBook
butterfly keyboards either.
The carbon fiber palm rest is comfortable
and doesn't get too hot or cold like aluminum,
but it does have a con in that it definitely
will show smudges from your hand oils.
So I wouldn't eat Doritos while typing on his laptop.
The trackpad is also a massive upgrade over all
other laptops that I've used,
second only to the MacBook Pro.
PC laptop trackpads are notorious for being a mixed bag,
but this is a great one.
I still prefer to use a mouse whenever I'm editing,
but I've edited videos with this laptop without one,
and it still worked great.
One of my other favorite features
is the power button that doubles as a fingerprint reader.
Well, I do wish this laptop had a Windows Hello camera
that will recognize you as soon as you open it.
Having a fast and accurate fingerprint reader
makes signing into this laptop a breeze.
This laptop also has a decent amount of inputs.
You get three USB A and one USB Type-C port
that supports Thunderbolt.
So if you edit off an external Thunderbolt drive or RAID,
or if you wanna plug in an external GPU, you're covered.
There's also an SD card slot that I use all the time
whenever I'm copying footage after filming a wedding.
I love not having to reach for a dongle or adapter
to plug things in, but I still have
a USB Type-C port if I need it.
One of my least favorite features of this laptop
is the speakers.
While, they are adequate,
they do make sound and they get decently loud,
unfortunately they are downward firing speakers.
So if you're editing on a desk, it can have a weird
slight echo to your audio, and it's not nearly as clear
as upward firing speakers are.
And I'm gonna warn you now, this laptop's fans
can definitely get loud and interfere with your speakers.
More on that in a little bit, but just know that I always
recommend wearing headphones whenever you're editing
video with this laptop.
Another feature that many people dislike about this laptop
is the webcam, specifically the webcam's placement.
It's on the bottom of the screen.
So if you're doing a Skype call or a Google Hangout,
everybody's gonna end up looking up your nose
or up my beard in my case.
My recommendation to you is that if you just want to use
this laptop for video calls, the webcam's fine.
But if you want to do any sort of the live streaming,
like I do to YouTube every month
with my wedding film review livestream,
which you can tune into,
then I would highly recommend either investing
in an external webcam that's higher quality
that you can actually place in a better position,
or purchasing an adapter that will actually let you use
your real camera such as a mirrorless or DSLR
with your laptop as a webcam.
I'll be sure to link to some devices that do that,
as well as webcams down in the video description.
Back to positives.
We need to talk about one of the best features
of this laptop, the screen.
If you are planning on editing videos with the XPS 15,
which this whole review is aimed at video editors,
then I highly recommend investing in the 4K panel option
for this laptop.
This screen is so gorgeous, and it's a thing of beauty
to watch wedding films and other videos that I've shot
in native 4K on it.
It's also quite bright.
Not quite MacBook Pro levels of brightness,
but dang I often times find myself turning
the brightness down to about halfway
because I don't wanna burn my eyeballs out
while sitting in my editing cave.
More important to just being pretty though
is the color accuracy of this screen.
With my older laptops, when I would bust out
my color calibration tool to calibrate my monitors,
it was always a massive swing before and after
the monitor was calibrated.
We're talking a swing from icy blue to bright orange.
With the new XPS 15, my monitor's colors
barely looked different after I calibrated it.
This tells you that the monitor is already
quite color accurate from the factory.
And if you do any sort of color grading or image editing,
you know how important this is.
I could not say enough good things about this monitor.
Remember how I was telling you that my Asus gaming
laptop's battery would only last
one to two hours on a charge?
Well, the XPS 15 makes massive improvements
in the area of battery life over my previous laptops.
I feel like basically all electronic manufacturers
are talking these days about all-day battery life.
You need to go all day without plugging
in your phone to charge it.
Leave your charger at home whenever you go to work
with your laptop.
Unfortunately, all-day battery life is basically impossible
for any laptop that I know of
whenever you're talking about using it for 4K video editing.
If I'm just browsing the web on the XPS 15,
with the screen brightness turned down,
answering some emails, watching some YouTube videos,
I find myself getting six to eight hours of battery life.
But if you're editing 4K videos
while your wife drives you on a road trip across Texas,
the battery life is gonna be closer to four to five hours.
To be clear, the battery life while editing
is definitely better than all of my previous laptops.
But if you remember one thing,
don't leave your charger at home
whenever you are planning on video editing.
With all that out of the way,
let's get down to the meat and potatoes of this review.
Specifically, I'm sure you're asking,
how fast is this laptop whenever it comes
to editing and rendering 4K video, Matt?
First, let's talk about CPUs.
My older bulky Asus gaming laptop
has an Intel Core i7-3630QM inside
that has four cores and eight threads at 2.4 gigahertz.
Well, this is definitely an older CPU.
Up until 2017, basically the most powerful CPUs
being put into laptops still only had
four cores and eight threads.
And in my experience, four cores and eight threads
is plenty for editing 1080p video.
But once you throw 4K video into the mix,
that's when everything starts to slow down.
Every year, CPU speeds have gradually gotten faster,
but it's definitely been a slower, more evolutionary pace
without many drastic improvements in speed.
Now I wanted to upgrade from my Frankenstein two
laptop system back in mid 2017.
But around that time, I started hearing rumors
that Intel is gonna be releasing new CPUs
that go from four cores and eight threads
to six cores and 12 threads,
and that seemed like it was worth waiting for.
Finally, in early 2018, Intel released their new CPUs.
And pretty soon after that, Dell released the XPS 15 9570,
which I bought.
And I cannot understate the importance
of these new CPUs to video editors.
Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve love having more cores,
especially if you're editing in 4K.
As far as specs go, I bought my XPS 15
with the Intel core i9-8950HK,
a six core, 12 thread CPU that runs at 2.9 gigahertz.
It also comes with an NVIDIA 1050Ti graphics card
and 32 gigabytes of RAM, which in my experience
is plenty of power for 4K video editing.
With those CPU specs and Adobe Premiere,
I've found that I can export a five-minute long
wedding film in 4K with warp stabilizer
and many effects applied to a lot of the clips
on the timeline in six minutes and 49 seconds.
For comparison, my older Asus gaming laptop
can export that same 4K wedding film in,
I wrote it down here, 1 hour, 33 minutes and 55 seconds.
What? That's insane!
So the XPS 15 is definitely an improvement.
To be clear though, my old Asus laptop is running
a third generation i7 CPU.
If you are upgrading from a more recent CPU
like an Intel sixth or seventh generation,
I would expect to see a big improvement
but not as large as my example,
considering how old my Asus laptop is.
I wish I had a more current laptop to try this
render test on, but I don't.
All that said about the blazing fast speed of this laptop,
if I could go back to Dell and change my order, I would.
Because as I said, I purchased the i9-8950HK CPU
with this laptop.
But if I could go back, I would probably buy
the i7-8750H CPU instead.
With the 8750H, you're still getting a CPU
with six cores and 12 threads,
but you're gonna be saving yourself $350.
And from the testing and reviews
that many other reviewers have made about this laptop,
I don't believe the i7 CPU is gonna generate
nearly as much heat as the i9 processor.
In my testing and video rendering,
I have not seen the i9 overheat or thermal throttle.
But in a laptop this thin, it is pushing up
against the thermal limits of this laptop
to put an i9 inside it, and I honestly think
that the i7 is a better buy.
Keeping up with the heat trend we're talking about here,
we need to talk about this laptop's fans
because they have a tendency to ramp up and get pretty loud
even if you're only editing video, not rendering it.
Like I said earlier, I highly recommend wearing headphones
whenever you're editing with this laptop.
The last thing I wanna talk about the XPS 15
is one of the features that not many other reviewers
that I've seen have been talking about,
it is one of the main reasons that I purchased the XPS 15
over the competition like the Razer Blade
or even a MacBook Pro.
That feature is the warranty.
And hear me out about this because it is surprisingly good.
Let's compare Dell's warranty to one of
the better warranties out there, Apple's AppleCare.
If you buy AppleCare for $379 and your MacBook breaks,
you can bring it to an Apple store if you happen
to live near one, or you can send it off to them for repair.
And depending on how bad it is,
you'll have your computer repaired within a week or two
if they have to send it off to replace some parts.
If you opt to buy Dell's Premium Support plus warranty,
which covers anything breaking,
either by there being an issue in manufacturing the laptop
or in you having an accident and dropping
or spilling something on your laptop, et cetera;
instead of you sending it off for repair,
Dell will send a technician to you within one to two
business days to repair your laptop on site.
Yes, you do not need to leave your house
or even put on pants to have your laptop repaired.
But it might get awkward.
This is one of the best warranties that I've ever seen
in the computer industry.
And as a working professional,
I feel like Dell is respecting my time with this warranty.
To be clear though, I haven't used this warranty
and I hope that I don't actually have to use it,
but I purchased the four-year warranty
so I still have a lot of time in the event
that something breaks.
So let's talk about price for this laptop.
With the warranty, I spent 3,830 on this laptop,
and I pretty much maxed out all of the specs.
As I said earlier though, I feel like the CPU is overkill.
So if I was you, I would save the $350
and get the 8750H CPU instead.
There are more ways to save money on this laptop though.
If you feel comfortable undoing some screws
on the bottom of the laptop,
the RAM and the SSD are user upgradable.
So you could actually buy the XPS 15
with the lowest amount of RAM and the smallest SSD size
and then upgrade them yourself using parts that you buy
that are cheaper.
In the case of the SSD, mine came with
a two terabyte Toshiba drive.
And if I wanted to swap that out for a Samsung NVMe SSD,
it would be even faster.
Also, keep in mind that this laptop has been out
for about half a year now, and Dell is very aggressive
whenever it comes to offering discounts and coupons,
especially on holidays.
So you should definitely be able to get
a much better price than I did
whenever I bought this laptop right whenever it came out.
So in conclusion, I really like the Dell XPS 15 9570.
And if you are a video editor that currently
is not working from home or an office
where it's feasible for you to build
your own video editing computer,
I would highly recommend this laptop.
It's not big, but Dell has managed to cram
a 4K screen into this thing,
a very comfortable keyboard and touchpad
and some very impressive CPU options.
In my opinion, this laptop is the best mix
of power and portability.
Speaking of power though,
I know I already harped on this
but I'm going to repeat it again,
if you are currently editing on a laptop
that has a four core eight thread CPU,
basically any laptop before mid 2018
and you find that whenever you're editing 4K videos
your laptop's chugging along just trying to keep up,
I would highly recommend investing in a laptop like this.
Quick update here guys, this is Matt from the future.
Yes, a few weeks after recording this video,
I actually recorded this video in mid-February,
but then my wife unexpectedly went into labor
with our new baby,
she's doing great by the way,
and so I was a little delayed in getting this thing edited.
Of course the day after I finished recording the video,
news breaks about Intel's new CPUs
including their new laptop CPUs
that are going to be eight core and 16 threads.
So if you are thinking about buying the XPS 15,
you may want to hold off until quarter two,
whenever these CPUs are released.
I'm pretty sure after that we'll see a new XPS 15
with these new eight core 16 thread CPUs inside it,
which is going to be even faster
than this current XPS 15.
Second thing, I somehow missed the news back in January
that Dell announced that they were going to be releasing
an updated version of the XPS 15
with an OLED 4K screen in March 2019.
And I'm sure you're thinking,
Matt, the time you release this video is March,
so sometime this month, they haven't done it yet
but sometime this month we're going to be seeing
a 4K OLED screen for the XPS 15.
It will probably be more expensive than the current XPS 15.
But as much as I said about how beautiful
this laptop screen is, an OLED version of it
would be even more beautifuler.
So keep both these things in mind if you are considering
buying a video editing laptop.
If you need to buy a laptop right now,
I think the current XPS 15 is a fantastic choice.
But if you could wait until later on this year,
we are going to be seeing some updates
that are pretty significant.
Also, keep in mind that with these updates,
the current XPS 15 price could go down,
which would make it significantly easier on your wallet.
All right, back to the original recording.
With that, thank you so much for watching.
If you're a video editor and you've been considering buying
the Dell XPS 15 9570, or maybe you've never
heard of it before, I hope that this video helps you out
in making a purchase decision.
Also, I am sure that there are a lot of you
that are getting ready to type comments like
hey, Matt, you got any cheaper laptop options out there?
And I've been considering making
a cheaper video editing laptop kind of round up I would say
that features cheaper laptops that are still great
for video editing.
Please leave me a comment below if you would like
to see that video.
Also, if you are interested in building
a video editing PC, I recently finished a video
that details how to build a budget video editing PC
that can still added 4K for $700.
So if laptop's not your speed but desktops are,
you should check out that video.
I'll make sure to link to it down in the description.
Thanks so much for watching, and have a great day.
(uplifting music)