Dell XPS 15 L521X: A Detailed First Look
by Jarred Walton on July 25, 2012 1:10 AM ESTDell XPS 15 Battery Life
Dell uses a 9-cell, 65Wh integrated battery in the XPS 15 that’s not user replaceable, which is similar to what we’ve seen in the previous generation XPS 15z as well as the MacBook Pro 15. Apple uses a higher capacity battery, and under OS X the MBP15 will generally offer superior battery life, but unless something has changed since our last look we would expect greatly decreased battery life under Windows via Boot Camp. Since the XPS 15 is designed to run Windows from the ground up, there isn’t a problem with lack of power optimizations, and the result is competitive battery life. The LCD was set to 50% brightness (109 nits) for our battery testing—or nine steps down from maximum if you’re using the keyboard shortcut.
Idle battery life is just over seven hours, with a normalized result putting the XPS 15 ahead of everything except Ultrabooks and AMD’s Trinity. Put a more typical load on the laptops, like our Internet test, and we’re at five hours of useful battery life. If you’re doing lighter web surfing with a mix of office applications, you can expect somewhere around six hours of battery life. As for video playback, Dell manages just over four hours of 720p H.264 decoding; 1080p H.264 decoding drops that slightly to around 3.5 hours. That’s actually one of the lower results for battery life considering the battery capacity, though it’s worth noting that playback on higher resolution displays ends up being more taxing as there are more pixels to push. Overall, then, battery life is good and will be sufficient for most people to get through a day’s work without plugging in, particularly if they let the LCD turn off and/or the laptop go to sleep during periods of inactivity.
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JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - link
Email Anand or Vivek and tell them to get some Windows Boot Camp numbers! I'd do it myself if I had a Mac, but I'm not willing to buy one just to test Windows. (Note: Vivek *ought* to be doing Windows testing already, so hopefully we'll get numbers sooner rather than later.)ananduser - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
I think Windows exclusive users should review Windows, like you. We don't want a site like the Verge where dedicated long time Apple fans(aka Verge staff) review Windows in a whimsical fashion.RDO CA - Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - link
Your showing a 16x9 aspect for the AppleTheTechSmith - Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - link
I feel "burned" to use Jarred's words by throttling caused by overheating with my 2008 M1330 :( It's performance has become so bad that after watching YouTube videos for half an hour or so it becomes so slow that I switch to my iPhone. It doesn't help that this computer has the defective Nvidia 8400M GS chip which just adds more heat to the mix and causes it to throttle faster. I've been reading about newer Dell XPS laptops in the user reviews and it's common to see someone complaining of throttling due to overheating. I just don't think Dell has the engineering ability to make a powerful computer compact... The one I have now is probably my last Dell for personal use. To be fair to Dell, my work computer is a Precision M4600, and it is huge but has never let me down. For personal use my next one is probably going to a Retina MacBook Pro.seapeople - Monday, July 30, 2012 - link
Agreed, Dell needs to work on improved cooling/thermals. While playing SCII at 1080p/high settings on my Dell 17" XPS L702x I get good framerates (~45-50 fps), but then after I installed HWMonitor I found that CPU temperatures frequently hit 97C after ~1 hour of playing. After seeing this I now run the game at 99% CPU (which disables turboboost), which still gives me ~40 fps, but temperatures now max out about 79C.If I hadn't installed HWMonitor and noticed these ridiculous temperatures, I'd probably have a dead motherboard in a year, or worse yet just slightly out of warranty.
Sunburn74 - Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - link
Stop mucking about you guys and give the people what they want! A definitive review on the Asus Zenbook Primetahoward - Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - link
Quality chassis material and conservative/good look - CheckGood hardware platform - Check
Adequate platform cooling - Negatory
I really wanted to see this laptop succeed but saw the ship sinking fast after people on notebookreview's forums started reporting on their received units' throttling and "Faraday cage" wifi issues. Reading your stress bench results with throttlestop put the final nail in the coffin; otherwise, I would have returned my mid 2012 cmbp and save a good chunk of change purchasing Dell's l521x.
Guess getting all three of those check boxes checked comes at a premium. One that several people are willing to pay if fulfilled.
pman6 - Thursday, July 26, 2012 - link
form over function.throttling is unacceptable.
i wonder if it can manage not to overheat if the fan is turned to the max.
blackrook - Thursday, July 26, 2012 - link
Are there any plans for a review of the Envy 15? A friend of mine purchased one for ~$1100 recently, and the hardware and aesthetics make it seem as if it would be an interesting alternative, especially with the IPS Radiance screen option.Is HP holding out like they did with the Envy 14 a couple years ago? ;)
JarredWalton - Thursday, July 26, 2012 - link
Pretty much. I had hoped we'd get some of the new HP products for review, but so far hat hasn't happened. We'll keep asking, though.