Dell XPS 15 Haswell Edition: QHD+ with a Refined Design
by Jarred Walton on March 6, 2014 7:00 AM ESTDell XPS 15 Conclusion: Almost There
At the end of the day, what can be said about the XPS 15 is that it’s a great looking laptop and on paper it checks all the right boxes. In practice, I’ll be frank and state that it’s been a bit of a love/hate relationship with the XPS 15, but the hate comes more from being frustrated by my inability to get consistent results. If the system always throttled (which is what happened with the previous generation Ivy Bridge XPS 15), it would be easy to point out the problem, but that’s not the case. When it runs as it ought to, the XPS 15 offers a great blend of style, build quality, performance, battery life...and let’s not forget the awesome QHD+ display. The applications on Windows may still have issues with High-DPI right now, but long-term I’d rather have a high quality display than not, and the XPS 15 gives me exactly that.
This review is possibly one of the longest of my career, at least in terms of finishing and posting it. Originally I had planned to get the review posted ASAP, but when I started encountering issues with the GPU clocks I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what precisely was going on. I really like the laptop in general, and if I hadn’t been pounding on the system specifically running benchmarks and games and checking for throttling, maybe I could have missed that. Even with that particular issue cropping up from time to time, I still like the XPS 15 more than the vast majority of laptops I’ve tested. There was a time when performance mattered more, but these days the keyboard, touchpad, screen, and overall design end up being far more important to me, and I suspect that’s true for many of our readers.
Since the first XPS 15 rolled out several years back, Dell has clearly been trying to create a laptop – and a line of laptops – that offers a premium experience. Each generation has improved, sometimes in small ways and sometimes not. This round, the optical drive has been kicked to the curb, making way for a slimmer and lighter laptop that doesn’t have to sacrifice on battery life or performance. Everything seems to be in place for the XPS 15 to succeed, and if I were personally in the market for a new laptop the XPS 15 would certainly be high up on my list. It’s just that one item of inconsistent GPU performance that gives me pause.
If you don't care about gaming but like everything else on top, the Haswell XPS 15 a great laptop and I could easily give it an Editors' Choice award. On the other hand, until/unless the need to reboot on occasion to fix the GPU and CPU temperatures (and the resultant throttling) is addressed, those who occasionally/frequently play games might be better off waiting or looking at other options. There are quite a few laptops coming out with high-DPI displays, and some may be able to top the XPS 15. Others may be lacking in the style or build quality departments but should come with lower pricing (and a caching SSD at best). Even If Dell can fix the need to reboot on occasion to get the GPU running where it ought to be, this is a premium quality laptop with a premium price, so it’s not for everyone; it is however one of a very few options that can even think of challenging the MacBook Pro Retina.
As far as competitors go, it’s pretty simple really: if you want to run OS X, get a MacBook, but if you’re happier running Windows I don’t see much point in going that route. There really aren’t many other laptops in the same bracket right now. Razer’s Blade (and Blade Pro) is close in many ways, but it has much more of a gaming slant and a higher price tag to go with it. Otherwise, you can either wait for the upcoming spring refresh of notebooks, or you can look at some of the Ultrabooks that skip the discrete GPU entirely – Toshiba’s KIRAbook and Samsung’s ATIV Book 9 Plus might be a couple to consider. Last year’s ASUS UX51VZ is another great candidate, but it needs a refresh to Haswell (and GeForce 800M perhaps?) now. In other words, there’s very little in the way of direct competition at present.
The bottom line is that this is a laptop that has style, battery life, build quality, input devices that work well, a high-end QHD+ display, and the option for a 512GB SSD, 16GB RAM, and a discrete GPU. Fix the thermals, whatever the cause – or maybe go with Crystalwell and forego the discrete GPU – and this laptop would be golden. Instead I’m left in the uncomfortable position of really liking a laptop that has a potentially serious fly in the ointment. Hopefully we can clear that up in the coming weeks.
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callmesissi - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
Great review. I'd like to ask you WHY do you keep comparing Windows products to MAC products. In real life you cannot do in a mac what a windows machine can, and dont get me started on "simulation software", if you do run windows on top of mac add the cost of windows license + simulation software and then benchmark the mac and lets see how fast it is by running that.Dont get me wrong, this is NOT a "i hate mac" post. But for a living i repair and give technical support to windows machines, and you CANT do everything that you can do in a windows pc on a mac. from hardware to software. for example my main client has quite a few stores + the central base and the radio software (win only) the printers (win only) the accounting software (win only) and so on...
I do hope you review Mac as a Mac versus other mac and not versus a windows pc. Macs are pretty much good for any user that does not use it for work, or business that use some specialized software like pilots, navigation, design and that's pretty much it.
I know it wont be long where we wont have that windows / macOS / android / ios / etc. problems, future is aiming for an open source, html based software that can run on any platform. but this is today and as of today you simply CANT use a Mac to replace a pc.
And not to mention a pc gamer... how many games are on a Mac?...
Please, just compare apples to apples (pun intended) or if you do, then add parallax + windows to the mac and then set benchmarks. Windows has support for like a 1,000,000 things more than a mac does.
my two cents.
Ma Deuce - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
It's extremely easy to run windows on a mac... Saying that you can't replace a pc with a mac is just completely false.My line of work requires me to use several Windows only programs, and none of them have issues running on my macbook pro.
About the only thing you can't do is make a good living providing repairs and technical support to mac owners, they just don't have as many issues lol
Penti - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
Plenty of enterprises run Windows on Apple machines, support-people shouldn't be unaware of that, guess he's never heard of bootcamp or for that matter knows what parallels is. A mac is a qualified machine for volume licensing. Corporations can just stream their business apps from their TS/RDS/Citrix environment rather then let users who use OS X virtualize Windows. The only thing you really can't do is remote control everything like on vPro/iAMT-machines but the same goes for this Dell. For a end user, a Windows license is about 100 dollars. For business it's pretty much the same as including any other machine in your volume licensing program. If you need Parallels it's 70-80 dollars. A small business can run Windows only accounting software just fine, the virtualization software will make it launch from the dock just like any other program if you like to do that, some OS X users can use business and accounting software that run natively. It's really not an issue any more. It mixes really well with a Microsoft server environment, regardless which OS you choose to run albeit some extra software is required to administrate the OS X-machines with ease.For a end user who wishes to legally use Windows on their mac it's just the 100-200 dollars extra. Even with that extra cost a MBAir and so on usually does very well against semi-expensive Windows-powered Ultrabooks. If they do choices that makes it worse then it need to be at the price point it's worth taking note. Even if most mac users prefer to use OS X for 90% of work. There is also some software for OS X in a few professional fields that aren't available for Windows and has no alternative. You really can't treat them like say if they wore a ARM-based tablet, hardware-wise it's totally comparable and sites like this one do benchmark on Windows too. Prices and price ranges are easy to compare too.
robco - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
Comparisons of high-end Windows laptops with MacBooks is inevitable. Apple's industrial design is considered to be the best in the business. The price difference between the model reviewed here and the comparable rMBP config is $170. The Mac has Thunderbolt (which gives you GigE with an adapter), plus Apple has their own OS. Dell's support is less expensive though.As for not being able to use it for work, I know many people who would disagree. Most web devs I know (who don't use .NET) use Macs. Same with most mobile app devs (required for iOS, much easier to set up Android SDK on OS X vs. Windows). Not to mention quite a number of A/V pros. As for most general business tasks, a Mac can do those just fine - just not necessarily with the exact same software. Most F/OSS is *nix based and OS X is UNIX. Unlike other *nix systems, OS X has a fair amount of commercial software as well.
If you are buying a system primarily for gaming, then of course you want a Windows box. But even that is changing. Check out Steam or even the Mac App Store and you will see quite a few titles available. For everything else, there's BootCamp.
Ultimately a computer is a tool. Use the best tool for your needs. But understand that the needs of others may be quite different from yours. For me and my needs, a Mac works better. However I understand that for many, the opposite is true. But quite a number of people (including the primary author of this site), find Macs to be quite useful for getting "real" work done...
blzd - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
Never buying another one of these after the 15z battery would die after 1 year almost exactly.tviceman - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
Maxwell is jumping and screaming to get put inside this chassis!augiem - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
It would have been nice to see mbpr in some of the tests and benchmarks where applicable. After all, that's what this thing is trying to be. At the very least on the screen tests and battery life charts.JPDiueholm - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
Did you encounter any problems like:http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop...
Which has rendered the XPS 13 unusable!
petar_b - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
It would be nice to compare the above mentioned DELL notebook with ASUS NV550 touch screen. They have almost identical hardware, both come with SSD, however AUSU kept optical drive (blu ray burner), and still has two fans (one for each PU). for the height of 8mm-18mm DELL sacrifices optical drive, while ASUS kept height of 27mm (and has lots of empty space below, I am sure asus could save 3-4 mm if the case was closer to components. Price of asus is aprox 1200eu while dell is 2000 eu. Not sure if dell is overpriced...Flying Goat - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
Hmm...I can't find anything about an "NV550". Looks to me like the Asus N550 (No V) weighs 6 pounds, not 4.5, has a mechanical HDD, and a standard resolution screen, also does not have 802.11ac (Though it does have an ethernet port), so not at all comparable, except perhaps in terms of video card and CPU. If you don't care about the weight or the high res screen, then you shouldn't buy the Dell, but if that's what you want, the price seems competitive with comparable models.The ASUS model you should be comparing it to is the ASUS Zenbook UX51Vz-XH71, which costs $2400 (More than the Dell). It's also light, and has high res monitor. However, it has previous generation CPU/GPU (Ivy Bridge, 650GTX), no touch screen, only 8 GB RAM, no 802.11ac, and marginally lower resolution monitor. Only things it has going for it are an ethernet port and bing only 4 pounds instead of 4.44. Anyhow, given that price, I'd call the Dell's pretty competitive, if you want a light gaming laptop with a high res screen - there aren't a lot of models that fit that bill.
If you want a gaming laptop, but don't care about the weight, and are happy with a lower resolution screen, the price premium may not be worth it.