Dell XPS 15 Haswell Edition: QHD+ with a Refined Design
by Jarred Walton on March 6, 2014 7:00 AM ESTDell XPS 15: Battery Life
Our final set of tests is for battery life, and here again we have a change or two to make. I did run our 2013 battery tests, but for 2014 I’ve made some changes. First, our “Heavy” test will now use the Windows Video app to play back a 1080p MP4 movie – the use of MKV files basically resulted in lower battery life by a fairly large margin, and MP4 files are readily available. I’m also considering dumping the “Moderate” workload and just sticking with Light and Heavy testing, as well as including approximate gaming battery life. There’s this mentality of “more information is always better”, but by the same token more information and testing means more time and thus less timely reviews. In general, our Medium battery life results have been pretty consistent about falling half way between our Light and Heavy tests, and with the newly modified Heavy test it’s just one extra benchmark with questionable value.
With that said, we continue to test with LCD backlighting set to 200 nits, WiFi is enabled, and earbuds are connected to the headphone jack. For the XPS 15 QHD+ display, 200 nits ended up being at exactly 50% brightness, which makes things easy on us. I do like that Dell has relatively consistent steps between backlight levels of around 35 nits per 10%. Many laptops that I’ve used in the past have been far less granular, sometimes going from 300 nits at 100% to 200 nits at 90% and then 10 nits intervals from there down to 0%.
Thanks in a large part to the 91Wh battery, the XPS 15 is able to place quite far up our battery life charts in terms of raw unplugged time. It’s not quite so awesome when we look at the normalized Min/Wh figures, but while that can be useful information at the end of the day people are going to be using the battery they get with this laptop. We measured nine hours of battery life in our light workload, nearly 6.5 hours in our moderate workload, and around 4.5 hours in our heavy workload.
Interestingly, our new Heavy test using the Video app with a lower bitrate 1080p MP4 results in battery life that’s basically the same as our previous Medium testing – so with Video, playing a fullscreen MP4 while streaming 1MBps and loading Internet pages every ten seconds isn’t really any more taxing than playing back an MP3 while surfing the web. It appears Microsoft's Video app can scale content without incurring a power penalty, whereas when I was using Media Player Classic previously higher resolution displays often did worse (e.g. look at the XPS 15 results above).
Trying to game off the mains is a different matter, however, and even with a relatively large battery the XPS 15 only manages less than two hours while running Skyrim. (If you’re wondering, for testing gaming battery life, we use the Balanced power profile with the GPU set to “Prefer Maximum Performance”. Then we load up our Skyrim save in the town of Whiterun and let the system run until the battery is drained. The camera begins to pan around the character so it’s at least moderately demanding, though other games are certainly more so.)
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tipoo - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
Do the larger battery sizes change the size (do they jut out like older models) and how much do they change the weight?Zoolookuk - Monday, March 17, 2014 - link
Mmm, nice power brick - and it gets its own box too! Nice touch!inperfectdarkness - Tuesday, March 25, 2014 - link
It's thinner and lighter, but the cost, performance and features are less than that of MSI GT-60 20D-261. Dell would have done much better (in my opinion) if they'd gone with 16:10--which would have differentiated the XP15 from every other Windows laptop with > 1080p display.acme64 - Sunday, April 13, 2014 - link
You had me at the specs and exterior, you lost me at the interior.Irma Gonzalez - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
To put it mildly, this is the laptop that nightmares are made of. I purchased a fully loaded custom built XPS15-9530 with 512 SSD and full high end everything for over $3000. When it arrived, it wouldn't even boot up! What a failure and I feel that I've been ripped off royally. All I get is 3 beeps, a pause, then 3 beeps and the cycle repeats itself. Stay away from this brick is my advice. See for yourself my experience as I unpacked and turned it on:Can you believe this? https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=y2-m...
I cannot even give a review on anything else as it fails to boot up. Customer service transferred me to Tech support, which then asked "What do you want me to do?" Really, WHAT do I want? I working brand new unit. Instead after a 3 hour conversation being transferred to everyone under the sun (but on supervisor as I repeatedly asked for) I have no resolution.
mxruden - Sunday, April 27, 2014 - link
Thank you very much for the great review, Jarred!I already purchased my XPS 15, expecting it next week. I'm planning to occasionally play games on it and was wondering, are there any changes to GPU throttling issue since the time of your review? Have Dell done anything to solve this problem during this time?
Max
Zhongrui - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Is there anyone who succeeded installing OS X mavericks on XPS 15 (9530)? Do the wireless and Audio work fine? Any information and comments are highly appreciated.eanazag - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
I was looking at this laptop, the Blade, and the Macbook Pro Retina. Each one had some pros and cons to me. This was before the refresh occured on the Blade (new high res screen and GPU). I ended up not having enough money for any of them. If I were looking again, I'd be setting my eyes on the Blade because they fixed the screen drawback. I was still hoping for a Maxwell based GPU in the Blade that was a performance model - not what Nvidia released thus far.rpagespollo - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
Has someone checked the unit with a 1080p display? There is a lower configuration with a 1080p display instead of the HiDPI display.sethboyardee - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
When will the NEXT version of this type of system be coming out? I'm debating buying one now, but if a newer/better version is coming in the next few months, I will wait.Also - the battery is NOT (easily) removable, is that correct? That frightens me - I prefer to lug around an extra battery.