Dell XPS 15: General Performance

With all the talk of potential throttling, some of you might be concerned with general performance – and again, let me reiterate that a reboot appears to clear the problem, so hopefully Dell’s engineering time can track down the root cause in the coming days/weeks and fix it. Even if they can’t/don’t, the reality is that in most cases the throttling is a complete non-issue. PCMark and other tests that hit the CPU never showed any problems, and even most of the other graphics testing that I ran didn’t have problems. Of course, with a reboot apparently being a workaround, that’s not too surprising.

As you would expect from the hardware, the high-end model of the XPS 15 that we’re testing runs plenty fast and should satisfy anyone short of extreme performance types. If you want more CPU power in a laptop, you’ll basically need to get something quite a bit thicker and heavier, and even then the top model i7-4930MX/4940MX are only about 25% faster in practice (4.0GHz maximum Turbo Boost vs. 3.2GHz). The 512GB SSD also helps keep things running smoothly, 16GB RAM should be sufficient for quite some time (outside of perhaps running lots of VMs or a few other specific workloads), and when needed the GT 750M is waiting in the background to help with graphics/compute tasks. Here’s a look at our general performance testing results, which have been updated to use the latest versions of 3DMark11, 3DMark (2013), PCMark7, and PCMark8 along with Cinebench 11.5 and x264 HD 5. PCMark8 v2 scores are not (entirely) comparable with the earlier release, so for now we only have this one system tested, but that will change in time.

PCMark 7 (2013)

Cinebench R11.5 - Single-Threaded Benchmark

Cinebench R11.5 - Multi-Threaded Benchmark

x264 HD 5.x

x264 HD 5.x

Futuremark 3DMark (2013)

Futuremark 3DMark (2013)

Futuremark 3DMark 11

There’s really not much to say about overall performance. The new Dell XPS 15 may not be the absolute fastest laptop around, but it’s certainly a capable offering that can handle any reasonable load most users might want to run. If you need more performance, you likely knew before even looking at these graphs that that would be the case. As a premium consumer/business laptop, I know plenty of people that would be quite please to have one of these to tote around.

Dell XPS 15: Throttling or Not? Dell XPS 15: Gaming Performance
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  • Dagger55555 - Sunday, January 11, 2015 - link

    Don't buy this product (or any product) from Dell if you care about service and quality. I purchased 2 XPS laptops with 3-Year Next Business Day + Complete Care for this product. It took 7 weeks to get a keyboard fixed! AT 6 weeks I was told my expectations were too high and I should be more concerned about their processes than results. At one point they sent me a replacement computer - it game with a busted keyboard! Emails to management went unanswered. Warning: If your computer won't boot then their policy is they wont come on-site (min 1 week down). Warning: everything is "available of parts" which they never seem to have for me. I'd like to say this was a 1 time issue, but my Venue 11 had to be serviced multiple times so far (< year old) with the last issue taking 3 weeks to get a new keyboard. My alienware 14R2 (with next day complete care) took a week for a hard disk (that wasn't in stock). I've been sold incompatible products and products with incorrect specifications. I've been more hours than I care talking to service, sales and customer service because no single person can seem to make a useful decision. I could go on for pages, but you probably get the idea. BTW I was denied all compensation for my troubles even though I feel they are in breech of contract.
  • Zyuzya - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link

    I don't think there's a chance you'll answer me as this is an old article, but I'll try anyway:))
    Are you sure about the PPS for this monitor ? I want to buy Dell xps 6842 , and for a whole day couldn't find any info if it has pps or not. Finally I found this:
    http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/usdhs1/help-me-cho...
    but due to this your Qhd+ can't have PPS either . Any ideas?

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