The Dell XPS 15 9550 Review: Infinity Edge Lineup Expands
by Brett Howse on March 4, 2016 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life and Charge Time
The XPS 15 is available with two battery sizes. If you opt for the base model, it comes with a 2.5” SATA drive and a 56 Wh battery. If you opt for a device with the M.2 SSD, the extra space taken up by the 2.5” drive is replaced with more battery cells, giving you 84 Wh of capacity. It also adds about 0.5 lbs of weight to the device, but if you are going to be working away from an outlet, the SSD model should give much better battery life.
But, with the high resolution display, and wider color gamut, battery life is going to take a hit compared to something with a more traditional display. Since Dell sent us the UHD model, that’s the one we have to test.
To test battery life we have two tests. The light test involves light web browsing, with the display set to 200 nits brightness. The heavy test increases the pages loaded by the browser, adds a 1 MB/s file download, and includes movie playback. All testing is done with Edge as the browser.
Light Battery
The XPS 15, with its quad-core CPU and high resolution display, can’t keep up with the best devices for battery life, even on light usage. At just under 7.5 hours, it is well under the XPS 13 and Surface Book results, despite the larger battery. It is also below the XPS 15 9530 results, and that device has a 91 Wh battery and 3200x1800 display.
Heavy Battery
With the extra CPU workload, as well as constant network use, the battery life falls to just 4:23. This is exactly the same as the XPS 15 9530 score, so there is certainly some more efficiency because the display is higher resolution and the battery is slightly smaller on the new 9550 model. It’s still not a great result though.
Normalized Battery
By removing the battery size from the equation, we can get an overall feel for platform efficiency. The XPS 15, despite the higher resolution display, does outperform the XPS 15 9530 on the heavy results, but the UHD display certainly hurts it compared to other devices. The Surface Book with discrete GPU is over double the efficiency, but with a dual-core processor. The Lenovo Y700 has the same processor and GPU, but a much lower resolution display, and it comes out quite a bit ahead of the XPS 15. For those that are normally plugged in, the UHD display is fantastic, but be warned, it’s a big hit on battery life.
Charge Time
The other side of battery life is how long it takes to charge. With an 84 Wh battery, this is a significant amount of capacity to top up. Luckily Dell ships the XPS 15 with a 130-Watt power adapter.
At 148 minutes, the XPS 15 charges very quickly. At least with the less than stellar battery life, once you do plug it in, it gets back on its feet pretty quickly.
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Ryan Smith - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
We've checked, and there's only a single drive (and not a RAID device) present in the Windows device manager.Soac - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
I don`t think I have explained correctly. The Laptop came setup in RAID mode on the BIOS, from the forums I saw that it happened to everyone, and yes this is for the 1 single drive 512 samsung m.2. Hence why I said it didn`t make sense. However, if you change the BIOS setting to AHCI the read speeds go up to 1.7Gbps.-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 5.0.3 x64 (C) 2007-2015 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1723.554 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 600.373 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.000 MB/s [ 0.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.000 MB/s [ 0.0 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 0.000 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 0.000 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.000 MB/s [ 0.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.000 MB/s [ 0.0 IOPS]
Test : 1024 MiB [C: 21.6% (102.8/476.4 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/03/09 23:13:32
OS : Windows 10 [10.0 Build 10586] (x64)
Funny enough, someone was saying that in RAID mode the drive felt faster... so it would be cool if you could test it.
medi03 - Sunday, March 6, 2016 - link
Would be interesting to see how it fares at gaming vs amd's carrizo notebooks.iks - Sunday, March 6, 2016 - link
While this is surely a great piece of tech, with a superb screen, capable hardware, and decent, cooling I still wonder, what is the target audience of this and other similar devices? Have the guys over at Dell and other companies actually tried to do productive work that involves a lot of typing on this so-called "keyboard"? Especially programming? Using impossible to hit buttons with no proper spacing, a short F row, minuscule arrows and no dedicated page up / page down / home / end. Sorry, but a keyboard like that is just dumb, and a torture to use.nerd1 - Sunday, March 6, 2016 - link
Say that to millions of mac users. Apple's DESKTOP keyboard is even worse than this.BPB - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
I am a developer, and I use a company issued Dell at work (decent specs). The keyboard doesn't matter to me since I dock it at work. At home I leave it closed and plug a monitor/keyboard/mouse into it. So why should I care? I do occasionally use it by itself, but I don't mind since it's not very often. I guess what I'm saying is, how many developers use a notebook without plugging in peripherals?iks - Thursday, March 10, 2016 - link
Well, I'm learning to use Vim to overcome button limitations on the different keyboards I may get to work on in future. People work on 60% boards after all.As far as plugging peripherals in / out, aren't you afraid of the ports coming loose over time?
jasonelmore - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
I wanted to point out that the laptop on this article has different materials depending on if you get the 1080p version vs the 4k version.The 1080p version has a lot more plastic vs the 4k one.
nerd1 - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
1080p version lacks the glossy glass (which I hate), but it is identical elsewhere.rstuart - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
I own one of these, but I run Linux. Typical Linux issues - if enable the NVidia card it doesn't boot, and it will be because NVidia hasn't released drivers for it yet. I'm mostly a command line user, so that doesn't worry me overly. The Intel drivers causing the kernel to crash 2 out of 3 boots on the other hand drove me nuts. The latest kernel has fixed that thank god, so it's rock solid now. I was surprised to read people running Windows are having the similar issues - here I was putting it down to Intel's poor support for Linux. It's more of a case of Intel not having good drivers, at all, on anything. Be patient, and be forgiving of Dell - it's Intel's problem, not Dell's.Apart from the display, it works extraordinarily well out of the box. As a Linux user, this is not something I'm used to. On the down side, there is not much in the box as Dell hasn't got their act together yet accessories - mostly because of the change to USB-C.
The one thing I do question myself about is going with the UHD display. It is gorgeous. But according to Dell the HD display roughly doubles the battery life, and in reality eye candy fade but not having to worry about charging during the day would have been appreciated for a long, long time.
One other feature not mentioned in the review is everything (battery, WiFi card, DIMM's, HDD/SSD, fans for cleaning) is accessible with the removal of 8 or so easy to find screws on the back. Unlike some other makes, Dell laptops have been getting better in this regard over the years.