The Dell XPS 13 (9300) Review: Return of the King
by Brett Howse on July 16, 2020 10:00 AM ESTBattery Life
One area that the XPS line has historically done very well was in battery life. This has been a combination of Dell building very efficient devices, as well as providing above-average battery capacities. For the 2020 XPS 13, Dell is offering a 52 Wh battery, which is somewhat smaller than they have in previous models. We shall see what kind of an impact that has on the overall runtime of this notebook. To fairly compare models, all devices are tested with the display brightness set to 200 nits.
Web Battery Life
Dell starts out strong with an excellent result on our web battery life test. It managed to achieve over 13.5 hours of runtime on this fairly demanding web workload.
The normalized result removes the battery size from the equation so we can get a clearer picture on overall device efficiency, and we can see why the XPS 13 has lost none of its amazing battery life despite Dell shrinking the battery capacity. Dell continues to lead the field here, at least with the 1920x1200 display that we reviewed. Certainly the higher-resolution, wide-gamut 3840x2400 panel would impact this result significantly.
PCMark 10 Modern Office Battery
A new benchmark added to the stable is the PCMark 10 Modern Office Battery test, which runs through several common office scenarios on a ten-minute loop. If a device is able to finish the tasks quicker, it gets to idle for a higher percentage of the ten-minute test loop, so efficiency is important, but performance also plays a factor. The XPS 13 once again achieved a very strong result, almost matching the web runtime.
Movie Playback
On the movie playback we generally see devices offer even more battery life than the other tests, but the XPS 13 showed such platform efficiency in the previous results that it was not able to extend that much here, but it is still a very strong result.
Breaking the movie playback into number of times you can play a very long movie, the XPS 13 almost achieves six complete playbacks of The Avengers before shutting down.
Charge Time
Dell ships a 45-Watt AC adapter with the XPS 13, which charges over a USB-C connector. Since there are Thunderbolt 3 ports on both sides of the notebook, it allows you to charge from whatever side is most convenient, which can help with cable management and is always a nice bonus.
The small charger is plenty to run the notebook, but the charge rate is not spectacular. Luckily, the excellent battery life does mitigate this. Dell does offer an ExpressCharge option which will charge the battery to 80% in one hour and fully charge in two hours, however the user has to specifically choose this if they desire it using the Dell Power Manager software.
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sonny73n - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
Haha... Dell XPS i7 $1400 gets beat up by Acer 4700U $650. Lovely!Based on some comments here, Intel fanboys are a bunch of sore losers.
Walkeer - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
a king...with intel...in 2020 XDikjadoon - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
I really hope manufacturers copy Dell's strong improvements here: no silly keyboard gimmicks or bloatware (looking at you, *****ing HP), improve the screen contrast, glare, and ratio (you gotta stare it all day), and nail battery life. With a near 16-hour real-world battery life, it absolutely dissuades ARM transitions purely for efficiency.But, while I love Dell's improvements, a few hard-to-swallow regressions here:
-- no type-A port. That's just frustrating. Are we *really* in a type-C-only world? No. And Dell knows that. Why is a "productivity" device (16:10 panel) handicapped? Did we need it thinner? Where the hell are all the PCH's USB / PCIe bandwidth going? Into the ... charge port? We should have 4X type-C ports these days.
-- soldered SSD. An absolutely groundless regression. Goodbye to a last-chance backup if the motherboard dies. And don't even think about out-of-warranty replacements.
-- toasty, toasty, toasty bottoms. 42 W PL2, even with GORE, is absolutely "crazy", as Anandtech points out. Likewise, Notebookcheck notched a nearly 30C idle bottom panel in a 20C room: the heat just exudes out even at idle. Add in a heavy load and you're at a toasty 46C in the back bottom (https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-9300-Cor...
And, it should be noted: Dell still sells the older Comet Lake-U models, so buyer beware which "XPS 13" you click on. The product names are identical and both use "10th gen" CPUs.
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
High heat, lack of useful ports and soldered storage make this a worthless device.sonny73n - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link
Buyers don’t have to beware. Just use it for a couple weeks then return. I went to dell website to check the price and specs of the model AT reviews. They have everything messy. No filter and no year of release for all the laptops they’re selling. Only “for home” and “for work”. wtf? I can’t buy a “work” laptop just to watch youtube at home? How about a laptop for both home and work?I used to prefer dell products especially monitors but since they became intel’s lap dog to monopolize the market, I put them on my “do not buy” list. Overpriced dells are for idiots.
stanleyipkiss - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
It WOULD be a solid laptop (the perfect ultrabook even) -- if they had included at least ONE USB A port.sonny73n - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
NOT when it costs $1400.Sharma_Ji - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
Qualcomm based atheros wireless modules were so good, I don't believe how killer ones are so bad, that intel acquired killer, sad that Qualcomm based modules will no longer will be available.invinciblegod - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
I don't know, are Qualcomm's wireless modules that good for Windows? I've had many problems in enterprises where Qualcomm's wifi was always unstable compared to Intel's. Though admittedly, at home I never had a problem.shadowjk - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link
Qualcomm based Killer WiFi is borderline unusable. If you can get the hardware running on the regular drivers from Qualcomm it gets tolerable.