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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
224 Comments
View All Comments
gescom - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
You have a kind of sick desperation in your laugh.https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T14s...
Korguz - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
gescom, more like a sick desperation to keep praising his god intel, and to bash amd any chance he can.ikjadoon - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
IIRC, this was not mentioned by Anandtech, but this laptop (and many, many, many, many) others from the premium Ultrabook category are partnered directly with Intel through the Project Athena program, aka the "Engineered for Mobile Performance" badge you sometimes see.It gives a lot of manufacturing / R&D support while also demanding a minimum set of specifications; I think, in the end, it's a win for OEMs as they get a better product (a virtuous cycle) and they get R&D support directly from Intel on the entire notebook (not just the CPU or wireless).
I think 9/10 premium Ultrabooks are Project Athena certified.
I do believe AMD has launched a rival program with Renoir, but it may take time to gain traction. Tiger Lake vs Zen3-based mobile is going to be exciting and AMD absolutely deserves far better than the relatively average performers they keep getting stuck with.
See Anandtech's reporting here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14444/intels-projec...
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
I've said for years that AMD needs to partner with a smaller brand like MSI or Clevo and show the world what a proper AMD notebook looks like.I was saying this back in the Llano days where nobody wanted to make a ultrabook style laptop with the A8-3500mx.
jeremyshaw - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
They did, with HP, a company with historically strong AMD ties in their consumer line. It didn't go well. Whomever thought bulldozer on netbooks was a good idea, is hopefully no longer calling shots at AMD or HP anymore.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
I made the mistake of buying one, and it was bad. The sooner that whole period is buried and forgotten, the better for AMD.lmcd - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
If you're referring to the entire Bulldozer family history, I gotta say my Toshiba Satellite with an A8-4500M was actually pretty solid for a number of years. Yea the battery life was trash but performance held up for years, especially with dual-channel memory that I upgraded it to.drothgery - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
Depends what they think AMD and Intel will be offering next year, I'd imagine.Most vendors wouldn't have even started designing an AMD premium notebook until after they had real performance and power usage data on Ryzen 4xxx, and even then wouldn't bother unless they were fairly confident Intel wouldn't be able to match it fairly soon.
Cinebench multithread (and other embarrassingly parallel benchmarks) notwithstanding, there's really not much value in more than 4 core/8 threads for most consumers (servers and workstations are another matter); Amdhal's law is still real. But the optics of selling 4 cores vs 8 aren't great, and at least initially, Tiger Lake U will still be a quad core.
Spunjji - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
"Most vendors wouldn't have even started designing an AMD premium notebook until after they had real performance and power usage data on Ryzen 4xxx"They would have had that data a long time before the platform shipped - Asus couldn't have designed the class-redefining Zephyrus 14 without it. They managed to create a whole new category of gaming sub-notebook, yet most of the larger OEMs couldn't manage to get one into an existing Ultrabook chassis. 🤔
Deicidium369 - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
Yeah agree there - the OEMs have had access to the specifics of Renoir - but likely will repurpose previous designs, since Renoir is largely like the previous (3xxx APUs, don't know the names) - from an electrical and packaging point of view.I can't imagine having a laptop as a gaming platform - Opus Magnum maybe - but not BF5. But every use case is different - there used to be a DTR slot in my lineup - but not any more.