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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Erulian - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
My received 2 in 1 has many parts that did not fit well. For example, the screen's topmost layer bulges out at the bottom of the frame, and a few keys are poorly stabilized. The hinge is also too stiff, making opening the laptop a two-handed job. I wonder if I got an early production version as a result of the rush to get units out to customers. The OS install also feels stuttery at times. Since these issues do not impact normal use, I've so far not bothered with informing Dell.iq100 - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
When the XPS 15 9560 was purchased with on site service, it took six attempts to get it to work.Here are the parts replaced on just the last (sixth) attempt.
SERVICE REPORT
REPLACEMENT PARTS
No. Dell Part QTY Description Parts Retained by Customer
1 5R1JP 1 ASSY,CVR,BTM,W/BDG,9550 No
2 M0T6P 1 ASSY,PLMRST,W/FPR,80,9560 No
3 9TXK7 1 ADPT,AC,130W,DLTA,4.5,L6,V2,E5 No
4 RN699 1 ADPT,CON,VID,DNGL,DP2VGA,L No
5 64TM0 1 ASSY,CBL,DC-IN, 9550/5510 No
6 2JVNJ 1 CORD,PWR,125V,2.5A,1M,C5,E5,US No
7 5G0HC 1 ASSY,PWA,DTRBD,AUDIO,9560/5520 No
Old wounds, not healed only fester. I purchase two U3011s. Both suffered the same design defect. Dell replace one but NOT the other, claiming "it was their policy to replace only one". Go figure.
www.tinyurl.com/HellIsDell
grant3 - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
You're making me feel better... The xps-15-7500 6 weeks ago hasn't seen a day of use yet because of the massive delays in getting the touchpad + fingerprint defects fixed.I'm surprised the hardware is never tested on new machines before being shipped.
ET - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
My XPS 13 9350 definitely could use an upgrade, but I'd rather have a Ryzen in my laptop.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
Looks nice, just one major downside, and one "wish they'd made that available": the major downside is the complete absence of a USB type A connector. I know they include an adapter, but that's just one more thing to forget or lose. If a Surface tablet has enough space for one, the XPS should have space for one, too. 2 USB-C/TB + one USB A 3.2, and it'd be almost perfect. The other "complaint" is the battery size. I'd gladly pay a bit extra and lug another 200 g around and have a 90 Wh battery - now that'll be a "whole day without recharge" ultraportable.And yes, it would have been nice to have a 4800u as a processor option, but these units are designed over a year before rollout, and AMD wasn't all that ready to rumble last summer. Now they are, and I hope that Dell will add a Renoir option for their 2021 XPS models.
eastcoast_pete - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
Forgot to add: why only one (one!) heatpipe with a 42 W top TDP CPU? C'mon, Dell, add the 50 or 100g weight for a second heatpipe and give the thing the cooling it deserves!Deicidium369 - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
and will be going against the massively superior Tiger Lake - MX350 level graphics, and 17% slower with half the cores (4 vs 8) than the top end Renoir. Unlikely to ever see an AMD in an XPS13 class machine.tamsysmm - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
Yeah right, Renoir is such a failure. Only these cheap and low quality models available (ThinkPad X13 13” (AMD) Laptop, LENOVO ThinkPad T14s AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U, HP Elitebook 835/845/855 G7). Oh wait...Korguz - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
to Deicidium369, ANYTHING AMD makes is a failure.Spunjji - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
I just don't buy this "AMD weren't ready" shtick. Asus designed an *entirely new class of gaming laptop* around Renoir. It really wouldn't have been difficult for Dell to integrate Renoir into this design - which has released much later in the year than the Zephyrus 14 - if they had had any interest in doing so.Whether this is down to AMD's failure in OEM outreach, Dell's failure in imagination, or standard Intel shenanigans is unclear - but the end result is inferior products and TBH I'm sick of it.