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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Gigaplex - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link
I'm a programmer, but I rarely use the laptop keyboard. I plug it into a dock and use a desktop keyboard.TEAMSWITCHER - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link
So .. you agree with me?mjz_5 - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
I hope they fixed the Bluetooth. I can’t move three feet away when trying to listen to music on my 2016 XPS 13”. Same headphone on my iPhone, I can go all over the house.Tunnah - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
I used to say "unless it's Intel I'm not gonna bother", am now just realising with the latest AMD mobile chipsets, I've firmly swung in the other direction. It feels almost daft to go with Intel nowadays considering what AMD are putting out. I'd love one of these with new Ryzen in itisthisavailable - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
This "king" is overrated. Surface Laptop is miles better at a lower price. The i3 and i5 versions of xps are useless because they are G1. 4gb ram version is, again, useless. It's not even a $1000 laptop.hanselltc - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
The lack of Ryzen here means there are sub 600 dollar laptops running laps around this when any resemblance of stress is present. Makes this a lot less attractive.Deders - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
Not sure why people still say windows 10 still handles HDR poorly, have they tried it since the HDR update? Apps look fine to me, everything looks fantastic (if a little bright)trenzterra - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
I had the XPS 9300 for a couple months before deciding to sell it. There are some issues with this laptop which wasn't highlighted in this review:- The display is really bright and all, but I had issues with screen colour uniformity -- on my set, there were two vertical "bars" where the colour had a little bit of green tint to it, noticeable on white or grey backgrounds. I had my display replaced twice before getting a decent one. After the lockdown was lifted, I went to look at display units in shops and it appears many of the Full HD and 4K sets had the same issue. Perhaps it's my eyes, or maybe panel lottery is particularly bad on this laptop.
- For some reason, my microSD card kept getting stuck in the slot (slot seemed misaligned or something, causing the spring mechanism to get stuck). In the end, I had to get a replacement laptop from Dell.
- The current firmware, 1.0.11 (and the previous, 1.0.10), has issues outputting video with certain USB-C to HDMI adapters. This has been going on for two months with no fix in sight, despite bringing it up to Dell's attention: https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-13-9300-BIO... . Further, users are also reporting issues connecting to certain LG and Samsung USB-C/ TB3 monitors (issue reported at launch but no fix yet -- apparently, you need to plug a separate power cable into the laptop and then plug the LG/ Samsung monitor into the other port just to get it to work, notwithstanding that the Samsung/ LG monitors are supposed to do PD passthrough). TB3/ PD support is really buggy on the XPS 9300 at the moment, and I wonder if they will ever get it fixed.
- If you have the Fast Startup option disabled (which is essentially hibernation in a different form), or restart the laptop, the laptop takes about 1min to startup, even on a whooping fast SSD. No fix in sight despite a 10-page+ long thread on the Dell forums: https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/Bug-New-XPS-13-...
- The laptop gets hot very easily at the palmrest area. I think this is a byproduct of the carbon fibre palmrest which kinda traps heat.
Overall, I found the laptop to be of rather good build quality and very good to look at. However, the flaws and lack of after-sales support (in terms of fixing BIOS/ firmware issues) from Dell has left me somewhat disappointed and I decided to cut my losses and sold it. Now I'm holding out for Renoir options...
trenzterra - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
To clarify on the boot times, the laptop gets stuck on the Dell "loading" logo for about 40 seconds, even on a fresh install without bloatware. It seems like a BIOS bug (where something is being stuck) more than anything else, but since Fast Startup is left enabled by default (I prefer to disable it to reduce unnecessary writes to the SSD), Dell doesn't seem keen to fix it.Spunjji - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
These issues remind me of most of Dell's high-end releases since at least 2008. Shame :/