Dell XPS 15 Haswell Edition: QHD+ with a Refined Design
by Jarred Walton on March 6, 2014 7:00 AM ESTDell XPS 15: General Performance
With all the talk of potential throttling, some of you might be concerned with general performance – and again, let me reiterate that a reboot appears to clear the problem, so hopefully Dell’s engineering time can track down the root cause in the coming days/weeks and fix it. Even if they can’t/don’t, the reality is that in most cases the throttling is a complete non-issue. PCMark and other tests that hit the CPU never showed any problems, and even most of the other graphics testing that I ran didn’t have problems. Of course, with a reboot apparently being a workaround, that’s not too surprising.
As you would expect from the hardware, the high-end model of the XPS 15 that we’re testing runs plenty fast and should satisfy anyone short of extreme performance types. If you want more CPU power in a laptop, you’ll basically need to get something quite a bit thicker and heavier, and even then the top model i7-4930MX/4940MX are only about 25% faster in practice (4.0GHz maximum Turbo Boost vs. 3.2GHz). The 512GB SSD also helps keep things running smoothly, 16GB RAM should be sufficient for quite some time (outside of perhaps running lots of VMs or a few other specific workloads), and when needed the GT 750M is waiting in the background to help with graphics/compute tasks. Here’s a look at our general performance testing results, which have been updated to use the latest versions of 3DMark11, 3DMark (2013), PCMark7, and PCMark8 along with Cinebench 11.5 and x264 HD 5. PCMark8 v2 scores are not (entirely) comparable with the earlier release, so for now we only have this one system tested, but that will change in time.
There’s really not much to say about overall performance. The new Dell XPS 15 may not be the absolute fastest laptop around, but it’s certainly a capable offering that can handle any reasonable load most users might want to run. If you need more performance, you likely knew before even looking at these graphs that that would be the case. As a premium consumer/business laptop, I know plenty of people that would be quite please to have one of these to tote around.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
152 Comments
View All Comments
wazx - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
How's Linux support?jphughan - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
Apparently the hardest thing is getting Optimus running correctly, and battery life isn't nearly as good for some reason, but otherwise a few people on the NotebookReview threads have gotten it working just fine. I think there's even a Wiki now with instructions.hasseb64 - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
Geezz!Your picture functionality in this article is below standard!
"return to article"
Returns me to page 1.
wazx - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
Does the CPU throttle a lot under CPU only loads?jphughan - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
No, in fact multiple people have observed that the CPU never even drops out of Turbo mode even under high-CPU load.JarredWalton - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
Yeah, this is one of my complaints: if the GPU is at 100% load, throttling the CPU (and GPU as well if needed) would be the smart thing to do. Right now, the CPU never throttles, and most of the time is at max Turbo if it's being used (i.e. not mostly idle).yacoub35 - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
Bad thermals and a terribly high price for mediocre performance? No thanks. Good review though.editorsorgtfo - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
recently i lost my password for an old dell xps and could not get in.. tried searching this website, couldnt find anything . doesnt help that forums have a different login but anyway this software worked for me http://windowsrecoverpassword.com/ if anyone runs into the same password problem for referencemsahni - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
Hi ..Just wished to find out if Samsung Magician with the RAPID mode would support the Samsung PM841 msata..... Would be a great enhancement if it did....
Cheers....
jphughan - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
The machine in 512GB form comes with the SM841 (using MLC flash), not the PM841 (using TLC flash), although newer ones appear to be coming with the PM851 (also using TLC). From what I can tell, those units are based on the 840 Pro, 840, and 840 Evo, respectively.Regardless, neither RAPID nor firmware updates seem to be available because Samsung does my directly support drives sold to OEMs and never to retail. Firmware updates might be available from Dell later, but I doubt RAPID will be. Then again some reviews indicate that RAPID actually decreases performance sometimes, and this SSD is plenty fast in real-world usage anyway, so I'm not worried.