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.
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Flying Goat - Sunday, March 9, 2014 - link
Calling this a "gaming laptop" may be a bit optimistic... There are much better mobile GPUs, but the 750 is about as good as you're going to see in a thin and light machine.Death666Angel - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
Good review, interesting laptop, but not for me (15" is just too large for my use case). I've been using a Samsung tablet with 11.6" 1080p display for the past ~ year and I've been running it at 125% with no problems and I'm no user of moder UI apps. All my note taking, browsing, the occasional gog or steam game have been very fine with that resolution and scaling. :-)Flying Goat - Sunday, March 9, 2014 - link
Looks like a nice laptop. If it weren't for concerns over throttling and the lack of dedicated page up/down keys, I'd probably have bought one after reading the review. I've been waiting for a Haswell update of Asus's 15 inch Zenbook, or something comparable, and this pretty much fits the bill, modulo those two concerns.snuuggles - Sunday, March 9, 2014 - link
I'm still not sure why you wouldn't just get the mbp and bootcamp it. The price difference is minor considering the mbp is simply a better machine, with better support, and gives you a choice between osx and windows.I am frankly stunned that nobody can beat Mac at making a windows machine--and they aren't even -trying-! Wtf is wrong with dell etc?
jphughan - Sunday, March 9, 2014 - link
Did you read the comments earlier about this? Here are SOME issues with Boot Camping a Mac:- Some hardware requires proprietary Apple drivers which hardly ever get updated on the Windows side
- Thunderbolt ports are not hot-pluggable (i.e. if you didn't have the device connected when you booted, it won't be usable until you reboot).
- The discrete GPU runs all the time (because of Apple's proprietary implementation of switable graphics rather than using Optimus), resulting in much worse battery life
- The keyboard layout isn't ideal for a PC (frankly lack of a TRUE "Delete" key in addition to the Backspace key that Apple calls Delete is a dealbreaker for me whether in Windows or Mac OS X, same for not having Home/End/PgUp/PgDn at all, even as functions of other keys)
- Support from Apple for issues you encounter on the Windows side is probably going to be difficult
Teerav13 - Friday, March 21, 2014 - link
From someone that runs bootcamped windows on a retina mbp all day every day. The worst part by far is the battery life. In visual studio and doing casual web browsing I can expect a 2.5-3hr runtime with reasonable screen brightness. No switchable GPU support in windows is a mega bummer.The keyboard layout is annoying (but not a dealbreaker).
I recently ordered the dell because of these two factors. I really hope the coil whine that people are making a splash about is either resolved or a non-issue.
As a side note though, I worry because every review or comparison I have really seen seems to favor the macbook. The only thing they don't really take into account in them is the users OS preference.
Any idea when a refresh would happen on this line of laptops?
cptcolo - Sunday, March 9, 2014 - link
I can't wait for the Lenovo equivalent. 0.7" thick, 4.4lbs, and a 91 wHr battery is impressiveHrel - Monday, March 10, 2014 - link
Looks like the Gigabyte Laptops are still better. P35K and P25K I think are the model numbers? 15" and 14"? Still waiting on the full review of those btw.lucyfek - Monday, March 10, 2014 - link
And this is just another thing that makes it suck - I'm "fighting" surface 2 pro connected to external monitor. You either get good picture on the tab and really crappy on 1920*1200 screen or your eyes will bleed when looking on the tab but external screen will look good. The best I got to was I lowered resolution on the surface (it's small so 720p actually look ok) and the external display goes with small text (and this is fine).Now if MS allowed to manage themes (not just wallpaper) and there was a way to limit the size of window borders (waste of space).
I'm trying hard to stay within environment limitation (no classic shell yet, trying to keep it "corporate") but usability does suck. And for what? - I removed all metro apps anyway.
Jeffrey Bosboom - Monday, March 10, 2014 - link
You can reduce the window border thickness with the BorderWidth and PaddedBorderWidth values in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics key in the registry.