Dell XPS 15 Haswell Edition: QHD+ with a Refined Design
by Jarred Walton on March 6, 2014 7:00 AM ESTDell XPS 15: Gaming Performance
With that lengthy preface about throttling, let’s just make it clear that all of the benchmark results here are from post-reboot testing, so throttling should not be present. What we find is that the GT 750M is a reasonable mainstream mobile GPU that can easily handle our “Value” settings and outside of the most demanding titles (e.g. Metro: Last Light) it can run our “Mainstream” settings as well. Not surprisingly, “Enthusiast” quality is mostly out of the question, except with older and/or less demanding titles. As for gaming at the native 3200x1800 resolution, that’s generally more than you can hope to get out of the GT 750M. Some games will certainly break 30 FPS at low to moderate settings, but in most cases opting for a lower resolution with higher quality settings will provide the better experience.
I also want to make note here that with 2014, we’re going to be reducing the number of games we test in our laptop reviews. There’s a real concern that running too many GPU-centric tests can distract from the overall target market for a device. While I’ve gone ahead and included most of the games from our 2013 test suite in Mobile Bench, moving forward we have decided to focus on just four games. Our current list consists of Bioshock Infinite, GRID 2, Metro: Last Light, and StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm. These should provide a sufficient amount of data that we’ll be able to say how well a system handles gaming workloads. In some reviews we will also include other titles (e.g. if there’s a new GPU that warrants additional investigative work), including some less demanding games that will better illustrate the “casual gaming” aspect.
Considering this isn’t really being targeted at a gaming audience – Dell has their Alienware brand if that’s what you’re after – the XPS 15 still manages to hold its own in the gaming tests. Throttling concerns aside, when the fans and GPU are running as expected, gaming at one fourth the native resolution and high detail settings is easily accomplished, and even 1080p medium/high detail is possible.
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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.