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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tipoo - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
Do the larger battery sizes change the size (do they jut out like older models) and how much do they change the weight?Zoolookuk - Monday, March 17, 2014 - link
Mmm, nice power brick - and it gets its own box too! Nice touch!inperfectdarkness - Tuesday, March 25, 2014 - link
It's thinner and lighter, but the cost, performance and features are less than that of MSI GT-60 20D-261. Dell would have done much better (in my opinion) if they'd gone with 16:10--which would have differentiated the XP15 from every other Windows laptop with > 1080p display.acme64 - Sunday, April 13, 2014 - link
You had me at the specs and exterior, you lost me at the interior.Irma Gonzalez - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
To put it mildly, this is the laptop that nightmares are made of. I purchased a fully loaded custom built XPS15-9530 with 512 SSD and full high end everything for over $3000. When it arrived, it wouldn't even boot up! What a failure and I feel that I've been ripped off royally. All I get is 3 beeps, a pause, then 3 beeps and the cycle repeats itself. Stay away from this brick is my advice. See for yourself my experience as I unpacked and turned it on:Can you believe this? https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=y2-m...
I cannot even give a review on anything else as it fails to boot up. Customer service transferred me to Tech support, which then asked "What do you want me to do?" Really, WHAT do I want? I working brand new unit. Instead after a 3 hour conversation being transferred to everyone under the sun (but on supervisor as I repeatedly asked for) I have no resolution.
mxruden - Sunday, April 27, 2014 - link
Thank you very much for the great review, Jarred!I already purchased my XPS 15, expecting it next week. I'm planning to occasionally play games on it and was wondering, are there any changes to GPU throttling issue since the time of your review? Have Dell done anything to solve this problem during this time?
Max
Zhongrui - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Is there anyone who succeeded installing OS X mavericks on XPS 15 (9530)? Do the wireless and Audio work fine? Any information and comments are highly appreciated.eanazag - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
I was looking at this laptop, the Blade, and the Macbook Pro Retina. Each one had some pros and cons to me. This was before the refresh occured on the Blade (new high res screen and GPU). I ended up not having enough money for any of them. If I were looking again, I'd be setting my eyes on the Blade because they fixed the screen drawback. I was still hoping for a Maxwell based GPU in the Blade that was a performance model - not what Nvidia released thus far.rpagespollo - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
Has someone checked the unit with a 1080p display? There is a lower configuration with a 1080p display instead of the HiDPI display.sethboyardee - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
When will the NEXT version of this type of system be coming out? I'm debating buying one now, but if a newer/better version is coming in the next few months, I will wait.Also - the battery is NOT (easily) removable, is that correct? That frightens me - I prefer to lug around an extra battery.