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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tarqsharq - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Like KB vs Kb...Omega215D - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
I'll chime in to back this statement as well. Display manufacturers in the mobile sector (probably in general though) state that qHD is quarter HD (960x540) while QHD is Quad HD (2560x1440) and then there's WQXGA, aka QHD+ (3200x1800).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_reso...
JarredWalton - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Thanks -- it was late, and I actually decided to change from calling it 3K to calling it QHD+, but then for some reason I had it in my foggy brain that the Q should be lowercase. LOL. Fixed now!GTVic - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
I failed a Calculus course once because I used a d without a tail in the final exam and got all zeros for otherwise correct answers. We hadn't taken partial derivatives yet and I had no idea that the no-tail d had a different meaning. Teacher wouldn't listen to reason so I had to repeat.Silma - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
I've had the Dell XPS 15 Platinum as main working machine since the end of November and I love it.The cons.
- Battery life, while absolutely fine, should be even better. There should be a way to get the processor or whatever to consume even less.
- No Ethernet port. This really sucks big time, I don't like to transport adaptators. Wi-Fi performance is superb though, although:
- No Wifi AC. It's not a big deal per se as there are almost no AC points at this time, but this should be part of a high end laptop nevertheless.
- qHD+ display. Absolutely nothing to do with the superb screen, but scaling isn't where it should be in Windows (most notably not possible to dpi scale differently per screen). Photoshop sucks big time on such high resolution.
The pluses
- It's beautiful and rock solid
- 4 USB 3 ports
- Full size HDMI plus mini Display Port. I've been using the XPS with an additional 2560x1440 external display and it works well.
- Silent. This laptop is really silent in Office situations. Super silent.
- QHD+ display. Outstanding when no scaling problem, super crisp, nice colors, amazing contrast.
- Rock solid performance. 512 GB SSD + 16GB RAM + Windows 8.1 = faster than light.
Especially start time.
- Very good audio. For a laptop, audio is perfectly acceptable and quite louder than most laptops I've used. Skype, with the 2 mics for auto noise cancellation is great.
- Acceptable gaming performances. This isn't a gamer's laptop. But in case you need, it's quite fine.
- As a test I did a full World of Warcraft raid (>3 hours) at 3200x1800. Sure you will hear the laptop then. But it never throttled.
All in all, I highly recommend the machine. To me the only alternative will be the new Thinkpad X1 Carbon with Haswell. the XPS 15 is not an ultrabook ( I think because of the 37W processor) but it has 95 % of ultrabook advantages with almost 0 % disadvantages: most of everything is user upgreadable such as battery, SSD, additional SSD, and so forth.
Silma - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Seems that I am mistaken and that the Wi Fi is AC compliantAccord99 - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Yes, with an Asus AC66 I can get transfer rates of 40-50 MB/s.Notmyusualid - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
No GigE port?I'll fold, thanks.
peterfares - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
Windows 8.1 DID add support for per-monitor DPI-awareness. Pretty much nothing takes advantage of it, but it is possible.http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/de...
peterfares - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
Here is a demo application to try it out! Scroll to the bottom. Works perfectly on my computer.http://emoacht.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/per-monito...