Dell XPS 15 Haswell Edition: QHD+ with a Refined Design
by Jarred Walton on March 6, 2014 7:00 AM ESTDell XPS 15: Battery Life
Our final set of tests is for battery life, and here again we have a change or two to make. I did run our 2013 battery tests, but for 2014 I’ve made some changes. First, our “Heavy” test will now use the Windows Video app to play back a 1080p MP4 movie – the use of MKV files basically resulted in lower battery life by a fairly large margin, and MP4 files are readily available. I’m also considering dumping the “Moderate” workload and just sticking with Light and Heavy testing, as well as including approximate gaming battery life. There’s this mentality of “more information is always better”, but by the same token more information and testing means more time and thus less timely reviews. In general, our Medium battery life results have been pretty consistent about falling half way between our Light and Heavy tests, and with the newly modified Heavy test it’s just one extra benchmark with questionable value.
With that said, we continue to test with LCD backlighting set to 200 nits, WiFi is enabled, and earbuds are connected to the headphone jack. For the XPS 15 QHD+ display, 200 nits ended up being at exactly 50% brightness, which makes things easy on us. I do like that Dell has relatively consistent steps between backlight levels of around 35 nits per 10%. Many laptops that I’ve used in the past have been far less granular, sometimes going from 300 nits at 100% to 200 nits at 90% and then 10 nits intervals from there down to 0%.
Thanks in a large part to the 91Wh battery, the XPS 15 is able to place quite far up our battery life charts in terms of raw unplugged time. It’s not quite so awesome when we look at the normalized Min/Wh figures, but while that can be useful information at the end of the day people are going to be using the battery they get with this laptop. We measured nine hours of battery life in our light workload, nearly 6.5 hours in our moderate workload, and around 4.5 hours in our heavy workload.
Interestingly, our new Heavy test using the Video app with a lower bitrate 1080p MP4 results in battery life that’s basically the same as our previous Medium testing – so with Video, playing a fullscreen MP4 while streaming 1MBps and loading Internet pages every ten seconds isn’t really any more taxing than playing back an MP3 while surfing the web. It appears Microsoft's Video app can scale content without incurring a power penalty, whereas when I was using Media Player Classic previously higher resolution displays often did worse (e.g. look at the XPS 15 results above).
Trying to game off the mains is a different matter, however, and even with a relatively large battery the XPS 15 only manages less than two hours while running Skyrim. (If you’re wondering, for testing gaming battery life, we use the Balanced power profile with the GPU set to “Prefer Maximum Performance”. Then we load up our Skyrim save in the town of Whiterun and let the system run until the battery is drained. The camera begins to pan around the character so it’s at least moderately demanding, though other games are certainly more so.)
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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...