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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dragonhype - Monday, March 10, 2014 - link
Thank You! I will look into it! Otherwise I love the laptop!xaml - Monday, March 10, 2014 - link
Regardless of what causes it, the electric noise issue also is present on the XPS 13 – both Sandy Bridge and Haswell.http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop...
jphughan - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
It sounds like the display performance impressions were taken before disabling Dell's questionably named "splendid mode", which grossly oversaturates colors. It's unfortunately enabled by default in the factory build and it's managed unintuitively in Windows Mobility Center -- but once it's disabled, multiple calibrators have found that the display delivers a DeltaE of less than 1 BEFORE calibration, and perfect coverage of sRGB. I have no idea why Dell shot themselves in the foot by setting up their system this way out of the box, but display perfection is just one buried option toggle away, no calibration required.skiboysteve - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
I could not find this setting in my windows mobility center. I see:Brightness, volume, battery status, screen orientation, external display, sync center, and presentation settings. The bottom right box is empty.
I'm going to contact dell support about this.
Also, I didn't get any throttling issues with mine.. so wonder if mine is different somehow
skiboysteve - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Found it, you have to install dell quickset to get these options. You get 4 more:Keyboard backlighting, fn key behavior (change between requiring fn press for f1-f12 or requiring fn press for media controls), touchpad on/off, and the SPLENDID color setting
jphughan - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
You need Dell Quickset installed and your built-in display needed to be enabled when your system booted (not just an external display).VisionX302 - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Great article. I picked one up a few months ago. This was my experience exactly. This thing should be a GREAT laptop, but it wasn't. I did some comparisons with the MacBook Pro using both OSX and Windows 8.1 under BootCamp and the new Lenovo X1 Carbon. The Dell was certainly a really good laptop, but the battery life was much better on the other two, resuming from sleep, even things like the keyboard and the touchpad in particular are much better on the other two. I was really hoping that the Dell would be my one size fits all solution for all my various needs, but it just left me wanting. If I hadn't compared it against the other laptops I wouldn't have noticed these little differences, but they really do add up. Things like the battery life are especially noticeable. With the Lenovo, I don't really even carry a charger anymore, I just top it off every couple of days. After a few hours, the Dell would have to be charged. The Mac very similar. I also had a problem with the touch screen that had to be replaced and ultimately returned the Dell due to a serious thermal issue / failure. I'm still waiting on the replacement. With those issues, I'm also left wondering whether the build quality is really there with the Dell or not.jphughan - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Dell has definitely had some QC issues on this system. Much of those issues pertain to the QHD+ display (dead pixels, dust under the glass, pressure point revealing a weird color distortion in a corner when gripping the lid a certain way) and there's also the widely reported coil whine issue that Dell is currently investigating after numerous reports. The unresponsive touchscreen issue was resolved with a firmware update though.hfm - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
If I recall the notebookreview threads the firmware update actually bricked some systems and they needed service. I wouldn't touch this thing until Dell gets a handle on the numerous build quality issues. It's really a shame as there are so many plusses with it.I'm personally waiting for the thin-and-lights sporting the 860M that are imminent. MSI GS60 looks like a 4.4lb monster.
jphughan - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Two people reported bricks that were fixed with replacement displays. I don't know if that was due to a bug in the firmware updater code or perhaps a bug in the existing firmware on the display itself, in which case those people would either have to stick permanently with buggy firmware or get a replacement display anyway that can actually be updated. In any case, my firmware updated fine for what it's worth.The QC issues are indeed disappointing. I ordered before they came to light but I've been fortunate to only have the coil whine issue. I don't even consider that much of an issue since I've had that issue on numerous other laptops that use high-wattage AC adapters. But if Dell does actually fix it, I'll consider using my warranty to get a replacement motherboard at that time. I've got 3 years, after all.