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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darwinosx - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
You could not play me to buy Dell anything. Cheap junk and forget about support after you buy.kgh00007 - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
How about the WiFi performance?The previous version had poor connection and throughput issues due to a design fault? Is this one any better?
My XPS 15 L502x, which is two generations behind this one, has the exact same throttling issues. I would not buyba laptop with any sign of throttling issues from the start, it will only get worse over time. Look for a laptop with good thermals from the start.
In order to game on my L502x with an i7-2360QM and GT525M, I have to set a "Game" profile with the CPU Max set to 99% to avoid turbo boost on the CPU so that it doesn't cook itself and the GPU. The heatsinks are connected just like they are in this newer model!
jphughan - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
WiFi had some issues early on in this system but they turned out to be driver-related. Intel released version 16.6 that seems to have fixed the vast majority of problems. Some people on NotebookReview are still having issues, but they haven't clarified what router or firmware they're running, so I consider those issues within the regular realm of WiFi performance/compatibility issues overall and not something specific to this particular system.dorekk - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
That's weird, I've never noticed any throttling with my L502X.Dug - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
I've read that people have been very happy with the business equivalent which is the Dell Precision M3800. No throttling and seems to run cooler. I'm assuming because it uses the Nvidia Quadro K1100M, w/ 2GB GDDR5. I personally would get the 1080p panel. The scaling with high resolution displays is fine, until you plug in external monitors. Yes you can have different scaling between the laptop and external monitors but it's never plug and play. As soon as you disconnect them, you have to log off and back in to get the correct scaling on the laptop.jphughan - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Or just take the acquisition of this laptop with a QHD+ panel as an excuse to buy a 4K panel! :D Of course that won't help if your apps don't handle scaling well at all as opposed to just having issues with regular DPI and HiDPI coexisting.I have the QHD+ version with a 24" 1200p external display and work around it by either not running the built-in panel at all when at my desk or running it at 1600x900. Yes switching to 3200x1800 and adjusting scaling requires a logoff and logon, which is somewhat irritating, but that's mostly because Microsoft only just delivered an API in Windows 8.1 that notifies applications when there's been a DPI scaling change, and thus those app developers haven't updated their apps to watch for and respond to that API notification. Remember back in Windows 95 when you had to restart your machine even when you changed your desktop resolution? That was true for the same reason, and it's been fixed because applications now watch for and respond to the resolution change notification. The same will happen with DPI scaling.
typicalGeek - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
After all the problems my kid has had with his XPS 15 (i5 - don't know exact model) in the 2.5 years he's had it, I would be pretty hard pressed to even consider one.The expensive "Crystal Clear HD" (or some such marketing BS) screen is useless unless viewed "head on" - only a few degrees off in either axis are unviewable, he's had problems with Dell's drivers (for the touchpad & DVD drive), and the 90W battery died without any warning. Still shows 100% charge on the status LEDs. Ha! Dell wanted $150 for a replacement battery, he ended up ordering one off Amazon for less than a third of that - and it included a 18 month warranty. Now his XPS keeps bugging him every start/boot that his battery is not genuine and that he should replace it. Does Dell <i><b>really</b></i> think they're going to convince someone to spend three times as much to get their battery by nagging them every day? All it really does is slow the boot process and tick off the customer. (Who probably isn't too keen that their battery didn't last much past the warranty in the first place.)
JBVertexx - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
My biggest beef with Dell now is their website and move to pre-configured models. It used to be so easy to go on the website and pick exactly what I wanted. I've tried numerous times in the last 4 months to go find something I would like, and it's just not there.There are too many models with too few options. The navigation is confusing, and there is no straightforward way to see ALL the models for a particular line you want.
I have a 4 year old Dell Latitude E6410, which was maxed out with the specs when I bought it. I've been happy with Dell laptops as my primary work and do-everything PC since I started buying them 16 years ago.
So instead of buying a new laptop, I just replaced my HDD with a 240GB SSD, then I bought one of the ODD bay adapters off ebay to fit a 750GB storage drive, and I'm all set for now. I'm starting to get in the hurt-locker with my NVS1100 graphics, and I'm starting to find cases where I could use more than 8GB RAM, but I guess I'll just have to suck it up for a while longer.
Really disappointed in what the website and their product lineup have become.
JBVertexx - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Correction - that's NVS 3100M - still in the hurt-locker though.jphughan - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Unfortunately pre-configured SKUs is the new deal. I think it's because in this smartphone/tablet era people overall are less concerned with menial options and more concerned with the overall product. That's not true of everyone of course, but fixed SKUs while continuing to only build to order means savings from a lean inventory and additional savings from fewer manufacturing variances and thus fewer chances of errors and rework.Still, Dell does appear to be passing the savings down to the consumer (likely because consumers are demanding lower prices for what is being seen more and more as a commodity/luxury than a necessity in the smartphone/tablet era). I remember my maxed out Precision M6300 back in the day cost $5200 before discounts. The modern-day equivalent of that system is the Precision M90, and even maxed out it costs less than half that -- despite inflation over the last 7 years. And it's certainly not because the Precision line has gone down the tubes.