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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jphughan - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Argh, again with not being able to edit posts. My old $5200 system was a Precision M90, and the modern-day equivalent would be the Precision M6800.fokka - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
exactly my thoughts. dozens of different lines and models, but completely gimped customization options. and i have to cringe when thinking about their website.katinavcloutier - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
hiNWBarryG - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Well done article.I bought the same configuration in December. It's - by far - the best laptop I've ever owned (and I've owned well over 30 over the years). I use it as a business laptop - mostly using Office apps and occasionally Adobe Creative Suite and some very light CAD work. Admittedly, I don't use it for gaming or any massively taxing workloads. I ran into the issue of losing mouse clicks but a driver update fixed it.
The screen is beautiful. I use my laptop for customer presentations so the screen was a major consideration for this purchase. I have never been a fan touch screens, but have to admit that when doing a customer presentation, the touch screen is pretty damn cool - especially when visualizing 3D models. The battery life is amazing. This is the first laptop that I've owned where I can travel around to meetings for an entire day and never even have to think about plugging it in. That peace of mind is amazing. It was not one of my original considerations, but now that I can get away with it, I would never give it up. Least of all, it looks cool, is incredibly light for being a 15" class notebook, and it feels good to carry around.
My only complain is that I wish the keyboard had dedicated home, end, pgup and pgdwn keys. I am getting used to not having them and it's a minor complaint. Other than that, this thing is fantastic! For what I use it for, it is perfect and would gladly have spent more. Once can always find things to complain about with any product, but for my needs, there is nothing on the market that even comes close. I did tons of research on options and have not been disappointed. For someone looking for a Windows business notebook with a 15" screen (lots of options available for notebooks with smaller screens) I don't think there is a better product available.
bloc - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
"My only complain is that I wish the keyboard had dedicated home, end, pgup and pgdwn keys. I am getting used to not having them and it's a minor complaint. Other than that, this thing is fantastic! For what I use it for, it is perfect and would gladly have spent more. "Yes I have no idea why they're making up new keyboard layouts. Developers prefer to have independent home/end/pageup/pagedown keys.
GTVic - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
If you preferred the Apple, is there any reason not to purchase that and run Windows 8.1 on it? Or will that just be a bunch of headaches.jphughan - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
That has its share of headaches. Examples are driver updates, keyboard layout not being ideal for a Windows environment, Thunderbolt ports not supporting hot-plugging in Windows (i.e. if the device isn't connected when you boot, you can't use it until you reboot), and I believe you're forced to use the NVIDIA GPU full-time on Windows, never the Intel GPU, so your battery life is far worse. Those are just off the top of my head, and I remember reading a long post on a forum about other niggles like that. Bottom line is that buying a Mac to run Windows 8.1 full-time is probably not the best idea.rish95 - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
I don't have any problems running it on my 2012 Air. My only issue is that Apple's trackpad driver for Windows sucks. It doesn't support any Win8.1 gestures and scrolling/zooming are poorly done.Battery life is ok. I get about 5 hours in Windows and 6 in OSX.
DanD85 - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
I think your argument of paying the extra 400 for SSD is flawed because you forget that if you choose to do it yourself you still have the HDD and you can choose to flip it for some bucks back or keep it as external hard drive. A better choice in my opinion.JarredWalton - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Larger batteries usually cost $100 (and you can't buy this one AFAICT), the SSD costs $350 for a Crucial or $450+ for the SM841, and the 500GB HDD is only worth $50 if you're lucky. For the ability to avoid cloning/reinstalling the OS, I'd just get things pre-configured with the 512GB SSD. It's not a great deal, but it's not raking you over the coals at least.