Dell XPS 15 Review

Dell's XPS laptops are considered the gold standard when it comes to premium notebooks, and the newest XPS 15 is no exception. Priced at $1,009 to start (about $1,409 as tested), this is one of the most powerful laptops on the market, thanks to its Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti graphics. It's also drop-dead gorgeous with its slim, modern industrial design, incredibly thin bezels and lovely display. The 15-inch still suffers from the XPS line's biggest flaw -- an ill-placed webcam -- but, overall, this is one of the best Windows laptops you can buy and a formidable foe to Apple's much pricier 15-inch MacBook Pro.

Specs
CPU 2.2-GHz Intel Core i7-8750H processor
Operating System Windows 10
RAM 16GB
RAM Upgradable to 32GB
Hard Drive Size 256GB
Design
With its clean industrial silver aluminum lid and undercarriage sandwiching a soft-touch black interior accentuated by smooth, rounded corners, the latest XPS 15 looks pretty identical to its predecessors. It's not a bad thing, as the laptop is very sleek and looks great in an office. The laptop is a little underdressed for a LAN party, but it's still an attractive system no matter how you slice it. Similar to the 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro, the laptop sports only one adornment -- the glossy Dell insignia in the center of the lid. It's a minimalist chic that I dig.

Dell XPS-15 (13.3-inch 256GB) at Amazon for $1267.88


Swathed in soft-touch black-carbon-fiber, the laptop's interior is just as familiar as its exterior, down to the power button that doubles as a fingerprint reader in the top-right corner. The barely there InfinityEdge bezel surrounds the 15.6-inch display, giving way to the large bottom bezel housing the webcam.

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Measuring 14.1 x 9.3 x 0.5-0.7 inches, the 4.2-pound XPS 15 is one of the slimmer notebooks in its class. The Microsoft Surface Book 2 also weighs 4.2 pounds, but has a much thicker profile at 13.5 x 9.9 x 0.9 inches, much like the HP Spectre x360 (4.6 pounds, 14.1 x 9.8 x 0.8 inches). The Apple MacBook Pro (13.8 x 9.5 x 0.6 inches) is slimmer and lighter at an even 4 pounds. The Huawei MateBook X Pro is the smallest of the bunch at 2.9 pounds, 12 x 8.5 0.6 inches, but it also has a smaller 14-inch screen.

Ports
The XPS 15 has enough ports to allow for a solid work or gaming battlestation.



On the right sits a USB 3.1 Type-A port, an SD card reader, a Noble lock slot and a battery status indicator flanked by five lights.



There's another Type-A port on the left alongside a Thunderbolt 3 port, an HDMI 2.0 port, a headset jack and a port for the AC adapter.

Display
We tested the XPS 15 with both a 4K, Ultra HD touch screen and 1080p non-touch screen.  As evidenced by the fine veins and deep red color of the flower in the XPS 15's wallpaper, the matte 1920 x 1080 display is capable of producing rich color and sharp detail. When I watched the trailer for Support the Girls on the 15.6-inch panel, Regina Hall's honey-brown skin seemed to radiate, despite her silver-frosted eyeshadow. Details were clear enough that I could see individual strands of the actress' chestnut-brown hair, including her honey-blonde lowlights.



Given how vivid the color is on the XPS 15's panel, I wasn't too surprised to learn that it can reproduce 115 percent of the sRGB gamut. That's a very good result, but if you want the best display, you'll want to upgrade to the 4K panel, which covers 160 percent of the sRGB spectrum. Both models coast past the 111-percent premium laptop average. When it comes to color, the competition falls somewhere between the XPS 15's 1080p and 4K displays, with the MacBook Pro, Spectre x360, MateBook X and Surface Book registering 117 to 131 percent, respectively.

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The XPS 15 performed a bit better on the brightness test, averaging 371 nits, which was enough to outshine the 310-nit average as well as the Spectre x360 (340 nits) and the MacBook Pro (354 nits). However, the Surface Book (417 nits) and the MateBook X (458 nits) were significantly brighter. Unfortunately, the 4K panel on the XPS 15 was dimmer than I would have liked, at 322 nits, which just tops the category average but is less luminous than its rivals.

Audio
I wasn't expecting much from the XPS 15's speakers, but I was happy to be enveloped in loud, relatively clean audio. The laptop's bottom-mounted speakers filled our conference room with Kevin Ross' gorgeous voice as he sang Andre 3000's "Prototype" a cappella. The melodies were nice and clean while the mouth pops and finger snaps were precise. The only rough spot was when the singer went for the high notes, which introduced significant distortion that I tried to smooth out with the pre-installed Waves Audio software, to no avail.

Keyboard and Touchpad
Normally, if a keyboard had shallow travel like the XPS 15 (0.7 millimeters), I'd be ripping it a new one, since it falls beneath our preferred 1.5mm. But the island-style keys' saving grace is the above-average 70 grams of actuation force that adds some much-needed bounce to the typing experience. I hit my typical 70 words per minute on the 10fastfingers typing test without bottoming out.



The 4 x 3.1-inch touchpad provides plenty of space to navigate web pages and documents, and was quick and responsive to boot. I had no problem pinch-zooming to enlarge or decrease images or doing a three-finger tap to launch Action Center.

Performance
For such a relatively slim system, the XPS 15 packs quite a punch. For this review, we tested two high-end configurations. The 1080p XPS 15 packing a 2.2-GHz Intel Core i7-8750H processor with 16GB of RAM had no problem running Windows Defender while I watched an episode of My Hero Academia with 20 open Google Chrome tabs -- some of which had Twitch streams and Slack running. Unsurprisingly, the 4K model with a Core i9 CPU didn't slow down during our real-world tests, either.