Dell XPS 15 review 2017: Is Dell’s portable powerhouse still the perfect Windows 10 laptop?

Dell is renowned for its respectable XPS range, so much so we rate the range extremely highly on our best laptop page, and at this year’s CES, the Texas-based firm showed off the latest variations. 

The Dell XPS 13 has a 13.3in screen, with the option of a full 4K display (3,840 x 2,160) instead of the QHD+ (3,200 x 1,800) screen on the previous model. Meanwhile, its new Dell XPS 15 is, as the name suggests, a 15in 2-in-1 powerhouse. Due to go on sale in Spring 2018, with a price starting at $1,299, it’s a worthwhile, if expensive device that might just be worth the wait.

Alternatively, if you’re looking for a Dell XPS 15 now, the 2017 is decent and still holds it own. Below you can read our full Dell XPS 15 2017 review, but be warned, there is a chance it will drop in price when the new model goes on sale so it might still be worth holding on for.

Original review continues below

Dell has hit a rich seam of form in recent years. Now, it’s taken the elegant carbon-fibre and metal design of the XPS 13 and again scaled it up to bring the company’s stylish 15in laptop, the Dell XPS 15, into 2017. Throw in the latest quad-core Kaby Lake processors, Nvidia’s gaming-class graphics and the option of some blazingly quick NVMe SSDs, and the Dell XPS 15 is ready and raring to do serious damage to credit cards across the globe.

Dell XPS 15 review: Design

If you’ve seen the XPS 13, then you know exactly what to expect here. Over the years, Dell has worked hard behind the scenes to refine the design of its XPS models, and the result is some of the finest Windows devices the world has ever seen.

Squared-off slabs of cool-to-the-touch metal sandwich a thin wedge of carbon fibre; long rubber feet poke through the underside; and the clean, crisp design is all straight-line geometry and subtle curves. Suffice to say, the XPS 15 is a handsome devil – I’d be tempted to say even more so than Apple’s current 15in MacBook Pro. There’s something about the visible weave of the carbon fibre and the fine sheen of the metal that make for a high-end yet understated appearance.

Tilt back the lid, and there are barely a few millimetres of bezel framing the Dell’s 15.6in display. This looks great (I’m a big fan of teeny, tiny bezels), but it also means the Dell XPS 15 is smaller than laptops with similarly sized displays

It’s a couple of millimetres thinner and narrower even than the equivalent MacBook Pro, and a more significant 12mm less deep; if you want a larger laptop with the smallest possible footprint, then the XPS 15 emphatically ticks that box. It’s not too heavy, either, at 2kg on its own, and 2.34kg with the charger in the bag.

What’s most impressive, though, is that Dell has made a beautiful-looking laptop without compromising on the essentials. The backlit keyboard provides just enough key travel and feedback to make for comfortable typing, with no cramped cursor keys or layout issues to sour the deal, and the touchscreen above feels superbly responsive, with a layer of Gorilla Glass 3 providing a smooth, silky feel for prods and gestures.

Even the buttonless touchpad, often a weak point for Windows devices, is good, and I found myself acclimatising to its solid clicks and range of multi-finger gestures with little in the way of annoyances and frustrations.

Dell XPS 15 review: Features and connectivity

As ever, though, it’s connectivity that finds itself sacrificed at the altar of slimline loveliness. Dell has equipped the XPS 15 with a pair of USB 3 ports, a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port (which also doubles as a 40Gbits/sec Thunderbolt 3 connection), an SD card reader, a 3.5mm headset jack, and an HDMI 1.4 port.

This roster of ports might be ample for a 13in Ultrabook, but it does seem a touch stingy here. I’d want at least another USB 3 port, maybe even a couple of USB Type-C ports for good measure. But, while Dell has also dumped Ethernet by the wayside, there is at least a glimmer of sense in its decision to employ a blazingly quick 3×3-stream Broadcom 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter.

What this means is that, with the right router, you’ll be able to connect at link speeds of up to 1,300Mbits/sec, which is fast by any measure. In slightly less exciting news, Bluetooth 4.1 is also supported.

There’s not much else to get excited about. The presence of Dell’s one-touch battery meter is welcome – press a button, and five LEDs light up to indicate remaining capacity – but I’m not sure anyone will get excited about the 720p webcam. It’s alright, and for most people fairly irrelevant, but I do wish manufacturers would pony up for decent image sensors on high-end laptops.

Still, I guess I should take solace in the fact that the XPS 15 at least has a decent set of speakers hidden away inside. Crank them up and switch the Waves MaxxAudio Pro app to its Music setting (the default MaxxSense mode tends to distort a little too much for my taste), and the result is better audio quality with music, movie and game soundtracks than most laptops I’ve encountered.

Dell XPS 15: Display

While the £1,399 Dell XPS 15 makes do with a Full HD non-touch display, the pricier models in the lineup (starting at £1,849) add a 4K, 3,840 x 2,160 touchscreen to the laptop’s list of talents. Suffice to say, everything looks razor-sharp, and it hits all the right notes.

The glossy layer of Gorilla Glass 4 across the display might not be to everyone’s taste, but it does give images a tremendously vibrant, punchy look. While skulking through the darkened corridors of Metro: Last Light, the Dell’s Full HD display picks out a huge amount of detail while delivering deep, inky black. It’s simply superb.

Brightness rises up to a respectable 365cd/m2, contrast reaches to 1,612:1 and it covers an impressive 91.2% of the Adobe RGB gamut. The best news of all, however, is that Dell has done away with the dynamic contrast feature it forced on the XPS 13. Brightness remains stable regardless of what you’re viewing onscreen, which is good news for those looking to use the XPS 15 for reliable photo- and video-editing duties.

The display’s ability to reproduce a huge palette of colours means onscreen colours often look overly intense, which is a common issue with wide-gamut displays, but Dell’s PremierColor app aims to counter that by allowing users to swap between a range of display modes including sRGB, Adobe RGB, Rec. 601 (the standard for SD video), Rec. 709 (HD video) and Rec. 2020 (4K video).

The XPS 15’s default display mode just so happens to be perfectly calibrated for the Adobe RGB spectrum, delivering a superbly low average Delta E of 1.82 – that’s fantastic news for anyone working in colour-managed applications such as Photoshop. It’s exceedingly accurate from the moment you take it out of the box.

Dell XPS 15: Performance

It might not look it, but the XPS 15 is something of a performance heavyweight. Unlike its smaller stablemate, the XPS 15 ups the ante with Intel’s quad-core Kaby Lake processors, adds dedicated graphics in the guise of Nvidia’s capable GeForce GTX 1050 GPU and throws in superfast NVMe SSDs on the pricier models. Oh, and there’s a choice of 8GB or 16GB of DDR4 memory for good measure. Dell hasn’t cut any corners at all here.

The result is a laptop that feels brutally fast in pretty much every scenario. Press the power button, and Windows 10 is up and running in seconds. This is largely due to the NVMe SSD in our review unit: with sequential read speeds of over 1,291MB/sec, it’s obscenely fast. It’s something of a revelation, and everything feels supremely responsive as a result.

The Kaby Core i7 in our review unit is the same 2.8GHz processor that’s included in all XPS 15 models, and – in technical terms – it’s extremely fast. In our demanding suite of image-processing, video-transcoding and multitasking benchmarks, the XPS 15 skipped through to a very respectable score of 127 – a near perfect score.

And speaking of games, the XPS 15 is unusually capable when it comes to 3D gaming. Our current go-to benchmark is Metro: Last Light, and while it’s no walkover, the Dell’s GeForce GTX 1050 and its 4GB of GDDR5 memory are more than capable of doing it justice. Running at Full HD resolution and lowering the detail to Medium provided a silky smooth and if utterly gorgeous-looking experience, sending average framerates well above 60fps. Frankly, it’s hugely impressive that this laptop didn’t immediately melt itself to a pile of hot metal and plastic.

Yet more impressive is the fact that the XPS 15 doesn’t cook itself while working flat out. Crucially, I observed no stuttering or throttling at all – the case felt warm to the touch, with a particularly hot area above the keyboard’s function keys, but this is nothing to worry about.

Dell XPS 15 review: Battery life

All that power-hungry hardware inside the Dell XPS 15 didn’t even take a toll on battery life, either. With its fairly large 97Wh battery, the XPS 15 managed to survive 10hrs 25mins in our video-rundown test, and bear in mind that’s with screen brightness dimmed down to 170cd/m2 and Wi-Fi switched off. For comparison sake, this almost twice the longevity than last year’s Skylake-equipped model.

Dell XPS 15 review: Verdict

With sheer perfection across the board, Dell should be patting itself on the back for delivering yet another top-notch Windows 10 laptop. The XPS 15 is powerful, portable and equipped with all the features anyone could ask of a high-end device. Factor in the genuine gaming capabilities, and I can see the XPS 15 being very popular everywhere from the bedroom to the boardroom.

No, it’s not cheap, especially not the £1,349 model I had for review, but this is exactly the kind of laptop that manufacturers need to be making if they’re really going to take the fight to Apple’s increasingly dominant MacBook family. It’s fast, gorgeous and multitalented: for me, this really is the do-it-all Windows laptop I’ve been waiting a decade for.