Customer Ratings & Reviews

Great laptop for the money. The dangle for usb-c is a bit annoying but overall great.

The condition was good, the only thing was missing is the charger. And it had 100 Watt charger because of consumption. Track pad was amazing. I could not use the laptop without a mouse before, but with it having a big track pad area usage was excellent.

It’s only been a couple of years since I got my Microsoft Surface Book 3. It’s been a great machine for my purposes, and I’m still using it, but I decided to get a more traditional laptop, so I picked up the new XPS 15 9520 laptop from Dell. I’ll share my thoughts on this laptop and how it compares to others that I use. Most laptops have moved toward an ever thinner profile, and the new XPS 15 is no chunky laptop. It sports an all-aluminum construction with carbon fiber on the keyboard deck. This has been Dell’s standard recipe for the last few years, but it’s still great. The carbon fiber on the deck provides a “soft touch” feel that is so much better than cold aluminum. It’s not completely impervious to fingerprints, but it’s not bad either. Resting my wrists on the carbon fiber felt very comfortable. Build quality is super solid, with no screen wobble at all. This is not a 2-in-1, so the screen does not flip around to the back. The XPS 15 weighs in at a little more than 4 pounds, making it lighter than many laptops in this class, but not a featherweight. The keyboard is a joy to use and has just the right amount of key travel. It’s not quite as nice as the Surface Book 3 (which is thicker), but it’s considerably better than Samsung’s latest line of Galaxy Books. The keys are well-spaced on the full-sized keyboard, which also has an excellent adjustable backlight. The trackpad is very large and responsive. Overall, the typing and mousing experience is excellent. This model includes the FHD non-OLED screen. At this price point, I was a bit disappointed not to get a higher resolution screen and/or an OLED screen, but the screen looks great and, with 500 nits of brightness, is VERY bright. The model I got is an interesting mix of components. It features the 12th-generation of Intel’s i7 CPU, as well as an Nvidia GeForce 3050 Ti discreet GPU, 16 GBs of RAM and a 512 GB SSD. With enough horsepower for a high-resolution screen, it’s interesting that Dell paired this one with a 1920 x 1200 non-touch Infinity Edge screen. However, it may be that they wanted to provide an option that wouldn’t have to waste most of its power rendering screens, and this one certainly benefits from not having to work too hard on the graphics side of things. More on that later. Windows Hello works well, both with face recognition and fingerprint recognition. That’s a nice convenience, since you could be in a situation where you’re wearing a mask and your face isn’t recognized. I thought the camera was a little slow in recognizing my face, but it worked well enough. The port selection is adequate, but I’m not a fan of manufacturers removing the HDMI port, which I think could have been included here. It is arguable that an HDMI port is more useful than a full-sized SD slot (which I’m also glad is still there), but you’ll need an adapter to plug in an external monitor. Thankfully, Dell has included an adapter with an HDMI port and a USB-A port. It’s nice that of the 3 USB-C ports, 2 of them are Thunderbolt. The XPS 15 uses the same “trick” that many computer makers use to make the laptop look thinner. The side is chamfered, angling down from the small flat side edge to the actual bottom. This gives the illusion that only the shiny flat part represents its thickness, but in reality, you have to include the distance between the keyboard deck and the desk it’s sitting on. Dell could have done away with the sleight of hand and easily included an HDMI port and a USB-A port. I’ve never owned a Mac Book, so I can’t compare the speakers to those, but I am pretty impressed with the speakers featured in the XPS 15. They’re discreetly placed on each side of the keyboard, and they put out more sound than I’ve heard from a laptop in a long time. My Surface Book has front-facing speakers, but the volume level can’t compete with the XPS. The sound is fairly balanced, not too heavy on either treble or bass, but not outstanding either. While I wouldn’t rely on the XPS 15 for listening to an evening of music, these speakers are plenty loud for filling a hotel room with music when you’re on the road. In my opinion, the sound on this laptop is well above average, and blows away both the Surface Book as well as the Samsung Galaxy Book 360 Pro, which has speakers on the bottom of the machine, limiting their effectiveness. What about performance? Out of the box, the XPS 15 feels snappy. It’s got a wifi 6 card, so downloads are very fast. It had no problem with tools such as Visual Studio, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2022, Office 365 or Logos Bible study software. One of the tests I typically run when I get a new machine is to measure how fast Logos can build a passage study guide. This involves scanning hundreds (or thousands in my case) of resources for content related to your search term, and then presenting the results in a coherent fashion. I was blown away that this only took a few seconds on the XPS 15, instead of a few minutes on other machines. It felt like I didn’t have to wait at all. Photoshop Elements enjoyed a similar boost as well. I’m not a huge gamer, but I do have a number of games that I like to be able to play. Civ VI, Caesar IV, Europa Universalis IV and older games such as Zeus loaded up faster than I’ve ever seen them load before, and the GeForce graphics card had no problem handling the highest graphics settings. That said, I’m not a hard-core gamer, so I’m not sure you want to buy this for playing a game at high frame rates. The 60 Hz screen is probably not up to that, but it was great for playing the kinds of games I’ve mentioned here. For a more objective performance analysis, I ran the Geek Bench CPU test. My 2 year-old Surface Book logged a 944 single-core score and a 3255 multi-core score. The new Dell XPS 9520 clocked in at 1536 for single-core and a whopping 10330 for multi-core! That’s a 63% improvement for single-core and more than a 300% improvement for multi-core! We knew that Microsoft had to make some compromises to fit in their design for the Surface Book, but that was made very evident by this comparison. The Dell XPS is ready to handle anything you can throw at it! Battery life is great, but I’m not sure I can get the 13 hours that Dell estimates. Nonetheless, 8 hours of solid use seems to be reasonable. So, should you buy the XPS 15 9520? If your use cases line up with mine, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a better laptop. Quality like this doesn’t come cheap, so keep that in mind as you compare to cheaper alternatives. The XPS 15 works and feels like a premium laptop. For doing real work with some gaming and entertainment thrown in, you’ll be very happy with this laptop.

Best laptop I've ever owned. Got the display model when they were clearing space for new versions, so I got a great deal too

wonderful device, ultra fast and high quality materials

Purchased a dell laptop, 2 monitors and a portal. Absolutely thrilled with everything. The best part of the purchase besides the excellent products we purchase was by far the best service rep Vincent. Never have I received such great service. He went above and beyond to help set up Cisco and remote access for my job. In all my years of work I have never had such a great tech guy that did everything possible to solve all my problems to get me set up to having everything working. Honestly we had bought a computer system years ago from Best Buy also. This was a huge endeavor for my work to have everything working. Thank you Vincent and thank you Best Buy. I will recommend you to everyone because of the great professionalism and service received by Vincent. You just don’t find that kind of service. Micki Melton

perfect for watching movies and world cup 2k30 in my house ..

I have been chasing tech for over 20 years. I’ve built more computers than I care to count. This is a great portable option. I am able to play many games and this got me through the 40hrs of labor my wife went through for our baby. Money well spent.

Was looking for a laptop to travel with. After trying several, this one fit the bill. Good battery life discrete graphics card and all aluminum case. Plus a small light charger.

Absolutely wonderful. I’ve used Dell laptops for years and this was the easiest to setup and the performance is unmatched. I love that I can increase the RAM if needed.

super fast with the 14 cores and the RTX allows it to play games like League at 200+ frames. completely satisfied with the purchase for college and work!

Great laptop for all needs. Only negative I have is the weight of the laptop and needing a USB C hub. Otherwise one of the best laptops I used for both college class work and engineering CAD work.

Great device…quick setup, love the inclusion of the 3050Ti onboard…wish there were more port options without use of a dongle

Best choice for the money. Very happy with purchase. Fast laptop and clear screen. I do have a second 24” monitor attached.

I was very pleased with my purchase and the service. Everyone went above and beyond to make my experience as good as possible.

Purchased the Dell XPS for my son fir college. He stated that the setup tutorial from Best Buy made it easy get started. Great laptop.

Great product. The store I purchased it from is being remodeled, couldnt go inside. However, the Best Buy rep I worked with was great.

Its brain with beauty. Nice windows laptop to compete with delicate MAC or Surface Pro. Typing experience is wonderful and its value for money.

The power on button only works after you push it 5 times. The keypad makes the cursor jump. You'll type something and soon the cursor is in another place and you have to stop and put it back. It's not a touch screen like on my old computer. Not the same. I also had to buy more an extra docking station. You shouldn't have to do that. Especially if you are buying a brand new computer that costs this much.

Powerful processor. Battery length is incredible. Definitely a powerhouse that travels