Customer Ratings & Reviews

I have been hoping to get a XPS for a few years now. This laptop does not disappoint performance wise. I ran a PC Benchmark against this that I run against any machine I build or use. i like to know what the testing metrics are going into the use of the machine. My son's gaming desktop scored at an insane 98th percentile in the metrics. My gaming laptop scored in a respectable 75th percentile. How dis the XPS 15 score. 95th percentile out of the box and 93rd percentile after loading it up with some of my required applications. Just phenomenal. This got me excited to use the laptop even more than I had already been. There are a few drawbacks. Very limited on the number of ports. There are two Thunderbolt and one USB C 3.2 ports. There is a SD reader and a headphone/mic port. No HDMI, charging is through one of the USB/Thunderbolt ports which takes you down to two usable ports. One nice add is Dell includes what I would classify as a dongle or mini dock(?) that allows you to use one of the Thunderbolt or USB ports to add a HDMI port and a USB type A connection which I have a 5 port USB hub plugged into it. I almost missed this when unboxing the laptop because it blended so well into the packaging. The screen is absolutely gorgeous. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 is an excellent graphics card which can easily drive my 3440x1440 monitor. The gen 13 i7 is very impressive with it's performance. Almost makes me wonder how an i9 would have been. The system has 16 GB of system memory, 6 GB of GDDR6 video memory for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050. Storage has it at a 1 TB SSD. The keyboard has really comfortable spacing between the keys and a very nice feel when typing. Key travel is almost perfect and is very consistent across the keyboard. The keyboard is also backlit, something I don't think I could go without after having it for so many years now. The track pad is pretty consistent and is quite large. I prefer using a mouse, but this track pad is quite usable. This may be the first laptop I have owned that I have not disabled the track pad immediately. While I am not an audiophile, the speakers perform quite nicely. They are loud and give a full range of sounds. They easily outperform most laptop speakers I have used in the past. I was actually amazed at how good they sounded. From what I have read up on, upgrading the laptop is pretty easy. There are two slots for hard drives, one is in use. And there are two memory slots that are both in use so you will need to replace both modules in the upgrade. To upgrade there are screws on the bottom that will remove the shell, a plastic separator tool is required to remove the shell. Everything is easily accessed from there. My final thought, this is one great laptop that only has a few minor drawbacks that can be easily corrected with a docking station or a USB-C hub. There is minimal bloatware, including the mandatory McAfee preinstall which I uninstalled. If you are on the fence, hit buy. If you want an i9, I want to now how good it is!!!

The Dell XPS 15 with a RTX 4050. When is a gaming laptop not a gaming laptop? When it's an XPS. This 15.6" laptop weighs in just over 4lbs with a blistering Core i7, 16 gigs of RAM, the aforementioned RTX 4050 with 6GB of it's own RAM, and a 1TB SSD. The specs scream gaming laptop but the looks. . . the same gray as many other Dell laptops you'd see round a business conference table. Is this meant to be a workhorse or a playhorse? Well, let's get some things out of the way, the display is gorgeous. 1080p, beautiful, and bright. And despite it's size and weight, pretty generous battery life. Going through a normal day of work for me, this lasted 6 hours on the battery. Yes, this is lower than the rating, but to be fair, my workloads can be pretty CPU and GPU intensive. It's best to look at this relatively speaking. My normal work laptop of similar size and weight with an RTX 3070, it barely squeezes out 4 hours. And the fourth hour usually requires me to change it to a battery optimized power mode and turn down screen brightness. On the Dell, I just ran normally until it died. So kudos to Dell for something where I can likely squeeze out a full day actually untethered to a power cable without needing to compromise or what inevitably happens, retreat to my office to either grab the power adapter or remote desktop from my desktop computer to finish out the day. The Core i7 did it's job. Seemed par for the course. I didn't notice any difference from my other i7 machines. 16GB of RAM is pretty much standard fare, gamer or not, so again preforming as expected / keeping up with the joneses. Given the short timeframe, I didn't actually do much with the SSD besides installing a couple games and EDA software then bring up my work environment over git. It seemed snappy and benchmarking showed it was plenty fast - no weird read or write speed abnormalities or places where it seemed bottlenecked. Graphics performance is where this starts to disappoint a bit (beyond the looks). Again, this is relative, but the RTX 4050 seems hampered in the Dell chassis. Looking it up, it's limited to 40W TDP. Technically, this should be able to match or outclass the 3070 in my other laptop but sadly the Dell was not up to the task. To be fair, as a work machine, it felt equivalent. The 4050 was certainly up to the task for my design software and handled rendering 3D views and moving objects around with ease. I never saw any hiccups when routing a project or moving around across different project windows. Jump into a game, and you start to notice about a 20% difference in sustained framerate. Unfortunately, this seems to be the tradeoff for the great battery life. Usability wise, the laptop was mostly good. But there were a couple strange omissions which I'll get to in a moment. Yes, my lap did get a bit warm at times but what was nice is that my wrist did not have some moments where the palm rest was almost too hot to the touch. The screen feels well balanced, no worries of the laptop tipping over away from you when seated on your lap at the edge of a chair. The speakers were decent. Good, so I'm happy listening to game audio over them or watching YouTube videos. You can still tell a decent pair of earbuds are better, but happy on the sound front. So, the strange omissions. So, for something that seemed to straddle the work/play realm, apparently, a fingerprint reader is not standard. You can build these into the power button so I'm not sure why it needs to be a separate option on the XPS 15. Second, there's an appalling lack of ports. So, it looks like you have three USB-C ports (two are thunderbolt 4 so yay) but plug in the power adapter and that's down to two. And yes, you can output 4k+ video out thunderbolt but not having at least HDMI built in or USB-A is annoying. The USB-C nirvana isn't fully here yet and while I'm pleased with it as a work laptop on the go, looking at the way I use things in the office, I'd need to multiply USB-C hubs and a docking station just to get the same functionality I have currently with one docking station and my current laptop itself. So, while there are several things this XPS 15 gets well, I'm not seeing a good fit for it. It disappoints a bit as a gaming laptop. And while it gives with one hand as a work laptop it takes away with the other. While it's tradeoffs give it a thinner profile and longer battery life, given it weighs the same as another 15.6" laptop with a bit smaller battery and more power hungry components, I don't think you really notice the slimness of the XPS 15. So where that's normally an advantage, here it seems like an unnecessary optimization that perhaps robs the XPS 15 of being something better.