Dell XPS 15 9550

The XPS range is where you’ll find Dell’s most desirable laptops. These aren’t all-practical workstations, or budget models. XPS is where Dell’s fanciest designs team-up with higher-end components.

This is the larger of the two Dell XPS models, the XPS 15. Much more than just a larger version of the XPS 13 this one trades away stamina in order to pack in a high-power CPU and a graphics chipset that’ll let you play recent games without making the visuals look like those of an original Xbox title.

Price

These abilities don’t come cheap, though. We’re looking at the very lowest-end Dell XPS 15 spec, which costs £1,029 from Dell and makes some significant sacrifices to even get down to that price.

Namely, it has a 1080p display rather than a 4K one, and a hybrid drive rather than full SSD storage. If you’re drawn to the XPS 15 because you’ve heard about its flashy Infinity Edge 4K screen, you’ll need to pay at least £1319 for that.

To see the XPS 15 at the height of its powers you’ll want to buy the £1,489 model, which has a 512GB SSD rather than a hybrid drive.

Design

No matter which spec you’re after, the Dell XPS 15 gets you the same design and chassis. It looks and feels nice, but is not as flashy as some.

There’s only about 5mm of plastic between the end of the display and the end of the laptop. This helps the Dell XPS keep very petite for a 15.6in machine – it’s around the size of most 14in laptops

While there are better options out there if you’re a road warrior, we had no problem carting in the Dell XPS 15 around in a rucksack and using it in a coffee shop for a few hours. It’s 23mm thick, after all, and our review sample weighed slightly less than the stated 2kg at 1,945g. Dell says the SSD version is even lighter at 1.78kg.

The XPS 15’s connectivity isn’t much better than you average, well-equipped 13in laptop, though. You get just two USB 3.0 ports, a Thunderbolt 3 USB-C socket, full-size SD card slot and a full-size HDMI. It’ll do the job for most, but if you want to use this as a main home PC you may need to get a USB hub involved to avoid having to swap over USB cables all the time. There’s no ethernet port, and no included USB adaptor – it’s optional.

It’s also worth noting there are no ‘special’ design moves here. This isn’t a hybrid, the screen hinge doesn’t flip around 360 degrees (just 120-ish), and unlike some previous XPS laptops, you don’t even get a touchscreen. Not in the version reviewed, anyway. The 4K models all have touchscreens.

The aim here is to pack traditional laptop power into a much more friendly and convenient shell.

Performance

Given that the XPS 15 is slim and light for a 15in laptop, it’s a little surprising that it uses an ‘HQ’ series processor rather than the ‘U’ kind we normally see on portable-friendly models. The base model has an Intel Core i5-6300HQ. While not the top-end option you’ll see in the more expensive XPS 15 models, it’s still designed to eat up more power and run hotter than U-series chipsets.

These chipsets are designed to use just 15W, but this ones thermal load is 45W. Being happy to suck up more power lets these HQ chipsets push much harder, but it means they’re less power-efficient and need a more serious cooling system.

As with pretty much any HQequipped laptop, the Dell 15’s CPU fan runs all the time. It’s a very light whirr, but if you dream of a totally silent laptop, this is not it.

Using a hybrid hard drive rather than a pricier SSD, our particular review model also emits the light clicks when writing data, common to all hard drives. And it occasionally makes mysterious louder ones, too.

There’s nothing magical going on in a hybrid hard drive, though. It gets you 1TB storage, but has an extra 32GB SSD attached, used as a cache to increase performance beyond that of a regular mechanical hard drive.

It works, but still doesn’t quite seem to get you the instant zippiness of a pure SSD system. Powering-up and coming back from standby is quick, but not nearinstantaneous. The CrystalDiskMark benchmark results show that it’s no replacement for an SSD, too. While read speeds reach up to an SSD-alike 475MB/s, write speeds are around 70- to 80MB/s. That’s the performance of a bog-standard 5400rpm hard drive, not an SSD.

This base spec isn’t really designed for the most demanding of buyers, though. While it uses an Intel HQ series CPU, it’s still a Core i5 rather than an i7, a quad-core i5-6300HQ 2.3GHz. Of course, when paired-up with 8GB RAM you still have enough power on tap to do virtually anything.

Serious video editing, involved Photoshop work and audio sequencing are not beyond its abilities – and you’d expect this north of a grand. The mid-grade spec leaves it with very solid middleranking benchmark results. For example, in Geekbench 3 it scores 9808 (3165 single core) points. The Intel Core i7 versions will, naturally, score much higher, but it’s still much better than what you get from the dual-core ‘U’ alternative. That CPU