Dell XPS 15 2-in-1
A slimline workhorse of a laptop, but it’s let down by one rather irritating keyboard flaw
“As the XPS 15 2-in-1 has a touchscreen with stylus support, it’s possible to use the display as a massive drawing or sketch pad”
Price As reviewed, £1,416 (£1,699 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk
Small irritations are like Japanese knotweed. If left unattended, the plant can cause serious problems, and that’s exactly how I feel about one aspect of this Dell’s keyboard. It’s not the action of the fancy “MagLev” magnetic key switches; they’re noisy, perhaps, but also comfortable. responsive and spacious. It’s one element of the layout that’s the problem.
The Page Up and Page Down keys lie immediately on top of the left and right cursor keys, like buttercream on a sponge cake, so it’s horribly easy to catch one of the former by accident. When you use the cursor keys as often as I do, that’s a serious drawback. In the first hour of using the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1, I accidentally switched tabs (Ctrl+Page Down) about 14 times. It’s highly irritating.
Not a cursor-key-cluster-jockey? Then you probably won’t mind. However, if you do use them a lot, don’t underestimate how frustrating this tiny layout quirk can be – like knotweed, it will grow and grow until you simply can’t take it anymore.
That’s a shame because the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 is a laptop with few flaws. The glass-topped touchpad, for instance, is a dream to use. It might not be as large as some, but it’s responsive and has a feather-light, reliable clicking action.
Winning design
The physical design of the laptop is attractive, practical and feels durable: like an overgrown Dell XPS 13, but with two beefy 360-degree hinges visible just above the keyboard. These allow the 15.6in display to be folded flat for docking purposes or pushed right over so you can present or watch movies without the keyboard getting in the way.
It isn’t the lightest 15in laptop as a result, weighing a hefty 2kg, but the slim bezels surrounding the screen ensure it doesn’t take up a huge amount of space in your bag. It’s slim, too, measuring 16mm at the rear of the tapering chassis when closed and 9mm at the front.
Otherwise, this 15in convertible is classic XPS. Black, soft-to-the-touch carbon fibre surrounds the keyboard and touchpad, while thick mattesilver aluminium plates sandwich the XPS’ internals. A pair of long rubber feet underneath prevent the laptop sliding around on the desk.
There’s also a decent selection of ports and sockets situated around the laptops edges, with a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports on the left edge and two USB-C 3.1 ports on the righthand side. You get a microSD slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack, while network connectivity stretches to 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet and Bluetooth 4.2 via the laptop’s embedded Killer Wireless 1435 chipset.
It’s a shame Dell couldn’t stretch to the Killer Wireless 1550, which supports 160MHz channels for stonking maximum speeds of up to 1.73Gbits/ sec, but the 1435 here does benefit from some of Killer’s more interesting features, such as the ability to connect via Ethernet and wireless at the same time and have high priority packets directed via the fastest connection automatically.
As for security features, the XPS 15 2-in-1 has both facial recognition – via the dual-camera array embedded in the bottom bezel below the screen – and fingerprint login, via a reader that’s integrated into the power button, both of which function swiftly and reliably.
Screen reflections?
Our review sample included a 15.6in 1,920 x 1,080 IPS touchscreen, but you can also specify the machine with a higher resolution 4K display if you have £2,199 to spend. Full HD may not sound particularly impressive, especially for a machine this size, but it’s not a problem: text and graphics look crisp at normal viewing distances. Whichever model you choose, you’ll benefit from a glossy finish with a remarkably effective anti-reflective coating. Quality-wise, the 1080p display is excellent, too. Out of the box it hits 90.8% sRGB coverage and peak brightness reaches 414cd/m2, which is easily enough to work outdoors in a shady part of the garden. Contrast is excellent, with a measured ratio of 1,640:1 and general colour accuracy is decent without being outstanding. As the XPS 15 2-in-1 has a touchscreen with stylus support, it’s also possible to use the Dell XPS 15 as a massive drawing or sketch pad. I would hesitate to recommend that you use it for jotting down notes purely due to its size, but you could do that at a pinch.
Killer Kaby Lake G
However, perhaps the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1’s most intriguing feature is inside the chassis. Instead of one of Intel’s eighth-generation “Coffee Lake” CPUs, the Dell XPS runs one of a selection of quad-core Kaby Lake G chips. These incorporate AMD’s Radeon RX Vega M GL graphics chip for graphics and use Hyper-Threading technology to support a total of eight threads.
The Intel Core i5-8305G in our review device runs at 2.8GHz and Turbo Boosts up to 3.8GHz. The Core i7-9705G in the more expensive variants of the XPS 15 run at 3.1GHz and boost to 4.1GHz but share the same GPU. In our review model (the baseline spec), there’s 8GB of DDR4 RAM and 256GB of NVMe SSD storage, but Dell offers four configurations: you can upgrade to a 512GB for £150, double the RAM to 16GB and upgrade to a 4K screen for £2,199, or choose the top-end version with 1TB of SSD storage for £2,499.
Even with only 8GB of RAM inside our review sample, it’s a fast machine. In our media-creation benchmarks, the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 gained an overall score of 123, which is the highest we’ve seen on a 2-in-1 machine of this size.
It’s 20% quicker than the Microsoft Surface Book 2 15, which has a Core i7-8650U and discrete Nvidia GeForce 1060 graphics, and outperforms it when it comes to graphics-intense tasks, too.
In Dirt: Showdown at 1,280 x 720 and with settings at medium, the Dell returned an average frame rate of 53ps. That figure dropped to a still-just-about playable 32fps with the resolution bumped up to 1080p. And it plays the notoriously poorly optimised PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (at 1,440 x 900 with medium settings) a lot more smoothly than the Huawei Matebook X Pro, which has both an Intel Core-i7 8550U and discrete Nvidia MX150 graphics on board.
The Dell’s 256GB SK Hynix NVMe PCIe SSD is the one weak performance spot, though. It produced sequential read and write speeds of 2,126MB/sec and 509MB/sec in our tests, results that are far from the fastest I’ve come across.
But the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 stages a comeback when it comes to battery life, with the six-cell, 75Wh unit delivering an impressive 8hrs 29mins in our video rundown test. That’s not quite as good as the result the regular non-2-in-1 XPS 15 achieved, or the Surface Book 2 15in with its twin batteries, but it’s still impressive for a laptop as beefy as this one.
Solid value
With prices starting at a £1,699, the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 is not only impressively powerful, it’s also a good value machine. It’s cheaper than the Microsoft Surface Book 2 15in, yet performance is in most regards better – and it’s slimmer and more portable.
Coupled with good build and decent screen quality (and, no, you really don’t need a 4K screen, even on a machine this large), it’s comfortably one of the best convertible 15in machines I’ve ever used. Only the HP Spectre x360 x15 comes close ( see issue 274, p64).
The one thing that might put you off – I know it does me – is the knotty problem of that daft cursor cluster design. You might decide, as I did in the end, that it’s worth losing Page Up and Page Down from your keyboard by remapping the keys, but that’s beside the point. You shouldn’t have to do that on a laptop costing this much.
So that’s one star off knocked off the overall score, which is a shame, because otherwise the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 is a top-class machine. SPECIFICATIONS Quad-core 2.8GHz Intel Core i5-8305G processor 4GB Radeon RX Vega 870 M GL graphics 8GB RAM 15.6in IPS display, 1,920 x 1,280 resolution 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD 720p webcam 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.2
2 x Thunderbolt 3 2 x USB-C 3.1 DisplayPort microSD card slot Windows 10 Home 75Wh battery 354 x 235 x 16mm (WDH) 2kg 1yr on-site warranty