Dell XPS 15

Dell’s flagship 15-incher re-focuses on performance.

While we were disappointed to see that Dell dropped the OLED panel option on its 2020 XPS 15, the new unit’s screen specs are still respectable. At the top end it can be configured with a 4K 500nit HDR screen that’s capable of Dolby Vision and reproducing 100% of the Adobe RGB colour gamut, or you can opt for the FullHD panel and save $600. Dell has also ditched the throttled Core i9 model, offering only a hexa-core Intel Core i710750H or a octa-core i7-10875H CPU. This means that the XPS 15 really only varies on FullHD/4K screen resolution, storage and RAM allocation.

The 6-core models all feature 16GB of RAM and start at $3,699 for a 1080p screen and 512GB of storage. This pricing lines up pretty closely to Apple’s MacBook Pro offering, but the XPS 15 was one of the few devices we tested this year with a hexa-core CPU since most of the laptops were either four or eight core chips, which made it a little hard to compare. Interestingly the XPS 15 actually beat the supposedly more powerful 8-core i7-10875H CPU on a Blade 15 (Advanced) from Razer by between 2% and 19% in all raw CPU benchmarks, even though it fell up to 30% behind in general working tasks. Battery life was less than ideal with the unit only lasting five hours and 49 minutes in 1080p movie playback and while the GPU is good for light 1080p gaming and moderate graphical workloads, it’s not really the same as some of the more powerful gaming rigs on offer here.

A powerful professional laptop that ticks all the boxes but doesn’t do much to distinguish itself in a competitive space.

“Dell has also ditched the throttled Core i9 model, offering only a hexacore Intel Core i7-10750H or a octa-core i7-10875H CPU.”