LAPTOP Review
Dell XPS 13 9310
Portability and power are two features that a photographer, especially a travel photographer, looks for in a laptop. Lightweight and extremely portable, the Dell XPS 13 series has been quite popular in the non-gaming and of ice productivity segment. The smallest and lightest in the latest generation of XPS 13 models, the 9310, offers a credible processing power with a nice and attractive design, making it a credible choice for photographers too.
Design & Build Quality
The XPS 13 9310 has a clean design and is available in black and white colours. The white colour we reviewed has a silver- inished (Frost, in Dell literature) machine-milled aluminium chassis along with an Arctic White interior. A glossy anodised metal band along the sides give a touch of elegance. The touchpad area has a nice, laminated inish with 3D rectangular textures showing up through the top layer.
Key Features
The device features a 13.4-inch UHD+ (3 40 x 2400) In inityEdge Touch antire lective display protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass 6 cover glass. The display can reproduce 100 percent sRGB and 90 percent DCI P3 colour gamut and offers 1500:1 contrast ratio. The screen provides up to 500-nits of brightness. The display is Dolby ision certi ied. The notebook measures 14. x 295.7 x 19 .7 mm and is quite light at 1.27 kg. The device houses two Thunderbolt 4 ports for display and power delivery, a 3.5 mm headphone/microphone combo jack and a MicroSD card reader. The Thunderbolt ports provide enough power and speed for external GPUs and most other peripherals.
The XPS 13 9310 features an 11th Generation Intel Core 17-11 5G7 quad-core processor clocked at 3 GHz. The machine is built on the new Intel Evo platform, which is a complete solution integrating onboard Intel Iris Xe Graphics, Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 4 ports. This notebook includes 16GB of 4.27 GHz LPDDR4x RAM, 1TB M.2 PCIe Me SSD storage and GB of vRAM. The device features dual fans and a single heat pipe designed with a single evaporator and dual condenser, along with G RE thermal insulation, which provides thermal conductivity levels lower than air for efficient heat management.
The XPS 13 incorporates a small webcam that is designed to deliver sharp videos and features temporal noise reduction. The webcam is compatible with Windows Hello and worked flawlessly during our test. Intel’s iller AX1650 Wi-Fi module offers Wi-Fi 6 technology and delivers up to 2.4 Gbps throughput. Two sidefacing, bottom-firing speakers provide excellent sound output with loud and clear audio.
The XPS 13 is one of the slimmest and most portable notebooks available currently. The laptop offers the latest features and comes with Windows 10 Home edition. You could pick on the unavailability of a USB Type-A port as a negative (Dell provides a single Type-C to Type-A adapter in the box), but dual Thunderbolt ports expand the possibility of adding various adapters including USB hubs and ethernet adapters without affecting data transfer speeds, and that should be enough for most of us.
Ergonomics
The chiclet keyboard offers good feedback. The keypad is illuminated and provides two levels of lighting, but I personally found it more legible after switching off the lighting, probably because predictably, the keys are not evenly lit and because of the better contrast offered by the dark unlit letters against the white keys. The charging adaptor offers a built-in indicator that shows when it is powered on and a bright LED strip at the front edge of the laptop indicates when the battery is charging. The device is powered by a 4-cell, 52 Whr battery. The compact 45W USB Type-C charging adapter is also white in colour.
Performance
As an everyday office-cum-production laptop, the device offers enough juice for your photo editing, video rendering and similar applications. 3D rendering and such heavy tasks might prove somewhat taxing for this device. We tried rendering a 10-minute 4k video clip and the machine proved fairly good at it, though it heated the underside of the device considerably. However, thanks to the efficient cooling system, the heat did not get transferred to the top. Apart from this, the device delivers credible performance in most of our on-the-field uses. The device provides excellent sound output, certainly better than many laptops in this category.
Value for Money
The XPS 13 9310’s price starts at
Rs. 150,990. With the configuration that we tested, it retails at
Rs. 1,71,722. This is good value for money for a device that is aesthetically designed with convenience in mind. And of course, this beauty comes with some serious potential.