Square eyes
Backspace and Enter keys are all in their right and proper places, they’re nice and big, and there are no other nasty surprises.
And, as ever, the typing feel of the XPS 13’s keyboard is second to none. Although there isn’t a huge amount of travel, you get loads of positive feedback and every time you press a key it’s accompanied by a satisfying, well-dampened thunk. Other laptop manufacturers should take note.
The 113 x 64mm touchpad is just as good, with a silky surface that delivers precise cursor control. It’s large enough to make multi-touch gestures a joy instead of a chore.
You have two display options with the 2020 XPS 13: a non-touch 1,920 x 1,200 screen or a 3,840 x 2,400 InfinityEdge touchscreen, both of which employ a taller, slightly squarer 16:10 aspect ratio than with the previous model.
Alas, I don’t have the 4K touchscreen to test, which is a shame because the specifications look tempting, but it’s good to know that the cheaper variety is pretty darned good. It gets incredibly bright, peaking at almost 600cd/m2 , making it the perfect laptop for working out in the garden – even on relatively sunny days.
The high contrast ratio of 1,777:1 ensures images on the screen have plenty of presence and don’t look washed out. Colour accuracy in the sRGB colour space is exemplary, and a matte finish to the screen ensures you aren’t distracted by reflections from overhead strip lights in the office. There’s no support for HDR with this non-touch display, but if you decide to upgrade to the 4K screen you get Dolby Vision and DisplayHDR 400 support.
Speed bump
As it usually does each year, Dell has transitioned quickly to the latest generation of Intel CPUs, following up its first tenth-gen refresh in late 2019 with another set of tenth-gen CPUs. You have a choice of two quad-core CPUs with the 2020 XPS 13: the Core i5-1035G1 and the quad-core Core i7-1065G7. One key benefit of the
Core i7 is its higher Turbo speed (3.9GHz to 3.6GHz).
I had the latter for testing, accompanied by 16GB of RAM, and it performs slightly better in the benchmarks than the 2019 Core i7 editions of the Dell XPS 13, which were based on the slower tenth-gen Core i7-10510U and the eighth-gen Intel Core i7-8565U.
As the graphs above indicate, the Dell XPS 13 is a quick performer. This is one of the big advantages this laptop family holds over similar ultraportables, with Dell ensuring that the core components are kept as cool as possible.
Dell squeezes the most out of Intel’s integrated graphics, too, with a 51.1fps average in Dirt: Showdown at 1080p and 64.8fps in the GFXBench offscreen Car Chase benchmark.
What’s perhaps more impressive is that battery life is now much better than it was in the late 2019 model. As you can see from the graph above, a time of 10hrs 50mins puts the new
XPS 13 some distance in front of all its 13in laptop rivals. If you want stamina and speed, it’s a great choice.