Dell XPS 17 (2020)
Magnificent performance and a wonderful display make this the perfect laptoplapto for photo editors
PRICE As reviewed, £2,415 (£2,899 inc VAT) V ) from dell.co.uk
The Dell XPS 17 reflects a slowl slowly growing trend in the world of laptops: the return of the large-screen desktop replacement. Championed by machines such as th the LG Gram 17 ( see issue 311, p56), ), Razer Blade Pro 17in ( see issue 311, p54) and the Apple MacBook Pro 16in ( see issue 305, p52), this rebooted genre loses the chunky stylings of the deskbound monsters of old, delivering big displays while maintaining the sleek chassis of modern laptops.
Built to last
The XPS 17 certainly matches its rivals in terms of style. Like an XPS 13 on steroids, it has the same black carbon-fibre interior as its sibling, right down to the gleaming edges and wedge-shaped profile.
When it’s time to pack up for the day, at 374 x 248 x 19.5mm (WDH) you can slip the XPS 17 into most “15in” laptop bags without stretching them at the seams. However, at 2.1kg (plus 485g for the power brick), it’s not as light as it looks.
That’s reflected in its build quality. With a stiff metal lid to protect the screen from mishaps and a rigid base that provides a solid foundation for the keyboard and touchpad, the XPS 17 is extremely well knitted together.
That three-stage backlit keyboard is as comfortable as they come, with square, Scrabble-style keys and a quiet, crisp, well-damped action. The layout is sensible, with the only cause for concern being that the fingerprint reader/power button nudges the Delete key inwards by a centimetre or so. I can live with that.
The touchpad is just as good. It’s huge, measuring 150 x 90mm, and it works perfectly for both general mousing and multitouch gestures.
Meanwhile, the large, upwardfiring speakers on either side of the keyboard deliver audio with enough body to convince you not to wear headphones. I’m less enamoured with the noisy 720p webcam, but it is at least compatible with Windows Hello so you can use it to log in with your face.
There are irritations. Despite the acres of space around the edges, the selection of physical ports and connections is limited: you’ll find two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C connections on either side, a full-sized SD card slot, a 3.5mm headset jack and that’s your lot. There’s enough space for a legacy USB-A port or two, as well as an HDMI output, so why not include them?
Stunning display
The laptop comes with a frankly enormous 17in display and, in typical XPS style, this delivers a stunning 93.7% screen-to-chassis ratio. The screen almost completely fills the lid, which is surrounded by the tiniest of bezels.
This screen is available in either a non-touch 1,920 x 1,200 resolution or a 3,840 x 2,400 touchscreen with support for Dolby Vision. Both panels use IPS technology, and while I can only speak of the touchscreen version on test I can assure you that it’s a thing of real beauty.
It’s a wide gamut gam screen that’s capable of producing produ 159% of the sRGB colour space – equivalent eq to 109.6% of Adobe RGB by volume. It reaches peak brightness of o 503cd/m² and an astonishing contrast cont ratio of 1,901:1.
It has all the c credentials of a topclass laptop display displ when measured too. Testing against again Adobe RGB, as that’s the colour space to which the display has been calibrated, its average Delta E was w 1.29, indicating this is a fabulous display for editing high high-resolution resolution photos on.
There are two things to note. First, despite Dolby Vision accreditation, you’re not going to experience any serious HDR effect when watching movies as there’s no local dimming. Second, it ships with the irritating dynamic brightness effect that has afflicted many Dell XPS laptops over the past few years. This is where the display brightens when there’s a lot of bright content onscreen, and dims when there’s a flood of dark content.
After fiddling with settings in the Intel Graphics Command Center, and a couple of reboots, I succeeded in disabling this, but there’s no obvious setting to flip – I happened to stumble across a fix through trial and error.
“With a stiff metal lid to protect the screen from mishaps and a rigid base, the Dell XPS 17 is extremely well knitted together”
Top speed
One thing I can’t complain about is this laptop’s speed. Then again, that’s what you’d expect with Intel’s octa-core, Hyper-Threaded 2.3GHz Core i7-10875H onboard. It’s backed by 16GB of RAM and a 1TB PCIe SSD, and the performance numbers are great. It’s slower than the MacBook Pro 16in with the 9th Gen, eight-core Core i9 but not by much.
If you don’t need that level of power, Dell provides lower-specified versions as per the table opposite. Avoid the £1,799 offering with 256GB SSD and integrated graphics, but anything above this will be fast: the
i7-10750H typically scores around 190 in our benchmarks, while the GeForce GTX 1650 Ti remains a solid performer in older games. Whichever version you choose, your laptop will be much faster than the 2020 LG Gram 17, due to its reliance on the lower-power and much slower Core i7-1065G7 or Core i5-1035G7 CPUs.
The XPS 17 is also a decent gaming machine. It will cope easily with older games at the screen’s native resolution, with only the likes of Hitman 2 causing it to stumble: it managed 32fps at 1080p with high settings, compared to 156fps at the same resolution for Metro: Last Light.
Gamers’ enthusiasm will be dampened by the 60Hz refresh rate of the screen, which is one of the reasons I would steer them towards a Razer Blade 17 with its 300Hz Full HD display. For example, the £2,600 version includes the same CPU as our test Dell but features superior RTX 2070 graphics (and a lesser 512GB SSD). That Razer returned 50fps in the same Hitman 2 test.
Where the Dell pulls ahead of both Razer and Apple is battery life: a time of 7hrs 47mins in our video-rundown test, with screen brightness set to 170cd/m² and Flight mode engaged, is excellent for such a large machine. It only falls behind the LG Gram, which is understandable given that laptop’s comparable lack of performance.
Top banana?
The Dell XPS 17 has its foibles. It isn’t as light as you might expect given its slim profile, I’d have liked more legacy ports and there’s the irritation of its auto-dimming display. Yet this is a serious laptop at a seriously tempting price. It has a huge screen that’s perfect for professional-level photo editing, it’s slim enough to drop into most 15in laptop bags and you can even play AAA games on it thanks to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 GPU.
It’s a worthy competitor to the MacBook Pro 16in for Windows 10 users, and the fact you can buy even cheaper configurations is an added bonus.
SPECIFICATIONS
Eight-core 2.3GHz Core i7-10875H processor 16GB DDR4-2933 RAM 6GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics 17in IPS touchscreen, 3,840 x 2,400 resolution 1TB M.2 PCIe SSD 2x2 802.11ax Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5.1 4 x USB-C Thunderbolt 3 SD card reader 3.5mm jack 97Wh battery Windows 10 Home 374 x 248 x 19.5mm (WDH) 2.1kg 1yr on-site warranty