Dell XPS 15 the lightest and the fastest

We all love Dell laptops for classic designs, and today's trend of gaming laptops is catching fire. This Dell XPS  15 laptop might not be the Alienware  but it's performance quite good for gaming. The design is quite simple but's it's screen is to gorgeous and beautiful.

This is not the eye-catching convertible design of its stablemate, the flipping-screen Dell XPS 12 , but the 3200x1800 display of the latest version of the XPS 15 is too good and ensures that it provides plenty of visual attention of its own. It's very light with having the weight of only 2.1kg. The best thing of this beauty is that it is one the lightest 15.6inch laptop available in the market. It makes it very handy to use.

It's  partial-aluminium casing in the sides and it's eye catching Retina-style screen gives a quitely comparable to  Apple’s Retina MacBook Pro , and its super light weight and very slimmy 18mm thickness are also very  identical.  The Dell XPS 15 has some quite unique features that outguns the MacBook Pro in a number of respects. The first thing about the Dell’s laptop is that it makes a good impression even before you turn it on. The aluminium casing is both light and sturdy and it looks very eye catching and appealing, and provides good support for the 15.6in screen.

The other good thing in this laptop is the stylish keyboard, with trackpad and surrounding panels all have a pleasant ‘soft-touch’ matt-black plastic finish makes it smart and feels very comfortable to use. The Dell XPS 15 is very slim due to this  slimline design it forsakes an internal DVD drive, but few people will complain about that if it means the XPS 15 can lose some heft compared to most 15in laptops. 

There is a big drawback that it have  no ethernet port for a wired network connection, but one of the three USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 could accept an adaptor. Both HDMI and Mini DisplayPort provide good connectivity for external monitors.  However, it’s Dell’s ‘QHD’ screen that’s the real eye-opener and the real deal. With a resolution of 3200x1800 pixels and 235ppi, it has a suprisingly higher resolution than the Retina display of the MacBook Pro, at 2880x1800 and 220ppi.

 It looks terrific, as it have a beautiful th IPS panel which is very bright and colourful, and have strong contrast that ensures that blacks look very black, while the pristine white backgrounds of many web pages help accentuate how dull the colours are for many other laptops. The screen is enough touch-sensitive, too, although we found ourselves reluctant to mar the brilliant and shiny screen with our fingerprints.  The big problem is with that high-resolution display is that Windows programs don’t work properly. The adjustable scaling technology in Windows works well enough on the main desktop, allowing you to adjust the size of text and icons to enhance visibility.

Due to very high screen resolution it doesn't always help with interface elements within individual applications, which remain at the screen’s native resolution. This means that toolbars, icons and buttons in some third-party applications appear so small that they’re almost unusable and creates many problems. And, ironically, it’s often graphics applications such as the Adobe Photoshop Elements program we tried that suffer the most here, because of their reliance on graphical-based tools. It feels very bad to switching to a lower resolution for tasks such as photo or video-editing; which rather defeats the point of paying for the QHD display in the first place. In our view it's microsoft's fault not the dell's that it cannot provide a solution to this quite a big problem, although it’s you as the latter’s customer that has to put up with it. 

Despite of the resolution issue with windows 8.1.There are areas where the Dell XPS 15 gives better performance and value for money than its big rival the MacBook Pro with Retina display. Currently there are two versions of the Dell XPS 15 currently available, with prices starting at £1,249 for a model with a quad-core Intel Core i7 running at 2.3GHz, 16GB memory and an Heavey Nvidia GeForce GT 750M handling graphics duties. Note that the model we tested had a 2.2GHz Intel Core i7-4702HQ; Dell’s website now lists a 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-4712HQ, after Intel’s running processor upgrade. Our review model included a 512GB solid-state drive, which bumped this price up to £1,499.

That compares favourably to a starting price of £1,699 for the 15in MacBook Pro, which has a 2GHz processor,  8GB of memory and 256GB solidstate storage. This entry-level model of Apple’s notebook also relies on Intel’s Iris Pro integrated graphics  rather than a discrete GPU.In Lab performance the Dell XPS 15 proves to be  good, with a score of 5833 points in the general purpose PCMark 7. This  suggests that the XPS 15 can provide  desktop-PC levels of performance  for a wide range of software.  Performance in the Home and Works suites of PCMark 8 wasn’t  quite so strong, but scores of 2699  and 2800 points respectively are  still solid enough for all but the most demanding of tasks. It can handle a fair bit of gaming action too, easily breezing to 68fps( thanks to the superfast Nvidia Geforce 750m)  when running our Stalker: Call  of Pripyat casual gaming test at 1920x1080 resolution.

We tried Batman: Arkham City  at the full 3200x1800 resolution  – which looked terrific, but only gave us 21fps. Dropping down to  1920x1080 allowed the XPS 15 to hit a smooth 50fps even with graphics details set to High. Battery life is disappointing.  Dell quotes a life of ‘up to 11 hours’,  but in our usual test we only just  managed fives hours of streaming  video with the XPS 15. Apple’s entry-level 15in Retina  MacBook Pro lasted more than 50 percent longer in the same test,  running for eight hours, 14 minutes. 

Verdict

Despite of the disappointing Battery life , especially as the Dell XPS 15 is intended as a lightweight Ultrabook, although as a desktop replacement system, . It provides outstanding display with 235ppi screen quality and high-end performance rocking a nvidia geforce 750m at a competitive price, while still being slim and light enough to slip into a bag for the occasional business trip or weekend away. It makes Dell XPS 15 a real marterpiece to buy, the people who like very high visuals will have to busy this beauty.

System requirements

 15.6in (3200x1800) gloss IPS touchscreen display;

  2.2GHz Intel Core i7-4702HQ (3.2GHz Turbo);

 Intel HD Graphics 4600 & nVidia GeForce GT 750M (2GB RAM); Windows 8.1 (64-bit); 16GB DDR3L RAM; 512GB mSATA SSD; 802.11b/g/n/ac; Bluetooth 4.0; 1x HDMI 1.4; 1x Mini DisplayPort 1.2; 3x USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0; SDXC card slot; 720p webcam/ microphone; 1x headphone socket; 91Wh lithium-ion battery; 372x254x18mm; 2.01kg.