Gadgetory

hey guys the Austin this plain-looking box contains one of the most exciting laptops I've seen in quite a while this is the Dell XPS 13 I really do like the LG cram so I've already done a full video on this what's nice is is that when I'm at the office I can plug it in via USB C to a monitor and use it like a desktop for stuff like email and notes when I'm on the go not only does it have some of the best battery life I've ever tested but it's also super lightweight and portable that's where the XPS 13 comes in so the XPS 13 has been around for a couple years now but this is the most recent version what makes it really special is that it is one of the very first laptops to ship with the eighth generation Intel Core processors now normally that doesn't sound like it would be any kind of huge difference but in this case it means it is going to be a lot faster at least I hope so one of the nice things about the XPS 13 is that it actually is made out of aluminum and I can immediately tell that while it is definitely a little bit heavier than the gram it feels really substantial pop this guy open and one of the first things you're going to see is the fairly large 13.3 inch display and a very very small chassis so when the XPS 13 first came out this sort of bezel was really impressive now it's getting a little bit more common but it still looks really nice the outside of the XPS 13 is all aluminum but on the inside it has this carbon fiber finish it actually feels pretty good it almost feels a little bit more rubbery than you would expect at a carbon fiber but it's nice and comfortable there's also a nice selection of ports so now that you have our power end but we also have a Thunderbolt 3 port which you can also use to power the laptop a USB 3.0 port headphone jack as well as the battery indicator which looks like it's dead which is cool and if we flip it over to the other side which we're gonna find is another USB 3.0 port as well as a full-size SD card reader having that Thunderbolt 3 port is nice as 9 doesn't double as a USB C port but you can also do stuff like connect a 4k monitor to it except power N and in theory you could connect it to an external GPU for better gaming performance although unfortunately it only uses two lanes of PCIe which means that that's probably not going to be a great idea it will get bottlenecks the display is 13.3 inches with a 1080p resolution but it is not a touchscreen if you want that you have to upgrade to the 1800 P model which is a lot more expensive now I actually like 1080p as I feel like it's a good sort of sweet spot between room screen resolution as well as battery life and this panel is decent so the color is fine viewing angles are solid however it just doesn't get quite as bright as I would like the biggest problem with the display is that means that the webcam has to be put in the left corner which means that it looks really weird not only are you looking up in my nose but I'm always looking to the side of the laptop this laptop has pretty decent speakers so one of my issues with the Graham was that the speakers were a little bit tinny however here even though they're not from firing they come up the sides it sounds a lot better I also like the keyboard and trackpad so the keyboard has a nice spacing the feels good and it's backlit and the trackpad uses Windows precision drivers so no it's not quite as good as something like a glass trackpad on a macbook but it is right up there my only real issue is that to get a touchscreen you have to pay another $350 which to me is kind of hard to justify what really makes this new XPS 13 stand out though are those eighth generation Core processors now typically when you go from one processor to the next as far as generations go it's usually not a huge difference with this guy we're going from dual-core processors to quad-core and then a small thin and light laptop like this that makes a huge difference this XPS 13 is powered by the IEEE 78550 you so the base clock is 1.8 gigahertz but it's almost always above that as you guys will see in a minute and it can turbo all the way up to 4 gigahertz now that's backed up by 8 gigabytes of RAM and a 256 gig nvme SSD run this guy through Geekbench I legitimately had to triple check my results in only is this one of the fastest laptops I've ever tested as far as single-threaded performance goes even with multi-threaded it is right up there with high end core i7s from gaming laptops of last year one thing to keep in mind is that this is still a 15 watt processor so for longer sustained use such as gaming or rendering you will see the clock speeds start to dip but for most stuff like video editing or web browsing you're gonna see it be incredibly fast unfortunately gaming performance doesn't see the same kind of gains so here on rocket ly you're getting anywhere between 40 to 50 frames per second at 720p quality which is fine for lighter titles but it's really not going to see a major benefit over something like skylake your cable under normal usage the laptop is basically silent however once you fire up something like a game some video editing you'll see that the fan does get a little bit noisy tell claims that you can get 13 hours of battery-life streaming video and about 22 hours of light usage which might be a little bit of an exaggeration but with a 60 watt hour battery it should absolutely last you all day there is a lot to like with the XPS 13 so $1,300 I feel like this Beck is a little bit expensive however once you can actually get a core i5 in this guy and especially if they have a more affordable touchscreen version this is gonna be hard to beat I am really excited to see these new processors roll out to more and more laptops having this much power in such a thin light laptop honestly is a game changer for me so what do you guys think about the XPS 13 as well as these new 8th gen processors let me know in the comments below and I will catch you in the next one