Gadgetory

Hey how's it going guys this is Dave 2d and this is my fairly extensive review of the 2015 edition of the Dell XPS 13 now I wanted to preface this review with just a little bit of information about myself I do not like desktops for the past 10 years or so I've tried to do everything I do on a notebook because I don't like having two devices that can do the same thing so occasionally I'll buy the parts for a desktop put it together and immediately regret doing it because I just don't like having two computers now every time anyone ever asks me oh you know for the past three four years what notebook should I get I invariably recommend the MacBook Air 13-inch just because it's it's such a great notebook in so many elements and if someone can get used to OSX or if they like OS X I think it's just a fantastic notebook so yeah on with this review now you know how I feel though Dells cardboard boxes this computer caming yet again another cardboard box but in a surprising turn of events within this cardboard box was a smaller black more premium looking box which I thought was a nice touch let's talk about the main design feature the carbon fiber now I thought I wouldn't be able to do it justice but surprisingly I can actually capture the look of the carbon fiber on camera and you can kind of see the weave right I hope this shows up you know how there's a little bit of a weave you can see like the pattern now it certainly looks like real carbon fiber inside like when you touch it it's got that like very subtle texture to it but I don't know if it's actually real I know Dell says it's real but I don't know for sure and I don't really feel like grinding down the resin to see if I can actually reach the weave but you know what if I had a few more subs I do it I do it for you guys now covering the carbon fiber is a soft touch rubbery grippy stuff it feels really nice actually and the hinge over here has a similar soft touch to it but without the carbon fiber underneath the top of the notebook is aluminum it feels pretty premium and it seems like the inside of the Dell logo here is filled with some kind of black plastic I thought it was metal at first but if you kind of give it a give it a couple scratches it does feel like it's plastic the bottom is also aluminum two rubber feet kind of line the length of the notebook I tried peeling off the adhesive just to kind of see how strong it was and it held pretty well it didn't peel off so that's kind of nice I have had notebooks in the past where after a few months of use it start to peel so I don't think this will be the case with this one right in the middle of the back is this hatch when I saw this hatch the first thing I thought was wow this is going to be easy mode Ram upgrades but you want to know what's behind this hatch here I'll show you it basically opens up to a tiny chamber of disappointment it's two screws and some serial numbers I mean like why didn't they build this hatch why did they go through the elaborate process of building this intricate metal plate to cover two screws and some serial numbers if any of you guys have ideas as to what it was for please let me know in the comments because I'm actually pretty curious turns out you can't upgrade Ram because it's soldered onto the motherboard but you can upgrade the SSD and then there's this vent so this notebook vents the hotter directly downwards instead of out the back so I thought it might actually be an issue at first because if you're using on your lap you know this hot air is burning your legs the whole time but I tried it out and I'll discuss it later it's it's actually not bad as it might seem so when you turn the computer on there's a power button that has a light the battery status has lights and the AC adapter has lights as well it's actually a little different it's kind of shaped like a ring it's kind of like curved LEDs which is kind of nice and it doesn't change colors in it's charging state so when you plug it in you don't know if it's charging or not just by looking at this LED you have to look on your computer screen which isn't a big deal these lights stay on even when it's unplugged but I actually found it useful because you can find the adapter tip at night so if it's like pitch dark and you're looking for your AC adapter to charge your computer you don't have to turn on your light source off you just look for these LEDs just pick up the the tip and plug it in something else that was kind of cool the prongs on the AC adapter it tucks in like most AC adapters but this one can also flip in two directions so it can flip like this and like this but I think the idea is that if you ever have to share a power bar or something with other devices you can plug it in like this and I'll take up less space something else I should have mentioned earlier are the ports on the machine there's no HDMI and there's no Ethernet which isn't a big deal and they also have a dongle that you can buy to get these ports back but it's just something you should keep in mind when purchasing it the weight of this thing is 2.6 pounds versus a MacBook Air which I always thought was a really light notebook that comes in at 2.96 pounds so even though it's on a substantial weight difference it's definitely noticeable if you're looking for it if you put them side-by-side you can kind of see just how much smaller it is the screen res I got with my configuration was 1920 by 1080 there is a higher res version that's 3200 by 1800 now that one comes out a little bit of a higher price but also a decrease the battery life the screen I got in my configuration is pretty good but it's nothing to write home about one thing I did notice though is if you're using the hardware buttons the screen doesn't dim down all the way so you know if you're at work and you're like browsing reddit instead of doing work and you kind of want to dim your screen down to pretend like your computers off well you can't do that here there's a webcam at the bottom of the screen which is a little weird at first because it kind of catches you in an unflattering angle it kind of looks up your nose and it's like looking at the ceiling but there's no other place to put a webcam if you're going to have a bezel this thin so if you video chat frequently or if you use it for work you might want to get an external webcam the keyboard is pretty cool it's got no flex and it feels pretty nice it's chiclet keys like a lot of notebooks and I think everyone's opinion will vary on this but unless you have really specific keyboard needs I think you'll grow used to it and you may even learn to like it okay the trackpad there is a seriously annoying problem with this trackpad but it's something that I think Dell will resolve shortly basically there's no software or controller settings I could find to adjust certain things about the trackpad so for example the direction of scroll right now if I'm moving my two fingers down to scroll down it's actually moving up I just want to reverse that and also tap to click I really don't like tap to click when I type I find that I'm constantly pressing the trackpad by accident but even though it's really annoying right now I think it'll be a non-issue shortly the trackpad itself feels all right it's a little bit of a sandy or rougher texture than a MacBook trackpad and the buttons are ever so slightly harder to click the CPU is new this year and I think it's one of the first few notebooks to use Broadwell but the performance gains as well as the power savings are minimal at best if you're looking for massive jump in performance or power savings you're not going to find it here I played some games mostly Blizzard games I tried Diablo ran fine around 50 frames per second remember this is only 1920 by 1080 red so if you guys want to pick up that super high-res 3200 by 1800 your performance is going to be a lot slower I love Starcraft 2 but I'm pretty bad at it I'm in gold League and I probably shouldn't even be in there but it felt very comfortable when I played it I was getting around 50 frames per second and keyboard actually felt pretty good Oh Starcraft I love that game I want to talk a little bit the temperatures and sound signature of this notebook it gets a little bit warm not super hot and the fan kicks in pretty readily now I tried gaming a little bit on my lap just because I wanted to test how that bottom vent would work so on my macbook air the vent faces away from the computer so it's kind of when you when it's sitting in your lap the vent is kind of facing in the same direction that I'm looking at it pushes the air seems to push outwards but this thing seems to be pushing straight down so I played a game of Starcraft and it got pretty warm on my lap but I started to lose and I was like I can't lose this game so I put it back on the desk I ended up losing anyways so it kind of sucked friggin Starcraft I hate that game in terms of the fan sound it's really silent when it's idle it was running around like 2025 decibels during games and the fans kick in it gets around 45 decibel so it's audible but it's definitely not annoying the speakers seem to be pretty loud for a notebook this size now I know this is subjective so I'm just going to play a song at maximum volume within the three different notebooks okay let's talk battery life Dell advertises this thing to have a 15 hour battery life which is even greater than the 13-inch MacBook Air so the first thing I did when I got home I charged it up and I let it drain down and I just used some casual web browsing and I was getting about nine and a half hours so I was doing Windows was doing updates at the time so I feel like it wasn't a fair test I charged it up again ran ran it down again got ten and a half hours this time and this is because I had lowered the screen brightness a little bit to like 60 70 percent so I thought this is impossible how is Dell saying that they can get 15 hours from this thing so I actually tried I basically I turned off Bluetooth I just browsed like Reddit with no youtubing and screen brightness was that like 30% and only then could I even stretch it out to 12 hours just a little bit over 12 hours and then afterward ran out of batteries I thought what am i doing this is this is not how you use a computer I feel I felt like I was drinking internet from a tiny little teacup so this is not how the Internet should be used this is not how Dell should be advertising their battery power so maybe just the battery needs time to kind of tune up or tune in or whatever but I'm not - I'm not too pleased with this 15 hour proclamation so far something else to note I got7 half hours watching Breaking Bad directly from my hard drive yeah just straight up movies seven half hours I think you'll get about 10 or 11 hours of realistic use which is still pretty good considering that's more than a full workday but it's still a little shy from the 15 hours that was advertised so I'm a little bit bummed about that as for my overall thoughts on this thing I I think Dell did an amazing job they hit it out of the park because this is a carbon-fibre notebook at $1000 now this the configuration I got was the 128 gig drive eight gigs of ram in the i5 with as I mentioned before the 1920 1080 screen so at that price point to get the materials that they've put into this and the finish that they've put into this is really good so I think it's a good value and I would wreck and this to basically anyone who asked me for a notebook recommendation right now in early 2015 I'm pretty sure Dell will be putting out a 2015 version of the XPS 15 and I'll be sure to do a review of that when it comes out and yeah I hope you guys liked this review it was really long I hope it wasn't too long but I feel like a notebook of this caliber really deserved a pretty extensive review so I hope you guys enjoyed I did it was nice I'll see you guys next time