Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave - Dee and this is my review of the Dell XPS 15 with the infinity display so one of the first youtube videos I ever did was the XPS 13 with the infinity display I really like that device but it wasn't powerful enough for what I wanted in a daily device like I wanted a quad-core processor and I wanted a bigger screen so I've been using a 15 inch retina MacBook Pro but recently Dell dropped this thing the XPS 15 and they've updated it with the infinity display it's kind of like the XPS 13 but everything has just been amped up so here are my thoughts it comes in a black box pretty plain but at least that's black and not just like brown cardboard right inside you get the laptop itself and some pamphlets the AC adapter and the extension cord come in a separate box okay so the top surface is aluminum and it's got a really nice finish to it it feels premium it feels durable and it doesn't show fingerprints really easily on the bottom we have two rubber strips for grips and they also help to raise the laptop for air intake through this big grill here and just like the 13-inch it has a flap which is apparently here to hide the serial numbers and the FCC markings and the reason why I know this is because like 500 people told me in the comments of my XPS 13 video thanks guys you can open it up pretty easily when you remove some screws and on the inside we have a battery upgradeable ram as well as an upgradable m2 SATA drive this is kind of refreshing because so many laptops have soldered on ram these days the bottom plate has a thin sheet of copper which I think they put in here to help with thermals and the whole bottom plate is like really rigid despite being so thin so I tried to twist it and it didn't really do much in fact the whole laptop is just really sturdy the screen doesn't have much flex the chassis is really solid the exterior edges are also really nicely machined I think they did a really good job on the aesthetics and build quality ok going around the sides on the right side we have an SD card slot a USB 3 port light up battery indicator and I love these little light up indicators and a lock slot on the left side we have a power socket another USB 3 port HDMI 1.4 port a USB 3.1 type C with Thunderbolt port and a combo headphone and my Jack it comes in a bunch of different configurations starting at $1,000 but the unit I'm reviewing is a skylake quad core i7 running at 2.6 gigahertz a 4k touchscreen 16 gigs of ram 512 gigs of storage a gtx 960m and it's currently going for around $2,100 u.s. it's roughly the same length as a 15-inch retina MacBook Pro but it's noticeably shorter from front to back so it's basically like a 15-inch laptop in what feels like a 14-inch footprint it's 4.5 pounds which is the same weight as a 15 inch retina MacBook Pro and because it's a smaller footprint it just feels like a pretty dense package when you open the lid you get that awesome carbon fiber now I'm a sucker for this stuff and I really think that Dell does carbon better than any other laptop company right now it's strong it's subtle and it's coated with some kind of like soft touch material so it's comfortable to rest your palms on it so just enjoy this carbon fiber porn that I shot the keyword is decent the layout is nice it's actually one of the better layouts I've seen and the three-stage backlighting is good but typing on it feels pretty similar to the XPS 13 with relatively short key travel I think it's at one point three millimeters it's still good but it's not great the trackpad is nice it's glass it's big and it works really well it's still not as good as a MacBook trackpad but it's pretty close and it's one of the best windows trackpads right now you'll probably really like this thing the screen is a 15.6 inch IPS touch panel with a resolution of 3840 by 2160 and it's LED backlit and it's fantastic so the bezel is super thin and it really lives up to the whole infinity edge trademark contrast is great viewing angles are great and then the touch screen is really responsive there's a dental utility here to adjust the color profile of the screen on the Adobe RGB setting this thing's like really color accurate for both print and web the screen is really nice it doesn't have the anti-glare coating that MacBook Pros have but it's such a bright screen that it's still very usable in brightly lit rooms or outdoors now I can't speak about the power consumption or the weight of the actual panel but visually I think it's one of the best 15-inch screens on the market right now and just like the XPS 13 the cameras on the bottom again what you think is unavoidable because of the soup thin bezels it's not high enough resolution for Microsoft hello but the image quality isn't bad okay let's talk performance I'm actually running the 256 gig drive it's a Samsung PM 951 and the 256 gig model is pretty slow my configuration normally comes with a 512 gig drive which is quite a bit faster but I swapped one out with a co-worker and the 256 gig version I have now is pretty gimpy I don't use much storage so I normally would never upgrade a drive but in this case I would just because of the slow speed of the 256 gig model video editing is nice 4k edits are smooth I rendered my iPad pro video using the XPS 15 and it took 48 minutes a fully loaded 15-inch MacBook Pro from 2015 took 57 minutes so it's around 15% faster I think Adobe Premiere really likes CUDA cores Gaming is also really good on this it's running a gtx 960m so like games like heroes of the storm or dota 2 those are going to run at 50 55 frames per second at 1080p on high graphics on extreme graphics I was getting around 35 to 40 frames per second and more demanding stuff like rusts I had to drop the graphics setting pretty low to make it playable you can hit 50 or 60 frames per second if you want but you have to crank your graphics really low the speakers are ok they're kind of forward-facing but they're underneath the keyboard and I noticed that I could feel the vibrations of the sound on the keys while I was playing games it wasn't bad or anything but I haven't experienced anything like that before and the sound is a little accualy maybe because of the location of the speakers but they're not bad and they get pretty loud fan noise is not bad silent at idle and around 30 decibels under load and the thermals are also good there's nothing too hot and there's no crazy hot spots on the keyboard or anything I think Dell did a really good job on thermal and noise management on this thing it's 130 watt charger it has that glowing ring at the AC adapter tip again so you can find it in the dark and it's reasonably small for 130 watts when the battery's low the light at the front of the laptop changes to orange and then it changes to white when it's charging it takes about 2 hours for a full charge now battery life is a little complicated this unit has a 4k screen and an 85 watt hour battery you can get a 1080p screen with the same sized battery and you can also get a 1080p screen with a smaller 56 water hour battery and that's four configurations with a disk drive instead of the SSD so on my configuration I was getting around six hours of regular use with screen at around seventy-five percent brightness and playing games I was getting around two and a half hours now supposedly on the 1080p model with the 84 watt hour battery you can get double the battery life but for my use the 4k screen is pretty important and the battery life isn't that bad okay let's do a recap XPS 15 awesome build quality aluminum exterior carbon fiber chassis the 4k touchscreen is outstanding it's really bright color accurate with super thin bezels the keyboard is comfortable not the best but very usable the trackpad is glass and it's one of the best windows trackpads right now on the inside we have a skylake i7 a gtx 960m that's really capable for 4k video edits and most games at 1080p there's a pair of upgradable RAM slots which is pretty rare these days and there's an upgradable or downgrade Abel in my case m2 SSD socket and lastly there's an 84 watt hour battery that lasts around 6 hours on the 4k screen alright there's a lot of good stuff going on inside the XPS 15 but I don't love that m2 sadder Drive it's a little bit slower than I'd like it to be but aside from that I think all the hardware choices they went with we're really good the battery life isn't amazing but it's kind of expected when you have a 4k screen in something that has this kind of footprint I mean you can only put in so many battery cells into a device this size is it a macbook killer I would consider this a better buy than a MacBook unless you need like a really long battery life or unless you need OS 10 I would consider this a better purchase because it's a better performer but aside from that I think like there's no other notebook right now that is this caliber it's really well built it's a great performer and it looks awesome that's into this review hope you guys liked it thumbs if you did Subsidy loved it it's been nice I'll see you guys next time