Gadgetory

in late 2015 Dell came out with the first good-looking XPS 15 this was a time where most laptops were pretty unsightly MacBooks looked good but most Windows laptops looked honestly quite bad they were plastic they were thick and if they were made of aluminum they didn't look particularly good that first XPS 15 was something special it looked good it was thin it was pretty powerful but it had thermal limitations and then the year later they came up with a 95 60 same design but the same issues it had Thermal limitations three years later in 2018 we have this the 95 70 and this is a different market right now in 2018 there are a lot of good-looking thin and light powerful laptop so it doesn't really stick out as being the obvious choice for someone that wants something like this is it still good it is but there are some issues that I have with it now I'm not going to look a regular review on this but I will give you kind of like a one-minute overview it still has the best-in-class exterior build for a 15-inch Windows laptop I still think the XPS 15 is the leader it has an awesome exterior carbon fiber stuff feels nice it's soft touch it's durable holds up well over time there's a decent port selection and the Thunderbolt 3 port finally supports four lanes of PCIe so if you want to connect to port external GPU you're getting full bandwidth it has an excellent track pad good keyboard with white backlighting it only has room for a single SSD slot there is room for a secondary drive it's like an optional kit but it's a SATA drive and you also have to use a smaller battery if you use that the speakers are ok they're also not in the best position there underneath the laptop the webcam is still a nose cam it's centered this year but it still has that unflattering angle it has an awesome battery life with the screen at 215 it's I'm getting a full eight hours of battery life that's better battery than the previous generation the screen this is the 4k panel and I really like it it's bright its color accurate it's excellent for content creation or for anyone that enjoys a high-res high-quality screen I think this is its best feature now I'm going to focus the rest of this video on what I think is the most important feature about this device or both of these devices it's the performance so these devices have been upgraded from the previous generation by a significant amount both the CPU and the GPU are strong performers there's a few configurations for the CPU the i5 and i7 are fast the i9 is faster the GPU in this one is a 1050 Ti and it pushes out really respectful frame rates for most modern titles right now at 1080p and it's also great for Adobe content the new XPS 15 is quite a bit faster in Premiere than last year's model now I want to talk about thermal performance and I think this is a topic that I think really defines this whole product line the XPS 15 from even three years ago if you push these devices hard for extended periods of time you will run into thermal throttling the i-5 and the i7 throttle occasionally the i9 throttles a little bit more it honestly questions why they even put the i9 into the XPS 15 because the thermal limitations of this chassis are quite pronounced and just when you stick in a very powerful chip like the i9 into this it just you know you're losing a lot of the value of that chip because of the thermal design of this laptop so this brings up the question of whether or not this thermal stuff is a serious issue so this is my take on it there's basically two well three ways you can kind of look at it one way is to look at this thermal limitation and be like you know what if thermal throttles deal-breaker forget about it let's look at a different brand the thing is I don't feel like that's a legitimate thing there aren't really obvious alternatives to the XPS 15 there are devices that are similar like the razor blade the aro 15 GS 65 but none of them are quite like the XPS 15 this really isn't a class of its own none of them are built as well as this and none of them have the super long battery life like this it's a unique product so if you want to find something that's like this without the thermal throttling it doesn't exist so there's really only two realistic options number one you deal with it by re pasting it and under vaulting it I've done a video on it in the past it's not the easiest thing in the world it's a bit of a pain but it is a way to get better thermals on the ninety five seventy if you want the other option is to understand that the XPS 15 was not built as a gaming device it's not built to run stuff at Full Tilt full-bore 24/7 it is a work oriented device it's a thin and light quiet laptop and if they wanted to they could crank up the fans it can this thing louder and have better thermal performance but it would sacrifice a lot of what makes the XPS 15 what it is so depending on what you want to do with this device you kind of have to choose one of those two realistic options now that being said I don't think that delegates a pass anymore when they first launched this in 2015 sure last year is a little bit of annoying but sure three years later I feel like they should have found some kind of engineering solution to make this issue not even be an issue and there are other devices out there now in 2018 that have very similar performance to this like without thermal issues and that's the thing now if you still want that really amazing build quality you got to stick with this but if you're just looking for raw performance there are other options I've done reviews I'll link them down below but this is what it is it does have thermal issues yet again and it's getting a little stale Dell it's getting a little stale