Dell XPS 13 (2015 Skylake) Review

By Josh Norem

Gaming notebooks like the Acer Predator 15 are fun to gawk at due to their ludicrous speed and prodigious girth, but when most of us need to use a laptop we want something thin and light that won’t die after a few hours. And preferably one with a display that won’t make our eyes bleed. For Mac users, the options are quite attractive, both literally and figuratively. There’s the svelte MacBook and MacBook Air, or the MacBook Pro if they need a bit of horsepower and a decent display. Those MacBooks are pretty sweet, and have caused more than a few cases of notebook-envy from PC users.

With the XPS 13, Dell is seeking to put a stop to this Mac-lust by releasing its own premium notebook with a beautiful high-res display, all-day battery life, and a Skylake processor, among other top-shelf specs.

The model we tested sells for $1,399 and is one rung down from the top of the lineup’s 13” product stack. Let’s take a look at the specs:

This model includes an Intel Skylake CPU; the Core i5-6200U, which is an Ultra Low Voltage par that sips just 15w and has two cores along with Hyper-threading for a total of four logical cores. It runs at 2.3GHz but Turbos up a tiny bit to 2.7GHz. If you need more ponies under the hood you can upgrade to a Core i7 for an extra $200. This model also features a touchscreen, and a 256GB M.2 PCIe SSD that utilizes the fancy new NVME protocol instead of the outdated AHCI, but you can get a non-touch version with a 128GB SSD for $400 less. It’s also rocking 8GB of RAM, but there is no option for 16GB.

The real star of the show is the Quad HD+ Infinity Edge display, which is absolutely gorgeous with a resolution of 3200×1800. It’s called Infinity Edge because it has a super tiny 5mm bezel on its sides, so it expands almost all the way to the edge of the display. This tiny bezel allows Dell to stuff a 13” display into a notebook that is essentially the size of an 11” model, and its super high-res display is something you won’t find on a MacBook Air. It’s even higher resolution than the 2560×1600 display found on the MacBook Pro’s Retina display. If you want even more pixels, the 15” version of the XPS includes a 3840×2160 display. The display is made of Corning’s fabled Gorilla Glass, so it can take a licking and not get scratched, though we didn’t test this particular feature on our loaner.

The only real casualty of this edge-to-edge design is the webcam, as there’s no room for it in its traditional spot above the LCD. It’s placed below the screen on the left-hand side. This makes using it quite awkward with an unflattering camera angle up your nose, so if you’re a frequent Skype-user this could be a deal-breaker.

The Infinity Edge display required the webcam to be relocated below the LCD, and off to the side.

Perhaps the most noticeable feature of this notebook is just how damn slim it is. It feels tiny, and measures just 9mm thick at the front, expanding to 15mm at the back. Its 12” wide and 7.88” deep, making it smaller than the MacBook Air, 13” MacBook Pro, or a traditional 13” notebook. It weighs just 2.7lbs, making it .2 pounds lighter than a MacBook Air, and half the weight of a MacBook Pro.

As far as connectivity goes, it sports two USB 3.0 ports including one with Dell’s PowerShare feature, which lets it charge USB devices even when the notebook is sleeping or turned off. There’s also one of them newfangled USB 3.1 ports, AKA Thunderbolt 3. It allows for file transfers up to 10Gbps, but devices that use this port are still exceedingly rare, though that will likely change in the next year so at least its future-proof in that regard. The bottom of the notebook is all CNC-machined aluminum and feels extremely sturdy, and there are two rubber ridges running along it so it won’t get scratched when you set it down on a desk.

The chiclet-style keyboard is a bit smaller than what you’d find on a bigger notebook but we had no issues with it and were able to type error-free right out of the box. It includes a dimmable white backlight that makes typing at night a breeze.

In terms of performance, the XPS 13 is obviously not a gaming notebook. Watching it crawl through Heaven 4.0 for example at 11fps is hard to watch. Since it uses the Intel integrated graphics and features an Ultra Low Voltage CPU, the graphics power is quite anemic, though it’s fine for watching movies, even at 4K. If you did want to try to run a game on this you’d have to run it at low settings.

In our PCMark Battery rundown test, the XPS 13 scored 4 hours and 44 minutes doing “productivity,” and when we let it play a movie until the battery died it was able to run for 7 hours and 48 minutes, which is impressive. It also sucks a very small amount of power in standby with the lid-closed, so you never really need to turn it off.

For standard notebook stuff like surfing the web, watching YouTube and working in Office, it was fast, responsive, and more than sufficient. It never felt slow using it day-to-day, and we love the most-of-the-day battery life too. All in all it seems like a zippy, quiet, easy-to-use notebook.