Dell XPS 17 (2020) review: heavy hitter

The Dell XPS 17 is not for me.

Yes, it has a 17-inch screen. Yes, it has high-powered specs that include an H-series processor and an RTX GPU. But compared to many other laptops available today, it’s really heavy: It weighs around five and a half pounds. Some people may enjoy carrying a five-and-a-half pound laptop around the house or in their backpack during the day. But that’s not me, and I doubt that most people are.

Which begs the question: why use this instead of a desktop? It has good chips and a big screen, but a desktop has better chips and a bigger screen. On the other hand: If you want something portable that’s built like an Ultrabook, why not buy a 15 or 16-inch machine that’s really handy to carry?

The question is whether the extra screen space and increased performance are big enough to be worth it. They’re for some people, but probably just the type of person whose workload will make the most of both.

The most exciting feature is, of course, the display. I doubt you’re considering buying a 17-inch laptop unless you have an idea of ​​how big it is. For those who don’t: It feels like using a desktop monitor. I always split the screen between two or three open windows, whether I was working in Chrome, editing multiple photos or Slacking while streaming video, and I felt pretty comfortable. I never had to walk away to see a full web page. The 16:10 aspect ratio gives you a little more vertical space in addition to the space on the sides.

But if you don’t usually do this type of multitasking, the screen may be too big for you. It is not practical, for example, to use a full window of the Chrome window because you will have frustrating amounts of white space on each side.

It’s also a pretty nice screen, with a resolution of 3840 x 2400. That’s a little bit higher than standard 4K screens, which are 3840 x 2160. Colors looked good (almost on par with the MacBook Pro), with deep blacks and light details. I saw part of Infinite war, and the faces of the characters were so large that I could see wrinkles in the expressions and individual strands of hair. Going back to smaller screens, even very good ones like the one on the MacBook Pro 13, made everything look miniature. The XPS covers 100 percent of the Adobe RGB gamut, and is bright enough to use both indoors and outdoors (with a little gloss).

However, the most impressive aspect of this display is that Dell has managed to adapt it to a chassis that is smaller than that of most 17-inch laptops and a decent number of 15-inch models as well. It has a 93.7 percent screen-to-body ratio, which Dell says is higher than any competitor. The bezels are small, particularly the bottom, which sported a large Dell logo on previous XPS models. In blunt terms, there is only a large amount of screen right in front of your eyes.

If you’ve kept up with this year’s XPS lineup, the overall vibe of the 17 should be familiar. Dell largely redesigned the XPS 13 and 15 this year, with notable improvements to their chassis and versions. There was no XPS 17 last year (Dell hasn’t released one in nearly a decade), but the 2020 model has the same recognizable features as its current counterparts. The laptop has a sleek aluminum chassis, carbon fiber palm rest, and a Gorilla Glass display. It is compact (14.74 x 9.76 x 0.77 inches) and incredibly strong; it feels and looks like a very nice laptop.

However, the thinness of the XPS 17 can be misleading; It is heavier than it seems. Exact weight varies by configuration: The non-touch model with a 56 Wh battery starts at 4.65 pounds. I have the touch screen model with a 97Wh battery, which weighs 5.53 lbs. That’s more than a pound heavier than the XPS 15, so again, that’s the price of the additional display.

Much of the other “laptop stuff” are also standard XPS rates. Like the XPS 15, there are speakers that shoot up on either side of the keyboard (there are two 1.5W tweeters and two 2.5W woofers). They produce impressive audio close to that of a decent external speaker. They even handle audible bass, which is a rarity among laptop speakers.

On the sides, there are four Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports (which support charging and DisplayPort) plus a full-size SD card reader, a headphone jack, and a wedge-shaped lock slot. Dell releases a USB-C to USB-A 3.0 dongle and HDMI 2.0 adapter in the box. It would be nice to see a USB-A or Ethernet connector on a laptop of this size, but it’s a slightly better pick than the MacBook Pro 16, which lacks the SD slot.

The 97Wh battery life is pretty good when it comes to 4K workstations. I put the XPS through my daily office workload (including multitasking between eight and 12 tabs from Chrome and apps like Slack and Spotify, with the screen around 200 nits of brightness) and usually got between seven and eight hours. That’s much better than what I got the same test on the XPS 15 (which has a smaller battery), and it’s comparable to the results we saw on the MacBook Pro 16. The 17 comes with a 130W charger to boot.

The downside to the small top bezel, as we’ve seen on other XPS models, is that there isn’t much room for a good webcam. The 2.25mm, 720p camera supports Windows Hello facial recognition, which works well, but was grainy and lost in video calls. You can also sign in with a fingerprint reader built into the power button in the upper right corner of the keyboard.

Finally, XPS keyboards and touchpads are always among my favorite laptop entries, and they keep the trend going. The keyboard, in particular, is a joy, with 1.3mm of key travel. They’re a little flatter than some of my favorite keyboards, but they have such a nice texture and a satisfying click that I didn’t mind.

The glass touchpad is massive 5.8 x 3.5 inches and clicks with an easy, quiet swipe. My two palms always touched it while writing, but luckily there were no problems with palm rejection. The benefit of that size is that I never ran out of room for scrolling or multi-finger gestures. For me, however, it was too big; the place where it was natural for me to reach my right hand was still in right-click territory, and I had to stretch my fingers or lift and move my wrist to reach the left half. Right-handed companions with small hands, take note.

There are powerful things under the hood. The $ 1,399 base model (currently $ 1,371) has a Core i5-10300H, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, and Intel UHD graphics. Our review unit, which currently costs $ 2,393, has an eight-core Core i7-10875H, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max Q, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. To prevent all of that from frying, Dell has introduced a new cooling system, which includes a steam chamber that spans the full width of the laptop and the vents hidden in the hinge.

The system did a good job with less demanding work, certainly better than the XPS 15, which got quite heavy under any load in my tests. The 17th was never cold, but neither was it too hot during any of my daily tasks. I also never heard from fans, whom Dell refers to as “dual opposing fans.”

Under heavier loads, cooling had more problems. Performance seems to be thermally limited: Through Cinebench R20’s four loops, the CPU remained constant in the mid-90s (Celsius) and was unable to keep up with the boost clocks. It dropped to 89-90 degrees Celsius during the fifth race.

But he was still more than capable of handling demanding tasks like video work. In a test that involved exporting five minutes and 33 seconds of 4K video to Adobe Premiere Pro, the XPS 17 finished the job in three minutes and 58 seconds. That’s much better than what we got for the MacBook Pro 16 and slightly ahead of the Dell XPS 15 (which finished the same export in four minutes and 23 seconds) and Microsoft’s 15-inch Surface Book 3, but it’s more than a minute behind the Gigabyte AERO 15, which has a stronger GPU and a more robust cooling system.

The XPS 17 is not a gaming laptop (no high refresh rate display options, on the one hand) and given that, the game’s results were decent but not mind-blowing. Nvidia’s RTX GPUs are so named because they can handle ray tracing, but the 2060 Max Q is the lowest level in the line, and is not capable of handling the combination of ray tracing and 4K resolution. The XPS 17 ran Shadow of the Tomb Raider (native resolution, medium setting) at an average of 24 fps with ray tracing on and 32 fps with ray tracing off. That should give you an idea of ​​the limits of this system: you’ll want to reduce the resolution or the graphic details to achieve playable frame rates. If you’re willing to do that and don’t mind a 60fps limit, it can work as a portable gaming machine.

So is the XPS 17 bigger and more powerful than the XPS 15? Yes. Is it better than other 17-inch computers, like the LG Gram 17? Yes, for a mile. But those laptops are still pretty good, and much lighter than five and a half pounds. You will likely see life-changing improvements if you often perform tasks that take full advantage of the powerful chips.

In short, this is not the best laptop for anyone who works primarily on Chrome at home or in libraries or coffee shops. It really is for advanced users who may occasionally need to work while traveling and who have found that smaller screens and lower power systems are up to their needs. For that person, this is the best laptop to buy.

Photograph by Monica Chin / The Verge