This is STILL the laptop to beat... right? - Dell XPS 15 (2023)

the XPS 15 is the absolute best Windows laptop period is what I said three years ago me as I was saying the XPS 15 has not received much for updates in the past three years and is it still the best Windows laptop around let's find out but first we don't want to look at that we want to look at what else is in the Box do we have warranty information here or is it a pre-production unit oh we do I can't yep plug it in press the power on we are good oh heck yeah I do really appreciate that with these even though the i o kinda sucks Dell is nice enough to give you a dongle in the box so we do have our HDMI and USB type a dongle right here and this one's super compact I really wish they would just sell these on their own they're quite nice for charging we get 130 watt adapter although this is getting a little bit large now these days you can get gallium nitride adapters that are about half the size that have just as much power so it's not quite as nice as it was when it was first released also do note that if you go for the XPS 17 that has had problems where it will be discharging well plugged in because it will draw more than the 130 Watts that this can provide there we go it looks exactly like it has for the last three years but that said it does still look like a mighty fine laptop like any give any give at all on this carbon fiber chassis oh tiniest bit this is a well-made machine for sure along the sides we have this diamond cut finish and on the left we have two Thunderbolt fours on the other side we have a single Thunderbolt 4 full size SD card reader absolutely love to see it and 3.5 millimeter headphone jack which you cannot trust Dell to always give you these days do you guys see something that's uh Missing here so something that uh that other laptop Brands don't have oh what's that right there a big stupid Notch nope Dell has a two millimeter webcam that does facial recognition and IR which is so sweet they have been able to get it into this tiny little bar who what Apple thought that that was a good solution we'll look at the webcams later but man that's stupid the rest of the laptop appears to be unchanged we have a cnc'd aluminum chassis carbon fiber wrist rest and oh nice big track pad right here I guess are we ready to get into it just start firing up games and stuff after I fire up the Segway to our sponsor thanks to keeper for sponsoring today's video keeper I barely know her from your favorite food delivery service to your email platform of choice these days you need to account for everything and it can be tough to remember all of those passwords it's time to ditch the pen and paper or Notes app and check out keeper security you can autofill login information from all of your accounts from your fully encrypted Vault on both mobile and desktop and with Keepers zero trust and zero knowledge security model only you have access and control over who can see your passwords check them out using the link below and use code short circuit 50 for 50 off personal and family plans to keep your personal information safe and secure wait a second Intel Arc control is Dell trolling us here I do know that there is an Intel Arc version of this laptop but I really thought that we had the 4071 I swear to God if this has an Intel GPU I'm going to throw it out the window for the CPU we have an i7 13700h your only other option is the I9 but this laptop doesn't really have the thermals or the power to support that so you should probably just get the i7 we also have 32 gigabytes of d ddr5 memory that's running at 4 800 Mega transfers per second one terabyte SSD Intel Wi-Fi 6E and an RTX 4070 heck yeah this right here is the 8 gigabyte model so it might not have quite the frame buffer that you want for modern games but that's it it is a freaking massive upgrade for the XPS 15. now how fast it actually is has yet to be seen because uh well this is not a particularly large laptop in the 4070s aren't necessarily very fast in the XPS 15 the GPU goes up to 40 Watts well in the XPS 17 that 4070 can go up to 60 watts which is not very much for a 4070 although that said that's way faster than the 3050 that we had before way faster now one of the main reasons that you won XPS 15 is the display and I would recommend just shelling it for the OLED it is 16 by 10 so a little bit taller love it and the resolution is a slightly strange 3456 by 21cm it is OLED and our Labs has done some testing on it and well I can tell you it looks great but the numbers also will tell you that it looks great Dell claims that this can do 400 nits Peak brightness although an SDR it was only able to reach 365 but you won't be too concerned about that because it's able to way overachieve and hit 620 nits with HDR and that was at 75 window that is amazing for an OLED display especially given that the blacks are just like actual black it is crazy in the past I've actually even taken the black level up a tiny bit to like three four percent in Dell software here just because sometimes if you're watching like a lot of YouTube videos they're not always properly color correcting and you can just end up with people who like if they wear black pants it's like looking into the void now if you plan on doing photo or video editing on this this display is accurate enough for professional color work so we're looking at 100 an srgb 99 DC ip3 and we have a 1.38 Delta e average Max of 3.5 so that right there is getting you under the two that you expect for professional work and it just looks freaking great now we can debate all day whether or not apple or Dell's solutions to display are better Apple gives you a bit more brightness but it does have the trade-off in dark situations whereas Dell looks way better when you're in a darker room but can't quite keep up if you're in direct sunlight just kind of think about which area are you going to be using it more in razor go away I do not need your software what I do need is to play valheim I have got the old XPS 15 here this has a 3050 TI and a 12700h unit and we will be comparing to this but before that I just want to do a quick little game because well if this can actually game it wins that's basically how this goes all right it is not powerful enough to play valheim at 4K we have learned that 2560 by 1600 so 1440p but 16 by 10. we are looking at 50 FPS or so this is pretty much maxed out Graphics which is pretty good but it looks like we're going to be dropping down to more like 1080p 1920 by 1200 this should just rock there we go we're getting our 60fps this is looking pretty darn good and also we are screen recording at the same time so it's having a little bit of a struggle in that regard now I can just show you how good valheim is but the last Labs properly tested it and oh man it murders the last generation like we're looking here Forza five the old one got 32 FPS average the XPS 15 with the 4070 got 64 FPS minimum and 73 FPS average that is a more than doubling in gaming performance same if we're looking at 1440p yup doubled it looking at Red Dead Redemption same sort of thing oh that's not quite doubled but we still went from 49 to 64 FPS this means that you can now properly game on this thing and also if you're doing like GPU accelerated renders it absolutely murders the last gen also since I said that we have an OLED display it is only 60 hertz which does hurt this compared to other gaming laptops but the response time is freaking great so you don't have that sort of like really slow business laptop up sort of lag here it's just now for gaming you are going to want to grab a mouse like this but if you are not gaming you won't really need one because this trackpad is exceptional Dell kind of LeapFrog absolutely every Windows device when they release this and since then you know other laptop makers have caught up like I would say that HP with the dragonfly Series has similar if not better level of trackpad but the one on the XPS 15 is still great and it remains freaking massive like look at this thing just shopping as compared to the MacBook there we go it's pretty much identical the XPS 15 has a slightly smaller trackpad but it also has a slightly smaller screen so I will forgive it above the track pad the keyboard also remains great but I feel like that other laptop makers have since exceeded this level of quality I guess Dell included with their XPS 13. so we do have an excellent feel to every single key they're all very consistent my only complaint is that the key stabilization isn't class leading so if you look if you press on the side of the key you can sort of have it flop around a little bit now you are able to get used to this easily enough because like I said keys are very consistent but it's more like an a instead of an A plus like it was a couple years ago so in the XPS 15 we get two tweeters and two woofers and if I remember correctly this thing sounds amazing oh yeah sounds good oh yeah oh yeah that's that's a good sound a laptop right there but we have another good sound of one the MacBook Pro 16 inch hmm oh those are pretty darn close it's gonna come down to personal preference if you prefer the sound of the XPS 15 which seems a little bit more flat or the sound of the MacBook which is a bit more v-shaped but they both sound freaking great and speaking of freaking great these displays man all right now this isn't going to be a perfect comparison because both of them will be a lot brighter with HDR content particularly the mac and also like YouTube compression whatever they both look freaking fantastic the black levels of this OLED though man that looks nice do I have a preference I take the XPS 15. really yeah I I think that this right here is the best display on a laptop also touch how I mentioned that it has touched yet can your MacBook do this well watch this Jake now we can argue all day long whether or not this display looks better than the one on the MacBook or the speakers sound better the problem with this laptop is the battery that is why this guy right here the old one is no longer in my bag and I instead have an HP dragonfly so this right here does have an improved battery the old one had a 6.4 hour battery life in our endurance test the new one has 6.8 which is not fantastic and it gets even worse so that drops to about an hour if you're fully loading it so I was having trouble where like I would be doing a shoot and my battery would die halfway through like I was getting depending on what was happening like four hours because sometimes you do need to have the screen at like full brightness when you're outside or something Ah that's pretty rough it makes it a very tough sell when the MacBook is able to do what like 12 14 hours something like that completely different experience now to make up for that battery deficit Dell needs to have the XPS 15 come in a fair bit under the 16 inch MacBook Pro and uh fortunately it does the absolute starting price is one thousand three hundred and fifty dollars but that gets you an Intel Arc a370m which you do not want to do the first one that you want to buy is an RTX 4050 and the i7 13700h which comes in at 1550 moving up to the spec that we have here which if you're a power user is a pretty good spec in my mind we are looking at twenty five hundred dollars for this one as spec that is the 32 gigabytes of RAM one terabyte SSD and for a similarly spec MacBook Pro it's a thousand more dollars wow so yeah if you're willing to sacrifice some battery life the XPS 15 is an excellent one to go for if you don't want to spend an extra thousand dollars for the Apple before we take it apart I just need to talk about this webcam it is fine they have improved it a little bit it is not as terrible as it was but it is still not very good it is plenty grainy there's stuff getting completely destroyed in both ways here on our set but at the same time it is exposing for my face really quite well and you don't have a notch so that's good eight T5 screws and a fair bit of prying later and we are in first of all just look at the Machining lines in here it's it just looks so freaking beautiful like do you realize how much time it would take with the machine to curve all of these out how many of these do they sell a lot I imagine in here we have something that has become way too uncommon it's upgradable look at see in there there two Ram slots so you can chuck in you know 32 gigabytes if you only have 16 to start with it is so nice that down the road you can upgrade your components so that you don't have to just Fork over all of the cash right at the start in three years time you can be like yeah it's 64 gigabyte time and then you can just do it in here we can also see our cooling solution these days in a laptop like this I would really hope to see a vapor chamber they do have that in the XPS 17 but I really think it should make its way down into the 15 and down here we have our 86 watt hour battery and I really hope in the next revision of the XPS 15 we get a 99 watt hour in this to try and combat Apple even a little bit so the XPS 15 this is still an absolutely fantastic laptop and I really miss having this display and this track pad in my everyday life because man it is some good now if you are able to get around the disappointing battery life this new one is insanely fast with that 4070 for what it is and I think it's just a great old laptop and I think you're just a great old viewer huge thanks for watching this video hit like get subscribed and comment down below what laptops you want to see next have a great day

Channel: ShortCircuit

Views: 501,997

Keywords: shortcircuit, SC, unboxing, first impression, tech, gadget, home, fun, buy, Dell, XPS 15, 2023, laptop, ultrabook, alex, wfh, office

Id: BzxwfW49weo

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023