Dell XPS 15 9500 Review: Buy this laptop instead of a MacBook Pro 16 - davidsonagainto

Timing is everything in the PC business, and the Dell XPS 15 9500, an overdue refreshen to the company's high-goal workhorse, arrives just in metre for it to be truly considered the "MacBook In favou killer" IT's always aspired to live.

Yes, we know "MacBook Pro killer" is overused Internet clickbait. Simply with Apple's decision to throw in the towel on x86-based laptops, anyone buying a Mac nowadays is au fon volunteering to stand on the deck of the Big and wave as the last lifeboats pull back away.

This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best laptops. Last there for information on competing models and how we tested them.

Some laptop computer refreshes can be clean minor. For the XPS 15 9500 ($2,254 at Dell.com), IT's a complete redesign of a laptop that's changed little since 2015, when information technology first-class honours degree adoptive its "InfinityEdge" bezels.

On this model, gone is the 16:9 expose aspect ratio that was prevalent for some years—precise for watching YouTube, non so great for productivity. In its place is a 16:10 prospect ratio, 15.6-inch empanel running 4K+ with HDR400 and Dolby Imaginativeness reenforcement. The result is a stunning every-screen look that is likely to set back the style for other laptop computer makers to emulate.

XPS 15 9500 Specs

The Dingle XPS 15 9500 wouldn't be a Dell XPS 15 without top-shelf parts. A you fundament see from the specification list that follows, IT's first-class all the way. Bank bill that the eval social unit we proved has a Core i7 CPU, which we call back is a better choice overall than the 9th-gen Core i9 in the Dell XPS 15 7590 we tested final stage fall. The Core i9 Saratoga chip seemed to push that laptop's thermals concluded the edge.

CPU: Intel 10th-gen 8-core Core i7-10875H

GPU: GeForce GTX 1650 Atomic number 2

RAM: 16GB DDR4/3200 in three-fold-channel fashion and And then-DIMM slots.

Expose: 4K UHD+ 3840 x 2400 Sharp IPS panel with touch

Storage: 512GB SK Hynix PC611 NVMe SSD

Networking: Sea wolf WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5

Dimensions: 13.6 x 9 x 0.7 inches

Weight:4.5 pounds, advantageous 1.5 pounds for the 130-watt power brick

Battery: Rated at 85 Watt-hours

Ports: For ports, pictures tell the story best. On the left side of meat of the laptop you get a wedge-shaped lock port and two Thunderbolt 3 ports.

dell xps 15 9500 4 — The left wing side of the XPS 15 9500 features (from left to right) a Noble lock port and deuce Thunderbolt 3 ports.

The right side of the XPS 15 9500 gives you a SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps Type-C port that can tally 10Gbps transfers and support USB Magnate Delivery charging and DisplayPort (with and adapter). You as wel begin a UHS-Trinity Mount Rushmore State card reader and an analog audio jack.

dell xps 15 9500 6 — The in good order English of the XPS 15 9500 gives you (lef tto right) a USB-C embrasure with DisplayPort and USB Big businessman Delivery charging, as healed as a UHS-III scorecard proofreader and headset jack.

Sorry, USB-A

Yes, at that place's no square USB-A port wine on the XPS 15 9500, which is convinced to chap some hides. We've complained about this since Dell jettisoned the USB-A on the XPS 13, but to no avail. Dell's administrative unit reason has been to subjugate the heaviness of the laptop computer without adding drop-land jaws or port bulges. The unofficial grounds, we distrust, is that if Apple gets away with it, why not Dell? When we mean "bewilder away with IT" we mean, people placid buy Apple and Dell laptops by the truckloads, so maybe it's just us.

Beyond the loss of the USB-A though, is an overall trend to lose concurrent left enjoyment. The previous XPS 15 7590 featured two USB-A, one Thunderbolt 3, a full-sized HDMI port, headset jack, Coyote State Card time slot, lock port and dedicated charging embrasure. That meant you could charge the older model with an HDMI monitor plugged in as well as a USB keyboard and USB mouse. With the XPS 15 9500, uncomparable USB-C porthole will always be filled by the charger. A monitor (with adapter) would take another port. Suddenly you're down to a single USB-C port for everything other.

dell usb dock xps 15 bundled — What's the difference between Dingle and Apple? You get an HDMI and USB-A dongle in the box with the XPS 15 9500. All Malus pumila gives you with the MacBook Pro 16 is the power supply and a contented look.

Fortunately, Dingle mitigates this a little by including a USB-C dongle with a USB-A and HDMI transcriber in the box. Dongles are yet some other accessory to juggle, simply a dislodge dongle is better than none at all. You can surmise what Apple does.

usb reader xps 15 9500 vs sandisk extreme pro reader — We found the Dell XPS 15 9500's shapely-in UHS-III reader (left) outperformed SanDisk's Extreme Affirmative UHS-II USB proofreader (right) in performance on a UHS-II-rated SanDisk Uttermost Professional SD card.

Dingle XPS 15 Card Lector Performance

Because the XPS 15 9500 is aimed at content creators, Dell spends valuable real estate to integrate an SD card reader into the laptop. Dell specs IT as a UHS-3-capable slot, which means in theory, it can hit 600MBps if you own a fast-enough carte du jour. Actual UHS-Cardinal SD card game are still nearly impossible to find, though, so for our test we used a 128GB SanDisk Extreme Pro card rated for 300MBps reads and 260MBps writes. We ran CrystalDiskMark 7.0's standard try out on the XPS 15 9500 and compared it to the results of a SanDisk Distant Pro UHS-II USB reader.

The XPS 15 9500's SD card slot outperformed a barred USB lecturer aside 21 percent in reads and 18 per centum in write speeds. If you're copying over 100GB of television files you just shot, that's a important departure.

webcams xps 15 gs66 xenia 15 aero 17 — Which webcam looks the topper to you? The Dingle XPS 15 9500 (top left), the MSI GS66 Stealing (top right), the XPG Xenia 15 (bottom left) or the underslung-bezel mount Gigabyte Aero 17 (penetrate right.)

Dell XPS 15 Webcam

Webcams are no longer the street arab feature they were high year. In the XPS 15 9500, it's a 720p-resolution unit (as are the huge majority) that's integrated into the top bezel. The module also supports infrared and works with Windows 10's biometric Windows Hello boast. If you don't want to use your face to login, in that respect's also a fingermark reader built into the mightiness release.

Overall, the webcam delivered simulacrum quality similar to that of most current laptops in normal lighting. Unless you're doing a video conference in a cave with Colonel Kurtz, it's just fine.

Speakers

Laptop computer speakers generally run the gamut from medicore to worse. Sometimes, like in the caseful of the MSI GS66 Stealing, you all but wonderment if there are speakers inside–or the earthly concern's smallest Kazoo band.

With the XPS 15 9500, Dell in reality integrates quatern speakers: 2 side-firing in the base of operations, and two speakers that fire up through 4,532 holes drilled direct the keyboard deck. This gives the XPS 15 9500 legitimately the best audio we've detected in a dinky laptop in a while. No, this won't match the annoying beat coming from the dorsum of a lowered Honda National, merely IT gets in good order loud with a good balance of highs, mids and lows. It could use a touch many low, but we fishy that's interrogative too much of a laptop this thin. Equally IT is, the laptop is tacky decent that you tail end feel the vibrations through the keyboard deck along your palms if it's turned adequate to moderately high book. (We're not in for what could be done except add vibration insularity, which would piddle the laptop thicker and heavier.)

The speakers are branded Waves Nx. Dingle says they were tuned by Grammy-award winning producer Old salt Joseph Puig to improve its immersive secure. Whether that's just marketing fluff we can't say, but it does indeed sound very immersive, thanks to the combination of the fathom coming at you from the top and the sound reflective dispatch a surface.

dell xps 15 9500 2 — The trackpad gets huge on the spic-and-span XPS 15 9500.

Keyboard and Trackpad

The parts of the laptop computer you touch most are the keyboard and trackpad. On the XPS 15 9500, you thankfully get a standard butterfly switch alternatively of the company's Magnetic levitation keyboard. That means good travel and fair stable keys when depressed.

Much like the MacBook Pro, the trackpad is now huge. It supports Microsoft's Precision drivers for Windows 10's gestures and is within reason smooth, though not as buttered-drinking glass smooth atomic number 3 MSI's GS66 Stealth. With its size, we were concerned about sending the cursor fast with our zaftig palms. But even when stressful, we could non get our palms to go by the pointer.

There were reported issues with loose and wobbling trackpads on archaic XPS 15 9500 units. Dell reportedly has said it known the issue, which has been corrected on newer units. Any laptops already in the field will be set.

So is a large trackpad better? That's semihard to sound out. A larger trackpad means you don't need your digit to be as precise Beaver State as focused in its movements as it would have to be on a smaller area. Your fingers also physically have to move farther. Boilers suit, Dell has finished its homework happening tuning the trackpad.

The trackpad is still a physical clickpad as well, with a hinge design placing the pin sharpen at the top near the keyboard. That means information technology'll get progressively harder to click the trackpad as you move farther sprouted the surface. In comparison, Apple's MacBook Pro series doesn't physically move, instead simulating clicks with haptic feedback.

Which is better? Malus pumila's system will hemipteran those who neediness their trackpads to actually move. Because the clicks are fake, however, there's no need to increase hale near the top of the keyboard. To each their own.

Display

xps15 front screen view blue fill — The XPS 15 9500's control panel is Dolby Vision and HDR400-certified.

Before we go on to carrying into action we do want to call unstylish the display, which has more acronyms than a PH scale.D. student who never left the university. The panel is UHD 4K+ with a 16:10 aspect ratio. It's not an off-the-shelf design either: While a typical 4K panel has a resolution of 3840×2160, the XPS 15 9500 features a domestic resolution of 3840×2400. The panel will hit 100 percent of Adobe brick RGB and 94 percent of DCI P3 color gamut. It meets VESA's Display HDR 400 spec, and it's also Dolby Visual sense-certified.

The screen is touch-enabled and sheathed in Gorilla Glass for protection. Information technology has an anti-reflective coating to minimize glare, spell still sporting that glossy look and feel people want.

Finally, the screen features Eyesafe technology, which reduces blue clean emissions that sustenance you up at night—patc motionless looking natural (more primitive blue-light reduction techniques look about Eastern Samoa harmful A a artificial sunset scene from a 1980s TV show). The screen is very nacreous and rated at 500 nits, which is nigh what we measured too.

Compared to a standard laptop's screen out, the XPS 15 9500 is a stunning difference. We likewise stood it up against the Gigabyte Aero 17 which similarly features an HDR400-rated 4K control board, and the MSI Creator 17 with an HDR1000 miniLED panel. Viewing various HDR1000 and HDR400 videos as well as standing images, our eyes give the MSI Creator 17 the butt. There's a zing and contrast the HDR1000 miniLED panel produces that's undeniable. We'd say the XPS 15 9500 is very close to the Gigabyte Aero 17's presentation, but we give the last mentioned a real svelte adjoin. All three are spectacular, though, so you basically can't miscarry.

One thing we should quotatio: When you unplug the XPS 15 9500 from the power brick, the screen will go sarcastic for a fewer seconds before coming back on. The reason out is harmless but still likely to annoy hoi polloi: Anytime you switch a Windows laptop computer from displaying HDR happy, it will automatically switch back to stock people of color gamuts when on assault and battery to reduce powerfulness consumption. You can switch off this behavior by switch remove HDR completely, or unchecking the Don't allow HDR games and apps on battery pick from the display properties.

XPS 15 9500 performance tests

We'll kick off our performance testing of the XPS 15 9500 with Cinebench R20—which is an updated, harsher version of the older Cinebench R15 we've typically utilised. Both are valid measurements of Mainframe multi-core performance at 3D moulding (one and only igniter-duty and one heavier-duty), and they give you a general idea of how the laptop could perform in other tasks that are heavily multi-threaded.

For vestal CPU tasks, the Nitty-gritty i7-10875H in the XPS 15 9500 represents well. IT's right in that respect with Gigabyte's much larger Aero 17, which uses the same CPU, and is awfully close to the 8-heart and soul Core i9-10980HK in the MSI GS66.

Eastern Samoa this multiplication of laptop computer is highly dependent on functioning settings, we time-tested the XPS 15 9500 in both its default option and its "Ultra Performance" states.

Overall, this is a great exhibit for a 4.5-poke, 15-inch laptop, American Samoa it can hang with more gaming-focused and better-cooled laptops in CPU operations. The only fly in the cream is the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 with its Ryzen 9 4900HS, which is an even small and lighter laptop that generally whups laptops victimisation Intel.

Still though Cinebench R20 takes three times as tenacious As Cinebench R15 to hunt down, it's still a reasonably short-snouted load. Modern laptops slowly taper dispatch performance as they physique up heat over thirster loads. To run that impact, we use an older version of the self-governing HandBrake utility to convert a 1080p register using the Mechanical man Tablet planned. Although tied this ISN't the punctuate test IT was a a couple of years agone, it still takes an 8-core laptop 20 minutes or more to footrace it.

Given that longer workload, you can see the thermal limitations of a thinner laptop in the results. The larger and heavier Aero 17, with the same CPU as the Dell XPS 15 9500, opens up a 15-pct lead over the Dell. To be antimonopoly, the Aero 17 when gear up to its own "Turbo" mode is quick to initiation its fans and makes rather a racket. You might consider the 8-core group XPS 15's 6-core-level result is terrible, only this is the world of a laptop computer this small running an 8-kernel Central processor. On long-running CPU loads, information technology's active to throw overboard soil.

For play, we'll throw in the results from runningRise of the Grave Raider at 1920×1080 resolution, set to Rattling High. This older run is run in DX11 mode without selective total-screen mood selected.

First you probably noticed that Dell's "Ultra Performance" setting didn't fix more than of a difference in CPU tests. But in this GPU load, we examine a gigantic difference.

Second: The result should be no surprise. Every laptop computer in this chart except the XPS 15 9500 are primarily gaming laptops, with big, hairy GPUs. They also tend to make more racket and generally consume screens better for gaming, but poor for content creation.

Wherefore are we even comparing the XPS 15 9500 to gaming laptops? Because hoi polloi often do, just A they would do with the MacBook Pro 16. If that MacBook Pro 16 were in this heel, it would be at the bottom or near the bottom.

Of flow, the trouble for the 4.5-pound XPS 15 9500 and the 4.3-pound MacBook Pro 16 is that gambling laptops—spell certainly farthermost thicker and large—aren't too far turned in weight. The MSI GS66 Stealth weighs the identical as the XPS 15 9500 despite its GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q. The XPG Xenia 15 is just over 4 pounds with a GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q. So yes, it's fair to show the Dell here.

XPS 15 9500 battery life

The XPS 15 9500 gets its revenge in perhaps the to the highest degree critical test of all for a laptop: battery life. For that we loop a 4K video at a within reason bright 250 to 260 nits, in airplane mode and with earbuds in site.

The XPS 15 9500 simply crushes those gaming laptops, with some 10.5 hours of video playback. Incredibly, that's with a 4K panel—which typically eats a third of run time—and an 84-watt-hour battery. Many an of the gaming laptops you imag Hera are packing a great deal big gas tanks. The MSI GS66 Stealing runs the maximum allowed on an plane: 99.9 Watt-hours. So yes, the XPS 15 9500 gets the last laugh.

Should I waste-yard my old XPS 15 for a new one?

We've reviewed enough XPS 15s over the years to give you some context for how much of an improvement the new 9500 delivers over prior generations. The results aren't equally obvious as you'd think.

First up is the older Cinebench R15 CPU test. News flash: An 8-core XPS 15 (like last year's 7590) is faster than a 6-pith XPS 15 (including this year's 9500), which is faster than all of those old 4-core group XPS 15s.

Although last class's XPS 15 7590 is actually faster, that's because information technology features a Core i9 C.P.U.. Note that this class's model seems to give you about the same performance from a Core i7.

Spell the XPS 15 9500 gave up ground in the longer HandBrake encode test to larger play laptops, the performance against its own cousins is really quite fortunate. Here you can encounter that it's actually as fast as last class's Core i9-based 7590.

For graphics, the motion picture gets a little more woolly-headed. The previous XPS 15 7590 grub the new XPS 15's lunch, and the two-year old XPS 15 9570 is tied with the new XPS 15 9500 even when set to Ultra Performance. This particular test result focuses solely on GPU performance and excludes Mainframe performance from its score, and so we're a snatch surprised by the result here.

We'll end with a video summing up exam. As we said earlier, 4K panels eat power. You can you see it here, where the XPS 15 9500 with its 4K IPS board, and last yr's XPS 15 7590 with its 4K OLED panel, easy miss three hours of battery life history when compared to the XPS 15 9570 with its FHD screen. However, we've come up a tenacious way from the fairly miserable five-minute battery life of an XPS 15 9560 with its 4K panel. So yes, the fres XPS 15 9500 is extremely commodity for a laptop with a 4K panel.

Dell XPS 15: Should you grease one's palms?

There's a lot to unpack with the XPS 15 9500. CPU performance is rattling good—information technology doesn't significantly propel the acerate leaf over the previous model, but you're getting more bang for buck from the stream Core i7 over the earlier, pricier Core i9 configuration.

On gaming performance, it looks like the XPS 15 9500 actually takes a step back for unexplained reasons. However, dissatisfactory gaming doesn't mean high-risk encoding, so video editors seat rest comfy. Gamers: Buy an Alienware.

The primary concentre of this generation of XPS 15 is the outside, an upgrade that was extendible overdue. The keyboard and trackpad are quite good, the sound is probably the best on a Microcomputer laptop computer this sized, and the screen is beautiful with its nary-bezel look. It's slim and relatively light even with its 130-watt USB-C power brick. It is, basically, probably the immaculate laptop for content creators on the move.

So yes, we're sticking with our original clickbait line, that the MacBook Pro 16 killer has finally arrived. We just didn't expect Apple would help push its own laptop computer overboard on with Intel.

Chastening: A previous version of this story incorrectly expressed what awarding music producer Jack Joseph Puig has won. He is a multi-Grammy Laurels winner. PCWorld regrets the error.