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clangers23

macrumors 6502
Oct 27, 2016
325
446
I'll be going for a 17" model, I currently own a 15" 7590 and after removing the heatsink and applying decent thermal paste and undervolting, it runs without throttling. It's only a 6 core CPU as well. I'm hoping this is the first XPS I don't have to do this to especially with a vapour chamber.
 

TomOSeven

Suspended
Jul 4, 2017
571
699
I can't find it on the German Dell site, do you have a link?

It's gone again, was online on the English language version of dell.de an hour or so ago. But according to Notebookcheck, the prices should be available tomorrow anyway.
 
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Useless Touchbar

macrumors regular
Jan 25, 2020
216
405
Well f**k. Finally a Macbook level PC machine and turns out it costs as much as a Mac! Sure those thin bezels are fine but I ain't switching to PC unless it comes with substantial financial benefits
 

Falhófnir

macrumors 603
Original poster
Aug 19, 2017
6,146
6,998
Here's some more info:



One of these will be mine! I just measured my backpack and the 17" will fit! Thank you small bezels!

Soon I will be a resident of dongle-town... :p
17" not available for a few weeks yet, hopefully they will put up pricing soon though... With the 15" the $1,750 model (maybe £1,650 or so if Dell are kinder than Apple with exchange rates ?) looks like a reasonable deal, not only user replaceable SSDs but dual slots - so I think that means you can just add an additional 1TB drive when you need it rather than having to replace the boot drive and reinstall Windows and everything (?) 1080p might be stretched a little thin on a 17" is my only concern coming from a retina 15". It looks pretty good at 15.6" 125% scaling on my gaming laptop though, and XPS displays are meant to be among the best even on the current generation. The low blue light feature sounds good too, like having night shift always on, but without the tint shift ?

Will have to wait and see for UK availability though. John Lewis have their 2 year guarantee if you buy it from them so that's also helps vs Apple's superlative aftercare
 

c0ppo

macrumors 68000
Feb 11, 2013
1,890
3,267
I know Dell uses lousy batteries that die sooner rather than latter. Lots of horror stories about those online.
Is Dell still using Killer wifi cards?

I really have hard time trusting Dell PCs. To be honest, never owned XPS. But I have just a few friends who have, and ALL of them had issues. Some had battery issues after a year, others had thermal issues, and ALL of them had coil whine. But that coil whine was extreme, witnessed it myself.

Now, I really don't want to come as a dell-hater or anything. Once again, never had any experience with Dell myself. But enough evidence to avoid them.

These new devices look great. Probably the best looking devices on the market. If 17" was made by Lenovo + additional ports, I would buy that thing first day.

The screens look amazing! And vapor chamber on 17" is probably great, especially because I see Dave2D excited about it. He's kinda hard to get excited, but this time he is.

I will wait for at least a year or so, just to see user reviews online. I'm mostly interested in coil whine and battery. XPS always looked amazing, but always had such stupid issues that even butterfly keyboard on MBP seemed like a joke in comparison.

But even with all of that, I would really like that display on my X1E. Simply amazing looks wise, but not only that, it's a productivity monster. 16:10 17" laptop. Last time I saw a laptop like that was a MBP 17". And those died out since TC took over :)
 

TSE

macrumors 68040
Jun 25, 2007
3,998
3,400
St. Paul, Minnesota
I guess I never paid much attention to XPS thermals. :p

The wounds of the newest Macbook Air shooting up to 100°C in a millisecond are still fresh. And I remember Dave's MBP freezer tests too!

Yeah I would expect the performance is still decent in the thin-n-light XPS. Just the amount of engineering they've put into it with all the heat pipes for the CPU and GPU are pretty impressive. It looks like Dell has at least put some thought into it.

I hope MaxTech and Dave2D will put these new XPS models through the thermal ringer! We'll learn soon enough! :)

The new 2020 XPS 15 seems to have some improved thermal capabilities as Dave2D pointed out, there is some added Thermal GORE - but the copper heatsink pipes and fan layouts are almost identical to my XPS 15 - but I'm not expecting anything too much improved.

To be honest, when it comes to MacBook Pro 15 vs. XPS 15, Apple's thermal design wasn't any better or worse than Dell's, they were about equal. It's just inevitable that putting full-power processors and GPUs into such a thin and light device requires crazy amounts of engineering to attain a performance level of "pretty good" versus thickboy workstation and gaming laptops where "pretty good" isn't good enough. Although I would say Apple came way ahead in thermals with their latest 16 inch model and some of the improvements they've made, we'll have to wait and see on the new XPS 15 - I think the design looks fantastic, and I'm honestly excited to see how the XPS 17's vapor cooling performs - it's a technology that worked wonders for the Razer Blade.
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I know Dell uses lousy batteries that die sooner rather than latter. Lots of horror stories about those online.
Is Dell still using Killer wifi cards?

I really have hard time trusting Dell PCs. To be honest, never owned XPS. But I have just a few friends who have, and ALL of them had issues. Some had battery issues after a year, others had thermal issues, and ALL of them had coil whine. But that coil whine was extreme, witnessed it myself.

Now, I really don't want to come as a dell-hater or anything. Once again, never had any experience with Dell myself. But enough evidence to avoid them.

These new devices look great. Probably the best looking devices on the market. If 17" was made by Lenovo + additional ports, I would buy that thing first day.

The screens look amazing! And vapor chamber on 17" is probably great, especially because I see Dave2D excited about it. He's kinda hard to get excited, but this time he is.

I will wait for at least a year or so, just to see user reviews online. I'm mostly interested in coil whine and battery. XPS always looked amazing, but always had such stupid issues that even butterfly keyboard on MBP seemed like a joke in comparison.

But even with all of that, I would really like that display on my X1E. Simply amazing looks wise, but not only that, it's a productivity monster. 16:10 17" laptop. Last time I saw a laptop like that was a MBP 17". And those died out since TC took over :)


My XPS 15 has been good for the most part. The thermals are really disappointing, and I had to pay the $20 for an intel wifi card to get reasonable performance with that, but besides that, my one time with Dell tech support was fantastic. I got accidental coverage and dropped my laptop, damaging the screen. They replaced it no questions asked and I had my laptop back within a week. My battery health has been great so far - I've used it for over a year consistently on battery and it's still healthy.

I would say their QC isn't as good as Apple's, but the XPS line is significantly better than most PC competitors. This one would be risky though as it's a first generation design and they made a lot of drastic improvements - I remember the previous generation of XPS 15, the first generation of the design was plagued with problems.
 
Last edited:

Michael Scrip

macrumors 604
Mar 4, 2011
7,932
12,489
NC
The new 2020 XPS 15 seems to have some improved thermal capabilities as Dave2D pointed out, there is some added Thermal GORE - but the copper heatsink pipes and fan layouts are almost identical to my XPS 15 - but I'm not expecting anything too much improved.

To be honest, when it comes to MacBook Pro 15 vs. XPS 15, Apple's thermal design wasn't any better or worse than Dell's, they were about equal. It's just inevitable that putting full-power processors and GPUs into such a thin and light device requires crazy amounts of engineering to attain a performance level of "pretty good" versus thickboy workstation and gaming laptops where "pretty good" isn't good enough. Although I would say Apple came way ahead in thermals with their latest 16 inch model and some of the improvements they've made, we'll have to wait and see on the new XPS 15 - I think the design looks fantastic, and I'm honestly excited to see how the XPS 17's vapor cooling performs - it's a technology that worked wonders for the Razer Blade.

Awesome... thanks for the info!

I've been in the market for a new laptop for a while now... and these new XPS models tick all the boxes for me.

16:10 screen being my favorite feature!

It won't be my primary machine... I have a big honkin' desktop for that. So it will just be my travel machine.

My 2014-era Toshiba piece-o-crap laptop will soon be retired! :p
 
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TSE

macrumors 68040
Jun 25, 2007
3,998
3,400
St. Paul, Minnesota
Awesome... thanks for the info!

I've been in the market for a new laptop for a while now... and these new XPS models tick all the boxes for me.

16:10 screen being my favorite feature!

It won't be my primary machine... I have a big honkin' desktop for that. So it will just be my travel machine.

My 2014-era Toshiba piece-o-crap laptop will soon be retired! :p

Go for it! You won't regret it. Overall I'm very happy with my computer - I bought it knowing the design was a bit dated so you can rest assured Dell won't be doing another design refresh for the next few years, so it won't get better than this for awhile.
 

grmlin

macrumors 65816
Feb 16, 2015
1,110
777
The 15" looks great, I would prefer the 17" but I'm afraid it's too far off and I need something the next weeks :/

Now, I don't know how new laptops do with Linux. I don't want to fiddle around the next 6 months with problems until the kernel catched up and everything works... decisions
 

c0ppo

macrumors 68000
Feb 11, 2013
1,890
3,267
Now, I don't know how new laptops do with Linux. I don't want to fiddle around the next 6 months with problems until the kernel catched up and everything works... decisions

I really don't see anything hardware related that would be an issue with Linux. And you can always update to newer kernels manually. Only thing that could worry you is how well does Dell support linux. Updates and all... But I think you can find that info easily online :)
 

grmlin

macrumors 65816
Feb 16, 2015
1,110
777
They sell their XPS laptops with Ubuntu, so I guess they will work great at some point. But a colleague got a XPS 13 with Ubuntu on release and he says it took them some month until it worked without problems.

I’ll take a dive into reddit and see what I can find. The screen is so nice lol.
 

Useless Touchbar

macrumors regular
Jan 25, 2020
216
405
So the base model for Dell XPS 15 here in the Netherlands is the one that starts at 2199 euros and gets you 1920x1200 screen/i7-10750U/GTX 1650 Ti/16gb RAM/512gb SSD. Very much in Macbook territory and I'm not sure if I want to pay that much for a Dell.
 

Falhófnir

macrumors 603
Original poster
Aug 19, 2017
6,146
6,998
Ok, so the configurations are a bit different in the UK, £1,949 for i7/16GB/512/GTX 1650Ti is the lowest configuration. No iGPU only option, which is probably a good thing at least until Tiger Lake H is available... Or they could always grab an AMD 4000 H chip?

£1,999 model looks best here, i7/16GB/1TB/GTX 1650Ti for the same price as a top end 13" MacBook pro if you want that roflstomp comparison. Suppose it's the same story with the XPS 13 as well though.

£2,299 is the base 4K option, I'm not sure I'd bother at 15", 1080 looks really quite good on my existing windows machine, but probably a necessity for the 17". I suppose it would be nice coming from a retina display though. Will have to wait and see what the 17" offers in comparison, think that would be a better jack of all trades computer.

They will also probably start adding more configurations in coming months, there were about 11 to chose from of the old 15" yesterday. Hopefully some AMD love among them as well!
 

TomOSeven

Suspended
Jul 4, 2017
571
699
I might revisit that decision once an AMD version is announced and notebookcheck did a full physical on this laptop, but as it stands, my search continues.

The base model in Germany has an i5 (which is fine), 8 GB RAM with no option to upgrade (not fine at this price point), FHD Display (perfectly fine for me, your mileage may vary) no GPU (which isn't fine) and a 56 wh battery (which certainly isn't fine) for 1699 Euros. I just can't justify that price point.
 

grmlin

macrumors 65816
Feb 16, 2015
1,110
777
To be fair, you can open the bottom and add your own (probably cheaper) RAM and SSDs by yourself. Try that with a MacBook :)

But the configuration options on the Dell site (in Germany) are weird. UHD is only mentioned in the title for example, but not in the configurator itself.
Beside that, I guess we have to wait a little longer for a fully configurable version of the new XPS 15.
 

Falhófnir

macrumors 603
Original poster
Aug 19, 2017
6,146
6,998
I might revisit that decision once an AMD version is announced and notebookcheck did a full physical on this laptop, but as it stands, my search continues.

The base model in Germany has an i5 (which is fine), 8 GB RAM with no option to upgrade (not fine at this price point), FHD Display (perfectly fine for me, your mileage may vary) no GPU (which isn't fine) and a 56 wh battery (which certainly isn't fine) for 1699 Euros. I just can't justify that price point.
It's user serviceable, 2 slots - as is the SSD (also 2 slots at least on the 17" model). That's why any future cheaper models that skimp out on RAM and SSD will be very interesting if/when they arrive - Potentially you could just slot in a second 1TB SSD alongside the 256GB boot SSD, no need to reinstall windows or anything!

I agree 1080p is fine at 15", though I'm thinking it might start to look a bit stretched thin at 17" so the 4K will probably be essential for that model... don't know if anyone has experience of an existing 17" 1080p? Any old 17" MBP users?
 

TSE

macrumors 68040
Jun 25, 2007
3,998
3,400
St. Paul, Minnesota
I do want to add for anyone interested in purchasing the XPS 15/17 is that I purposely chose the 1080p (now 1200p) screen purposefully, and even if they offered me the 4K display for free I would have still chosen the one I did. Windows scaling and third party apps at times have compatibility problems with 4K, you get an extra hour or more of battery life, the money you save is great, the lower resolution is matte, and honestly, when I was at Best Buy I could barely tell the difference between the two when viewing it from a normal laptop distance.

The 4K resolution and panel might be worth it for Touch, maybe a bit better color, but don't feel bad or even feel like you are cheated if you can't afford it - you won't be missing out on much with the lower resolution display, and in fact, in many cases, it's preferable.
 

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,661
43,671
The 4K resolution and panel might be worth it
What I found in using my Thinkpad (4k display) is that for 15" displays, its just too small of a form factor for such a high resolution. Its less about windows poor scaling and more about the display being too small. Windows poor scaling just makes a bad situation worse. I think 17" may also fit that as well.

I'm finding FHD to be the sweet spot for 15" displays - at least on windows. Apple's retina resolution on 15" display is pretty nice :)
 
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c0ppo

macrumors 68000
Feb 11, 2013
1,890
3,267
I'm finding FHD to be the sweet spot for 15" displays - at least on windows. Apple's retina resolution on 15" display is pretty nice :)

It's actually a shame that PC OEMs don't use 1440p or 1600p resolutions on 15" laptops.
That way you can save on battery life, laptops wouldn't have to push many more not needed pixels, and scaling would be a less of an issue. Win-win for all. I believe Linus is on the same boat.

If I could get 144Hz 1440p screen on a 15" device, I would take that one in a heart beat. 4K is a complete overkill. Looking at my 4K X1E side by side vs MBP 16, I can see no difference at all. Text is sharp on both devices.
 
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