DELL XPS 17

amazon DELL XPS 17 reviews

It is equipped with an extremely powerful configuration, including the Intel H series processor and RTX graphics card. But compared to many laptops on the market today, it is too heavy – about 2.5 kg. A few people may not find carrying a 5.5 kg laptop running around the house or in their backpack all day is a thing that makes them feel heavy or uncomfortable. But I, and I guess most of us, are not among them.

This might cause you to ask the question: So why would anyone choose to buy this laptop rather than a desktop machine? It has good chips and a big screen, but a desktop machine can have even better chips and a bigger screen. On the other hand, if you want an easy-to-carry computer with a similar appearance to Ultrabook machines, why not buy one with a 15 or 16-inch screen, more practical options can bring?

The question is whether this wider screen and is this performance improvement worth the weight you have to endure? For some, the answer is yes – but perhaps only for those who frequently deal with specific tasks that require both.

Advantages:

– Widescreen, excellent display quality.

– The keyboard and touchpad are very good.

– “Compact” design (considering a 17 inch screen size).

– Impressive performance.

Defect:

– Heavy.

– No USB-A port.

– Webcam quality is poor.

The most interesting feature of this machine is, of course, the screen. I will put a question mark for you if you consider a 17-inch laptop like this unless you imagine how big the screen is. For those of you who haven’t already, I can say something like this: it feels like a desktop screen. When I experience this laptop, I always split the screen into two or three parts to display two or three software windows at once – whether when working with the Chrome browser, editing multiple images at once, Or while I checked Slack while streaming the video, I still felt very comfortable. I’ve never had to zoom out of a browser window to see the full content of a web page on this screen. The 16:10 aspect ratio gives you more room (by width), along with more space on either side for working.

However, if you do not multitask regularly, perhaps the 17-inch screen size is too large for you. It is simply not practical; For example, when you open a Chrome window in full-screen mode, the two sides of the web page will have incredibly large white spaces.

The display of the Dell XPS 17 is a pretty good one, with a resolution of 3840 x 2400. This resolution is slightly higher than standard 4K monitors, which are only 3840 x 2160. Colors Display is quite good (almost equivalent to a MacBook Pro): deep blacks and sharp details. I used the camera to watch an Infinity War movie, and the characters’ faces were displayed so large that I could see the wrinkles clearly when the characters expressed emotions and single hairs odd again. When I go back to viewing with smaller screens – even the very good quality ones on the 13-inch MacBook Pro – everything looks like miniature toys. The display of this XPS is also capable of displaying 100% of the Adobe RGB color space, and it has the maximum brightness enough for you to work indoors and outdoors (however there is still glare when using use in the sun).

The most impressive aspect of this display, though, lies in the fact that Dell has managed to fit such a large screen into a chassis smaller than most 17-inch laptops other on the market and even only on par with 15-inch laptops. The ratio of screen area/chassis reached 93.7%; Dell says the figure is higher than any of its rival laptops. The screen bezel of this machine is tiny – especially the “chin” on the bottom edge – so in front of your eyes there will be a huge screen area to admire and experience.

If you have been keeping up with this year’s XPS lineups, the 17-inch laptop’s exterior looks pretty familiar. Dell has mainly focused on redesigning this year’s XPS 13 and 15 laptops, with significant upgrades in chassis and finish. There’s no XPS 17 version last year (Dell has not released a laptop of this size for nearly 10 years), but the 2020 model possesses the conspicuous form characteristics of the rest of the XPS laptops. The device has a smooth aluminum frame, carbon fiber palm rest, and the screen uses Gorilla Glass. The device has a fairly compact size (37.44 x 24.8 x 1.96 cm) and is extremely sturdy. Overall, this machine gives users the impression of a good quality laptop.

The thinness of the XPS 17 can be a factor that makes you feel like you have been “fooled”; this machine has a heavier mass than it looks. The exact weight of the machine depends on the configuration version: Version without a touch screen and equipped with a 56Wh battery has the lowest weight, about 2.11 kg. I am experiencing a version with a touchscreen and a 97Wh capacity battery, weighing 2.51 kg. As can be seen, this model is about half a kilogram heavier than the XPS 15; so again, this is the “price” you pay for more area on the screen.

Most of the other “laptop specific” features found on the XPS 17 are also of very good quality. Similar to the XPS 15 series, the XPS 17 features an upward-facing speaker system on either side of the keyboard (consisting of two 1.5W treble speakers and two 2.5W woofers). They deliver very impressive sound, almost on par with good external speaker products. They are even capable of producing an audible bass – a feature quite rare in other laptop speakers.

On the sides, the machine is equipped with four USB-C ports that support Thunderbolt 3 (support for charging and outputting the screen signal via the DisplayPort standard), with an SD card slot, headphone jack, and lock slot. Dell has included a USB-C to USB-A 3.0 adapter and an HDMI 2.0 adapter. In fact, with a laptop this size, a manufacturer can add a USB-A port or Ethernet network port right on the machine, but it’s still better than the 16-inch MacBook Pro anyway – Apple’s big-screen laptop doesn’t even have an SD card slot.

The battery life of the 97Wh version is quite good because this is a heavy machine with a screen resolution of over 4K. I tried to do my everyday office tasks on this XPS (which includes multitasking: opening 8-12 browsing tabs in Chrome browser, Slack and Spotify apps, and so on. screen brightness is set at about 200 nits), and battery life stays around 7-8 hours. This is a lot better than the same test I did on the XPS 15 (with a smaller battery) and comparable to the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The XPS 17 comes with a 130W charger to accelerate the charging speed of the device.

The downside of laptops with thin bezels, as we’ve seen on other XPS models, is the lack of room to install a good quality webcam. Webcam of this machine is 2.25mm in size, 720p resolution, supports Windows Hello facial recognition technology to unlock the device, giving temporary quality; But when meeting video, the image from this webcam is quite noisy and blurry. You can also use the fingerprint sensor built into the device’s power button (located in the upper right corner of the keyboard) to log in.

Ultimately, the keyboard and touchpad on the XPS line have always been the mouse duo – my favorite laptop keyboard, and the XPS 17 still maintains that feat. In particular, it must be mentioned the great experience this keyboard brings – with 1.3mm of key travel. The keyboard is a bit “flatter” than some of my favorite keyboards, but their materials and the pleasant sound they produce during use leave me not bothered by a weakness that too.

The glass touchpad measures 14.73 x 8.89 cm; you can make the mouse click quite easily and the sound coming from it is also quite soft. The palm of my hand often touches the touchpad during the typing process, but fortunately, there is no time the touchpad mistakenly recognized it as a mouse gesture. The benefit of a touchpad with this size is that I never run into a lack of space for scrolling or multi-finger gestures. For me, though, this touchpad is a bit too big; My right hand can only reach the area for the right mouse button. I would have to spread my finger wide or move my wrist to reach the part for the left mouse button (if only using the touchpad with one hand). Users with small hands should note this point.

Inside this machine hides a very powerful configuration. The standard version costs 1,399 USD is equipped with an Intel Core i5-10300H processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD hard drive, and integrated graphics processor Intel UHD graphics. Meanwhile, the machine we tested, currently priced at $ 2,393 is equipped with an Intel Core i7-10875H octa-core processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max discrete graphics card. Q, 32GB RAM, and 1TB SSD hard drive. To prevent these components from being “too hot” during use, Dell introduced a new cooling system that includes a cooling vapor chamber that spans the entire width of the machine and hidden vents in the margins of the device.

The system performs well for jobs that do not require too much hardware – better than the XPS 15, which heats up pretty quickly in every test. The XPS 17 series never “cooled down” during use, but it never got too hot to get annoying in all of my everyday tasks. I’ve also never had to hear the heatsink running, which Dell calls “a pair of fans that blow the air out facing each other”.

When performing heavy tasks, the cooling system starts to work harder. The performance of the machine seems to have been “bottlenecked” by heat: through four tests using Cinebench R20 software, the machine’s CPU regularly reaches 95 degrees Celsius and cannot maintain the maximum clock rate. In the fifth test, the device’s temperature just dropped to about 89-90 degrees Celsius.

However, this machine is still more than capable of handling heavy tasks, such as video editing. In a test exporting 5 minutes and 33 seconds of video files at 4K resolution using Adobe Premiere Pro software, the XPS 17 got the job done in 3 minutes and 58 seconds. This processing performance is much better than the 16-inch MacBook Pro and slightly better than the Dell XPS 15 (which completes the video output in 4 minutes and 23 seconds) and Microsoft’s 15-inch Surface Book 3. However, the file output time of this machine is still 1 minute slower than the Gigabyte AERO 15 laptop, which has a stronger GPU and a more efficient cooling system.

The XPS 17 is not a gaming laptop (due to a variety of factors, such as the lack of options for a high screen refresh rate), and as a result, the gaming performance test results are also good. did not make any special impression. Nvidia’s RTX GPU, as the name implies, is designed for ray tracing tasks, but the 2060 Max Q GPU model is the lowest GPU model in this line, so it can’t. Take care of both the ray trace task and the 4K resolution screen at the same time. The XPS 17 when playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider game (at default resolution, medium setting) hit 24fps (with ray tracing) and 32fps (with ray tracing turned off). This is enough to show you the limitations of this system – you may have to lower the screen resolution or reduce the level of detail in the graphics to get the frame rate possible playable. If you are willing to do that and have no problem with the monitor’s 60fps frame rate limit, then the XPS 17 can serve as a portable gaming machine for you.

where can you get a DELL XPS 17 online

New XPS 17 9700 17″ Laptop 10th Gen Core i7-10875H up to 5.1 GHz 8 cores RTX 2060 6GB Max-Q 4K UHD Anti-Reflex 500-Nit Touch Display Plus Best Notebook Stylus Pen Light (2TB SSD RAID|32GB RAM|10 PRO): Buy it now

New XPS 17 9700 17″ Laptop 10th Gen Core i7-10875H up to 5.1 GHz 8 cores RTX 2060 6GB Max-Q 4K UHD Anti-Reflex 500-Nit Touch Display Plus Best Notebook Stylus Pen Light (1TB SSD RAID|32GB RAM|10 PRO): Buy it now

Configuration of Dell XPS 17 (version used in this test)

– Processor: Intel Core i7-10875H clocked at 2.30GHz (16MB cache, maximum boost clocked at 5.1GHz, eight cores).

– RAM: 32GB (2 sticks of DDR4 2933MHz RAM 16GB capacity)

– Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max Q with 6GB of GDDR6 memory

– 1TB PCIe NVMe SSD hard drive.

– Screen: 17 inch, with touch, 3840 x 2400 resolution, maximum brightness 500 nits, contrast ratio 1600: 1.

– Size: 37.44 x 24.8 x 1.96 cm, weight 2.51 kg.

– Battery: 6 cell batteries, total capacity 97Wh.

– 130W USB-C battery charger.

– Four-speaker system, including two subwoofers with a capacity of 2.5W and two speakers with a capacity of 1.5W.

– Dual digital microphone.

– 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports capable of charging and outputting DisplayPort standard display signals, one SD card slot version 6.0, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a wedge-shaped lock slot.

– Full-size keyboard, backlit, 1.3mm of key travel.

– Magnetic touchpad (touchpad) is made of glass, high precision.

– Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 (2×2)

– Bluetooth 5.1.

So, is the XPS 17 bigger and more powerful than the XPS 15? Have. Is it any better than decent 17-inch laptops, such as the LG Gram 17? Yes, even much better. And this machine looks thinner and lighter than its actual weight of 2.5 kg. You will only find this machine effective if you regularly perform tasks that require powerful chips inside it.

In short, this is not the best laptop for those who mainly use the Google Chrome browser and regularly “carry” it around the house or library, or coffee shop. This machine is intended for professional users, who often have to work away from home, on the road, and who feel that the small screen laptops, lower configuration are not enough for them. For those people, this is the best laptop they can own.