Dell XPS 15 2017 9560 (7300HQ, Full-HD) Notebook Review

[Matt4109]

AquaeAtrae - The difference isn't negligible IMO - around 12% less on average over all the techpowerup benchmarks. That isn't game changing but it's enough to be meaningful I think.

Unfortunately there are no 15" laptops that have 4 TB3 PCIe lanes open, aside from the Macbook Pro. And if you're planning on gaming with an eGPU that probably isn't the best option. The HP Spectre x360 15" theoretically has 4 lanes open if there is a way to disable their dGPU, but it's very unlikely it will be possible IRL. So the only Windows options available with 4 lanes are the Spectre x360 13" and the upcoming 14" Thinkpad X1 Yoga.

I 'm leaning towards the Spectre 15" right now. I can play Civ6 and FIFA without an eGPU with that, and for other games I don't mind the 12% 2 lane eGPU hit over the 4 lane 13" Spectre. So far the Spectre looks to me like a better laptop than the XPS15 but I'll wait for notebookcheck's review.

[Douglas Black]

AquaeAtrae - The difference isn't negligible IMO - around 12% less on average over all the techpowerup benchmarks. That isn't game changing but it's enough to be meaningful I think.

Unfortunately there are no 15" laptops that have 4 TB3 PCIe lanes open, aside from the Macbook Pro. And if you're planning on gaming with an eGPU that probably isn't the best option. The HP Spectre x360 15" theoretically has 4 lanes open if there is a way to disable their dGPU, but it's very unlikely it will be possible IRL. So the only Windows options available with 4 lanes are the Spectre x360 13" and the upcoming 14" Thinkpad X1 Yoga.

I 'm leaning towards the Spectre 15" right now. I can play Civ6 and FIFA without an eGPU with that, and for other games I don't mind the 12% 2 lane eGPU hit over the 4 lane 13" Spectre. So far the Spectre looks to me like a better laptop than the XPS15 but I'll wait for notebookcheck's review.

Only the X1 Yoga? Any particular reason the X1 carbon (or MBP 13") wouldn't work?

Also, I have personally experienced the bottleneck of x2 PCIE with my XPS 15 + razer core. It's a very strange thing to experience... it's like using the laptop in molasses. Even the most basic game/software is unable to hit more than 45-50 FPS due to the botleneck. Anything that accesses the disk does so at a crawl. For example, when I ran firestrike on the internal display with a GTX 970 in the core, it took about 1 minute to load each test and where as the GTX 960m scored a 4100 on the internal on firestrike and the 970+core+external scored 9200 or so, the 970+core+internal gave me something like 2300.

[Matt4109]

Douglas - your experience is surprising - egpu.io 's implementation list has several successful examples of old XPS 15 & eGPUs at good frame rates. Maybe some of the hardware you had wasn't working properly?

Good catch, I'd missed the X1 Carbon. I'm leaning away from the Lenovos though, as early reports claim heating and fan noise issues, which is pretty par for the course with Lenovo.

The 13" macbook pro does have 4x lanes; I was just listing Windows machines in that sentence. The 15" Macbook is actually in 2nd place for me right now after the Spectre. The reasons I'm leaning towards the Spectre are the touchscreen, convertibility, Windows Hello, the fact that Nvidia and most game studios don't strongly support Macs, and price. I actually really like touchscreens on laptops for scrolling through articles and playing Civ 6. I never use tablet mode in convertibles but I use the tent and stand modes a lot since I'm frequently on airplanes. Windows Hello IR cameras are extremely convenient and probably the safest security implementation currently available. And of course the price is almost half of the equivalent Macbook. Still though, if the Spectre's battery life, screen quality, temperature, fan noise, speakers, and overall build quality aren't up to par I will go for the 15" Macbook which will probably be at least a little better in those aspects as well as having 4x PCIe lanes. I'm optimistic for the Spectre though since HP's strategy last year was essentially to make a straight Macbook clone and they mostly succeeded with build quality, and early reviews of the 15" are very positive.

[AquaeAtrae]

Thanks all

I too have seem last year's XPS 15s run with good framerates via eGPUs.
https://egpu.io/external-gpu-implementations-table/

There are other options available now (including 15") and some are definitely wired at x4 lanes (e.g. ASUS UX501VW). I'd recommend watching this crowd-sourced listing for updates.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12G1VTFWkTL5tb8nxUAtnDHwTLyya9I3Vw-OXXrIN4e4/edit?usp=sharing

Much of the testing and reports are coming from https://egpu.io/

I'm not sure if your 12% figure is comparing x2 lanes vs x16 lanes maybe. On FHD resolutions, the difference between 16GTps (PCIe x4 gen 2.0) and 32GTps (PCI x4 gen 3.0) was about half that. The difference was even less at 4K resolutions. Plus, PCIe 3.0 reduced overhead from 20% to 1.5% so these comparisons should be conservative. On the other hand, Thunderbolt 3 itself adds about 5% overhead to the overall affect but that's true of x4 lane implementations as well. Regardless, its always a matter of opinion how much more powerful eGPU you'd need to buy to make this laptop worthwhile. I can certainly respect that.

My only point is that those expecting a 50% loss of performance given half as many lanes would be pleasantly surprised ...assuming other issues weren't affecting their game.

Also, many report that feeding video back into the internal screen has a notable impact, and perhaps more so with just x2 lanes. External displays show the best performance. But since Thunderbolt's bandwidth is 40Gbps upstream plus a separate 40GBps down, I remain curious to see this tested in detail and/or explained.

PS: We are seeing the first attempts to connect these new XPS 15s with eGPUs. Unfortunately, he may have received a defective ASUS XG Station 2, but we're still looking into it.

[Matt4109]

AquaeAtrae - I was getting the 12% figure from this imgur post of a fellow who had rolled up all the scores. Looks accurate to me? http://imgur.com/a/y0pSm

For the 15" x4 options I'm really only looking at the Ultrabook class, so something like the Asus with 6hrs of battery life won't do for me unfortunately. However, I don't know how I stupid enough to miss it, but I did miss the Razer Blade Spectre as another 14" option.

Very interesting point on the external display. And good point on techpowerup's scores being conservative with the reduced overhead.

[Douglas Black]

Douglas - your experience is surprising - egpu.io 's implementation list has several successful examples of old XPS 15 & eGPUs at good frame rates. Maybe some of the hardware you had wasn't working properly?

Good catch, I'd missed the X1 Carbon. I'm leaning away from the Lenovos though, as early reports claim heating and fan noise issues, which is pretty par for the course with Lenovo.

The 13" macbook pro does have 4x lanes; I was just listing Windows machines in that sentence. The 15" Macbook is actually in 2nd place for me right now after the Spectre. The reasons I'm leaning towards the Spectre are the touchscreen, convertibility, Windows Hello, the fact that Nvidia and most game studios don't strongly support Macs, and price. I actually really like touchscreens on laptops for scrolling through articles and playing Civ 6. I never use tablet mode in convertibles but I use the tent and stand modes a lot since I'm frequently on airplanes. Windows Hello IR cameras are extremely convenient and probably the safest security implementation currently available. And of course the price is almost half of the equivalent Macbook. Still though, if the Spectre's battery life, screen quality, temperature, fan noise, speakers, and overall build quality aren't up to par I will go for the 15" Macbook which will probably be at least a little better in those aspects as well as having 4x PCIe lanes. I'm optimistic for the Spectre though since HP's strategy last year was essentially to make a straight Macbook clone and they mostly succeeded with build quality, and early reviews of the 15" are very positive.

It's because the actual data link is 32Gbps for 4 lanes and 16Gbps for two. 8Gbps is reserved for DisplayPort. So you've got 16Gbps upstream, which works OK, but when you double that by sending data back to the internal screen, it's completely choked. That's my understanding of why, anyway.

Lack of touch is a good reason not to buy the MBPs. I like the spectre 13 and 15 but I just want a 15W dual core CPU. It isn't good enough.

Of the quad cores under 200lba we've got...

Alienware 13 r3 - too large a footprint for a 13" screen.
Razer Blade - poor screen (touch), ugly logo, bad QC and support
Gs43vr - ugly and cheap feeling
XPS 15 - can't run eGPU on internal screen
MBP - grossly expensive, poor thermals, Windows bootcamp will not let you use the iGPU, no touch
Aorus x5 v7 - just too large and with poor battery life for me

(All just my subjective opinions and do not represent a notebookcheck review whatsoever)

I think that's basically all of them right now. Thus, I'm just going to wait.

[Iguana Divergent]

So.... Who's genius idea at Notebookcheck's HQ was it to review the I5, 1080p with smaller battery version of the XPS 15 2017 edition? Are you guys going to review the I7, 97WHR, UHD version too????

[Douglas Black]

So.... Who's genius idea at Notebookcheck's HQ was it to review the I5, 1080p with smaller battery version of the XPS 15 2017 edition? Are you guys going to review the I7, 97WHR, UHD version too????

I don't see why we wouldn't have an i7/UHD review in the near future, just as we did with the 9550. :)

[Andreas Osthoff]

Hi guys, we will review the high-end spec as well. The test model (4K, 512 GB PCIe-SSD, i7-7700HQ) should arrive in a couple of days.

[Mobile Gamer]

Could you please test the 3D performance on battery, I find it remarkable that the whole point of a laptop is to compute on the move and yet all gaming laptop reviews never test gaming performance on battery.
You are the only site I've every found that even does a little in this regard in providing 3DMark 11 results on battery. (FPS) on games would be better. But I notice this and some other recent reviews don't have this, please can you add it to this and the upcoming UHD review. Would be very helpful.

[walter]

Sorry but... where are the conclusions and, where is the icc file??  ;D

[AquaeAtrae]

AquaeAtrae - I was getting the 12% figure from this imgur post of a fellow who had rolled up all the scores. Looks accurate to me? http://imgur.com/a/y0pSm

For the 15" x4 options I'm really only looking at the Ultrabook class, so something like the Asus with 6hrs of battery life won't do for me unfortunately. However, I don't know how I stupid enough to miss it, but I did miss the Razer Blade Spectre as another 14" option.

The biggest loss I see there is in Battlefield 1 (1080p) where 140.9 FPS drops to 128.8 when restricted from 32GTps to just 16GTps (like x2 PCIe lanes). Other resolutions and games weren't that much.

Like you, I'm looking for long battery life. I was very interested in ultrabooks until I realized the impact those dual-core CPUs had on specific games I play (e.g. 40% loss in Battlefield 1 regardless of the GPU). It's not so bad with all games, but something to be aware of. Here's a good review comparing the Razer Blade Stealth (dual core) vs full quad-core performance.
https://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/laptops/2016/11/10/razer-blade-stealth-and-core-review/4

If the battery life wasn't so poor (very misadvertised), I had been keen to try an ASUS Transformer 3 Pro 2-in-1 with the new XG Station 2 eGPU. But alas, just 3.7 hours despite the low power components.

There was also rumor of a new low-power 18W Kaby Lake with quad-core HQ performance. That with an eGPU would have made the perfect 2-in-1! But all indications suggest that idea never came to market. :(

[Matt4109]

AquaeAtrae - Wow I had not seen that dual core impact. That changes things...

So what are your thoughts on the best options are now and in the next few months? Does anything look promising for the kind of laptop we are looking for?

[AquaeAtrae]

Well, I'm actually still leaning toward the XPS 15 + XG Station 2 + GTX 1080 for mobile productivity and intense gaming when docked. Admittedly, I was hoping for a bit more than the 5 hours battery life reported here. And it may be a while 'til eGPU support is actually benchmarked much less fully developed.

https://twitter.com/AzorFrank/status/829719350961696768

I'm also keeping an eye on the Latitude 5580, Gigabyte Saber 15, and Aorus X5 v7. If I can't realize the eGPU dream this year, I may fall back to lugging a 7lb Alienware 15 and its power brick ...or just wait it out another year with my 6 year old XPS 17 L702x.

With the new Thunderbolt 3 eGPU options and Nvidia's Pascal efficiency, these should be good days for a new laptop. But it's still very early in the game. These reviews are just now coming in.

[Ken PC]

I am looking forward to the battery life reports on the 4k/i7 version.
I use idle battery life reports via the windows battery icon on the taskbar as a quick check on the 'baseline', knowing it will never be better under use.

The first BIOS version of the 9550/4k ran about 9.5hrs@min screen brightness and about 5.5hrs at max. That was a known BIOS bug, but took a few BIOS versions to sort out.

Currently, on my 9550 I get about 16hrs at min screen idle (apprx 5.25W) and 6.5hrs at max (apprx 13W). Compared to min screen brightness, +4 notches (out of the 10) adds about 2 watts to the screen power. As the numbers show, the screen takes an additional 8 or so watts going from min to max brightness.

Running Netflix (not 4k content) at +4 brightness provides about 6hrs total battery life according to the taskbar.

Running W10 on 'balanced' power profile.