I had this computer for about 8 months now and I am hugely disappointed. I have been using XPS Notebooks for about 8 years now starting with the XPS 15 9500 and I was a big fan so far. But the XPS 17 9730 is really a terrible machine and I am done with Dell. By the way, I have no commercial interest in this. The only reason for me to make this video is to call out a seriously problematic product that I want to warn others about. So, if you think about buying a XPS 17 9730, let me tell you why it is probably not a good idea.
1. First of all, Windows and Intel broke any type of functional standby. With the XPS 17 you either have have "modern standby" which really never turns off anything except the screen and the Wifi, and therefore uses about 5-10 % of the battery per hour, while letting the computer get pretty hot in your backpack. Or you can use hibernate, which needs pretty long to wake up your computer or put it to sleep. Dell's reply to having broken a functioning Standby for the XPS is to tell people to please not transport their notebook in a backpack when in Standby. Well, thanks for a notebook that you effectively have to turn off before you can transport it anywhere Dell.
2. What makes matters worse is that when I did put my XPS into hibernate, it frequently crashed until a Dell representative found a faulty Realtek driver after 2 hours of searching. However, rather than fixing this driver, Dell update eventually reinstalled it automatically, so the computer started crashing again about 2 months later. And the worst thing is: When the computer crashes in hibernation, then it force-restarts, gets stuck in Bios and gets seriously hot, which, if you do have it in your backpack is pretty dangerous.
3. And (you can't make this up): the internal keyboard misses keystrokes when an external monitor or docking station is attached. Even replacing the physical motherboard, including the CPU and GPU plus a keyboard replacement did not change this. Month later Dell acknowledged that this is a problem on all XPS and promises to fix it. However, until then, you simply cannot type with this computer due to missing keystrokes.
4. The i9 is also severely crippled due to wattage and heat limitations, and this problem is compounded because different from previous versions, you cannot undervolt the CPU anymore, so in benchmarks, this computer is slower than my XPS 9700 from two years ago.
5. Similarly to the CPU, the RTX 4080 is severely limited by heat and wattage. Do not expect more than about 50 % of what a desktop RTX 4080 would be capable off. Dell thus used components that are great advertise, but do not deliver even close to the performance that they should. Also, Dell never managed to reliably turn off the dedicated GPU when on battery, so you manually have to disable the DGPU in the device manager, and then turn it on again, otherwise it keeps on getting pinged, which continually drains the battery, which brings me to my next point.
6. The Battery runtime on the XPS 17 9730 is realistically 2-3 hours. If you manually deactivate and then manually reactivate the dedicated GPU, you can get 4-5 hours if you try very hard. But this is about as much as a notebook from almost 20 years ago could accomplish.
7. The problem of the low battery runtime is compounded by the 4k Display, which is another feature that sounds cool, but you basically have to set windows scaling to 150 % percent to see anything. So, realistically, a 3 k 1440p display would have been a much better choice. But again, while this would have been much more usable, well, it just doesn't sound as cool in the advertised specs.
8. When I connected this computer to my Dell docking stations, and I have tried this on three different ones, you get intermittent screen blackouts when connecting a 4k 144hz monitor. Believe me, I have tried all cables, HDMI, Displayport, three types of docking stations with three types of monitors, I have tried it with two XPS 9730 motherboards, it seems to be a systemic problem, particularly as it has never occurred with any other computer I have connected to exactly the same setup.
9. To top it all off, I compared the speed of the XPS 9730 to my friend's Macbook Air M1 that is three years old by now. I use the statistical software Stata and the i9 is actually not faster than a Macbook that cost a fifth of its price, uses a quarter of its wattage, weights a third, and does not even have a cooler, while the i9 jumps to 100 degrees at the slightest occasion.
10. Finally, there is the price. I paid close to 5000 for this computer for a machine that has an effective runtime of 2-3 hours on battery and gets outperformed by a three year old Mac without a cooler for a fifth of the price.
So bottom line: This is a terrible computer, whose components seem perfect, but they simply do not work. This is why I have been a huge XPS fan, but this is it for me. To be fair, Dell customer service was great whenever I had a problem, but they cannot change the sheer amount of problems that I did and most likely you will have with this machine. So, if you want a machine that you can actually work with rather than having to work on, do not get the Dell XPS 17 9730. I honestly wish I never would have bought this computer and much less paid almost 5000 Euro for it. It's frankly a disgrace for Dell. So, thank you and I hope that this review is helpful for everyone thinking about a buying a Dell XPS 17 9730.
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