Dell XPS 13 and XPS 13 Developer Version—side-by-side evaluation

We spent this weekend going hands-on with a couple of 2020 style Dell XPS 13 laptops—one traditional version operating Home windows 10 Professional, and one Developer Version operating Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. The XPS 13 is amongst Dell’s hottest fashions, and for just right reason why—it is a swish, solid-feeling pc which generally has among the finest hardware and just right battery existence.

Sadly, either one of the XPS 13 fashions we examined had driving force problems—in particular the Home windows pc, which has a Killer AX1650 Wi-Fi card.

Hardware

Specifications at a look: Dell XPS 13 2020 style, as reviewed
	XPS 13	XPS 13 Developer Version
OS	Home windows 10 House	Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Display	13.Four-inch FHD+ (1920×1200) touchscreen	13.Four-inch UHD+ (3840×2400) touchscreen
CPU	Intel Core i7-1065G7
GPU	Intel Iris+
RAM	16GiB	32GiB
HDD	Intel 512GB NVMe SSD	Hynix 512GB NVMe SSD
Networking	Killer AX1650 Wi-Fi 6 (2×2), Bluetooth Four.2
Ports	2 x Thunderbolt three, 1 x three.5mm headphone jack, 1 x microSD card reader
Dimension	11.6×7.Eight×zero.58 inches (296×199×15mm)
Weight	2.7 kilos (1.2kg)	2.Eight kilos (1.3kg)
Battery	52Wh battery
Guaranty	1 12 months on-site (after far flung prognosis)
Extras	Fingerprint reader (in energy button), 720P IR digital camera, backlit keyboard
Value as examined	$1,617 at Dell	$2,000 at Dell

The XPS 13 is a small, swish, very solid-feeling pc with a vivid display and really slender bezels. It does not be offering a lot in the best way of connectivity—there is not any Ethernet jack, no HDMI port, and no USB-B port both.

The pc does be offering one Thunderbolt port on each side, so you’ll be able to get absolutely anything attached with the precise dongle—however until you purchase a Thunderbolt or USB-C dock, you’ll be able to best be capable of attach one among whatever-it-is, for the reason that different Thunderbolt port might be occupied via the charger.

There’s a separate three.5mm audio jack, so XPS 13 customers will be capable of attach a suite of old-school stressed out headphones with out consuming up a Thunderbolt port within the procedure.

Each fashions we examined got here with touchscreens, they usually appear good enough—even though we didn’t take a look at with a stylus, since neither pc got here with one.

Impressions—Home windows

This 12 months’s XPS 13 is the primary Ice Lake pc we now have had the risk to move hands-on with. We began via checking out the usual XPS 13 with Home windows House on it—and in the beginning, the instrument appeared extra adore it used to be powered via an Eight-year-old Celeron than a brand-new 10th technology Core i7.

The entirety about working the XPS 13 used to be slow—home windows had been reluctant to open, packages had been glacially sluggish, and the lovers went all of the manner as much as 11, whole with an unpleasant steel whine. Monitoring down the issue drove us berserk—whilst Useful resource Track confirmed a whole lot of CPU and disk process, it did not characteristic the CPU process to any procedure or provider.

MS Place of work Click on-to-Run went via a quite temporary spike of 1GiB/sec disk process, which surely did not assist—however after the Click on-to-Run procedure had finished its factor and settled down once more, the CPU used to be nonetheless thrashing to 100 p.c utilization on all 8 to be had threads of the Ice Lake CPU. It seems that the issue used to be the “Killer Keep an eye on Heart”—a device utility related to the Killer AX1650 Wi-Fi card.

Killing the Killer Heart took CPU utilization down from 100 p.c on all 8 threads to about 30 p.c general, unfold around the 4 bodily cores. This used to be sufficient for the lovers to spin down significantly and make the pc usable—however there used to be nonetheless extra space for growth.

Fortuitously, we already knew that the Killer AX1650 stocks the similar bodily hardware with a easy Intel AX200. So after downloading the vanilla AX200 drivers from Intel’s web site and operating the installer, we had been in a position to forcibly exchange the Killer driving force with the Intel driving force—which introduced CPU utilization the remainder of the best way right down to what it must be, neatly below 10 p.c.

With the Killer killed, the XPS 13 is a pc remodeled. The Ice Lake i7-1065G7 is a high-end CPU, and it feels that manner—we expect the general public buying groceries Intel laptops must be searching for Ice Lake CPUs just like the 1065G7 somewhat than their Comet Lake equivalents, which might be warmer, devour extra energy, and feature inferior graphics.

In case your best enjoy with a brand new pc this 12 months is an Ice Lake pc, you’ll be able to most definitely be inspired. However this wasn’t our first 2020 pc enjoy—and the i7-1065G7 is a a ways cry from the Ryzen nine 4800HS we examined ultimate month within the ASUS Zephyrus G14.

The XPS 13 did rating a ways higher for battery existence than the Zephyrus G14 did, even though. It were given a PCMark 10 Fashionable Place of work battery existence rating of 14 hours 11 mins, evaluating to the G14’s nine hours 35 mins. This most probably has so much to do with this evaluation unit’s FHD+ show somewhat than 4K UHD+; with the 4K UHD+, we would be expecting the Fashionable Place of work rating to drop considerably.

Impressions—Ubuntu

Bodily, the one distinction between the XPS 13 Developer Version and the plain-vanilla XPS 13 we would already examined is the colour—the place the Home windows gadget had the not obligatory, $50 more-expensive “Alpine White” internal, the Developer Version gadget used the usual “Black.”

In principle, the outsides are other, too—the Home windows system’s external used to be “Frost White” and the Linux system’s is “Platinum Silver.” However in maximum lighting fixtures, you would be exhausting pressed to inform the 2 aside with out opening them up.

There have been some important hardware variations, as neatly—you’ll be able to’t purchase the common XPS 13 with greater than 16GiB RAM in it, whilst the XPS 13 Developer Version will also be spec’d as much as 32GiB. Our explicit XPS 13 DE additionally had a 4K UHD+ touchscreen, as a substitute of the 1920×200 FHD+ touchscreen on our Home windows gadget—however that, like the colour, will also be configured the similar on both model.

The XPS 13 Developer Version got here pre-loaded with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and for probably the most phase, it is beautiful traditional and may not be offering skilled Ubuntu customers any surprises. It nonetheless feels a bizarre to click on via acceptance of Dell’s company Phrases of Carrier on first run—and seeing a 6GiB FAT32 restoration partition is a bit of ordinary, too.

Maximum customers will most probably by no means see the 2 Dell packages bundled with the XPS 13 DE—the “Dell Linux Assistant” and Dell Restoration. Dell Restoration lets in the person to both roll the gadget again to a factory-fresh state the use of the 6GiB FAT32 partition on the height of the SSD, or it lets in customers to create a complete set of OS set up media directly to both USB disk or DVD.

The Dell Linux Assistant is not in particular useful, and why it used to be incorporated is slightly of a thriller. It gives two choices—Machine Knowledge and Person Registration—and clicking both choice led to a 17-second wait (sure, we counted) throughout which not anything by any means occurs. That will provide you with the chance to wonder whether you mis-clicked or the app locked up. However no—it is simply that sluggish.

After 17 Mississippis, you get both a terse set of hardware knowledge—kind of an identical to Ubuntu 18.04’s About display and not so good as 20.04’s—otherwise you get a easy shape to fill to your knowledge. We aren’t certain why this app is so slow, why it is restricted to one of these tiny quantity of display actual property, or why the Person Registration wasn’t only a shortcut to a web page.

Dell’s OEM Ubuntu 18.04 loadout is a bit of other from the usual ubuntu-desktop metapackage—it strips out Firefox fully and replaces it with each Chromium and the overall proprietary Google Chrome browsers, either one of which might be pinned to the launcher.

We temporarily came upon, sadly, that Google Chrome wasn’t correctly put in—a easy apt replace within the Terminal threw GPG mistakes, since the key for the repository hadn’t been imported. That is most simply fastened just by surfing to the usual Chrome obtain web page and putting in it once more from there—the person will get the most recent model, and the GPG key’s correctly imported, and not using a extra mistakes throughout updates.

Even supposing our Developer Version pc used to be fortunately freed from the Killer Keep an eye on Heart and its related excessive CPU thrashing, it wasn’t with out driving force problems with its personal. Our XPS 13 Developer Version locked up the desktop surroundings exhausting as soon as whilst we had been checking out it; when locked up, the gadget seemed utterly unresponsive, however pulling a plain-text TTY the use of Ctrl-Alt-Fn-F3 labored, and the desktop surroundings may well be killed off from there with out rebooting the OS itself.

We reached out to a colleague who owns a 2020 style XPS 13 Developer Version, and he reported having the very same factor occur “a couple of instances” since he is owned it. We suspect the problem lies with some out-of-tree drivers Dell has put in—the Further Drivers icon is got rid of from the Launcher fully, however it may possibly nonetheless be reached “throughout the again door” via opening Instrument & Updates as a substitute, and clicking its Settings button.

When we get to Further Drivers, we will be able to see that Gnome thinks that each the Wi-Fi card and the sound driving force are damaged—and that there is a “day by day” driving force put in for the audio. Gnome is not fully proper about this; each sound and Wi-Fi had been running high quality at the XPS 13—however we suspect non-standard driving force is what is every now and then locking the desktop up.

If we owned this pc, our subsequent step would most definitely be to wipe the entire thing and do a brand new set up of vanilla Ubuntu 20.04, which must be offering local fortify for all of the pc’s hardware already.

The very last thing we wish to quilt at the XPS 13 Developer Version is battery existence. We would not have a snazzy Fashionable Place of work Packages benchmark suite to run in Linux like we did in Home windows—so as a substitute, we did our standard fallback approach, which is to look at the BBC’s Ten Hours of Stress-free Oceanscapes in fullscreen mode at 1080p for an hour.

We most often run this take a look at in Firefox. This time—for the reason that XPS 13 got here with out Firefox pre-installed—we attempted in each Google Chrome and Firefox. Collection of browser did not make a lot distinction: the pc reported 23 p.c decrease battery after an hour gazing the fullscreen 1080p video in Firefox, and 24 p.c decrease battery after an equivalent hour in Google Chrome.

It is a worse end result than we are aware of from top-of-the line laptops on this elegance. HP’s Dragonfly Elite G1 misplaced best 16 p.c battery existence in the similar take a look at, and its display used to be at complete brightness whilst the XPS 13’s used to be at 30 p.c. To be honest, the XPS 13’s display is slightly brighter than the Dragonfly Elite’s—500 nits to 400—and it seemed nice in my place of work at that surroundings.

We suspect that almost all of the adaptation is because of the XPS 13 Developer Editions’ 4K display. If you do not want 4K in a pc—particularly one as small as this—you are most probably at an advantage with out it. The 4K show provides a whopping $300 to the acquisition worth level, in addition to hanging an important further drain at the battery. You’ll be able to save every other $100 on height of that in case you opt for the non-touchscreen model of the FHD+ show.

Conclusions

We truly sought after to like the XPS 13, however with driver-related screwiness on each Ubuntu and Home windows, it used to be a troublesome instrument to like. The number of the Killer AX1650 Wi-Fi card over the plain-vanilla Intel AX200 used to be a deficient one for the marketplace. With built-in graphics best, we do not see the XPS 13 as being anyone’s first number of “gamer elite” pc, and the extra complicated Killer driving force and device stack is of doubtful price, even if it does paintings proper.

The pc itself, bodily, seems and feels nice. The hinges are simply the proper stiffness, the display is vivid and transparent, the keyboard feels excellent for one of these small, skinny pc, and its white backlighting seems just right at the hours of darkness. The Ice Lake i7-1065G7 is a succesful CPU, and the Iris+ built-in graphics are a large step up from older fashions’ UHD graphics. The audio high quality is absolute best described as “completely cromulent”—it is not likely to provoke someone, however it is lots loud and somewhat listenable when taking part in tune on YouTube.

The nearest competitor to the XPS 13 that we now have reviewed is HP’s Dragonfly Elite. Total, we would give the nod to the Dragonfly Elite for high quality—it is a marginally smaller, has higher battery existence, and the 2019 style wasn’t plagued with driving force weirdness. However additionally it is considerably costlier—at HP’s retailer, a Dragonfly Elite with an eighth-generation i5 and 256GB SSD prices about $250 greater than an XPS 13 with a 10th-gen i7 and a 512GB SSD.

The Excellent

• The XPS 13 chassis feels as stable as ever
• Best possible stiffness to the show hinges
• Brilliant, sexy show with minimum bezels
• Webcam is the place it must be—on the height of the show
• Audio is stable high quality, if now not spectacular
• Ice Lake i7 gives just right CPU efficiency and higher iGPU efficiency
• Nice battery existence—in case you go for the FHD+ display, now not the 4K UHD+
• Excellent price for the fee

The Unhealthy

• Killer Wi-Fi within the Home windows version must be taken out again and shot
• Occasional Ubuntu desktop surroundings lockups at the Developer Version
• Fingerprint sensor within the energy button is bizarre
• Webcam is best 720P

The Unpleasant

• We are nonetheless mad about that Killer Wi-Fi rubbish.