Review: Dell XPS 13 (9300), a great little ultraportable
Dell has an extensive catalog of equipment, and among them stand out their notebooks powerfully. Perhaps not all models, but most, and especially the latest ones. The XPS 13 is one of the smallest computers on the market, and in its latest remodel ( XPS 13 9300 ) the company upgraded some components and made a good laptop even better. Above all, this device offers portability with good performance thanks to an Intel Ice Lake processor.
The most visible changes in this version focus mainly on the screen, with a new 16:10 format that is more interesting to work with. Dell has also taken care of the external design, maintaining excellent manufacturing in aluminum along with carbon fiber, making it a compact and lightweight equipment. It is probably the best ultraportable on the market, as you will see throughout the analysis.
Design and components
Dell has done a good redesign of the XPS 13, changing the most visible part of the screen, reducing the frames to a minimum. The equipment is composed of an aluminum casing, while the part where the keyboard rests is made of carbon fiber. The texture of both is very good and gives a feeling of rigidity to the team. It doesn’t bulge by continually typing. The equipment measures just 295.7 mm × 198.7 mm × 14.8 mm and weighs 1.27 kg, which is quite little and an ultraportable in its own right.
The equipment screen is 34 cm (13.4 inches), being of the IPS type. It has a great resolution of 3840 × 2400 pixels, which probably would not be the one I chose for my personal use because I prefer greater autonomy, and these high resolutions are at odds with it. The screen is capable of reproducing high dynamic range images and covers 90% of the DCI-P3 color scale. It is a touch screen, although personally on a computer that is not a convertible it seems to me a feature that does not contribute much to the user. Dell has incorporated a webcam into the upper frame. The finish of the screen is in gloss, although it includes a good anti-reflective coating.
The included processor is a Core i7–1065G7 with an integrated Iris Plus G7, and features 16GB of 3733MHz LPDDR4X and 1TB of solid-state storage. The processor is an Ice Lake built at 10nm, with improved core architecture and semi-decent integrated graphics. I am not going to stop long to talk about it since I will do more in the next section.
Despite the lightweight and size, Dell has included a 52 Wh battery in the ultraportable, which is good news for autonomy. It seems to me that this section is very important for an ultraportable, even if it is used far from a plug. That will depend greatly on the user, but it is a point to keep in mind when buying one of these devices. The provided charger is 45 W, with a cable to connect to any of the USB type C ports of the equipment. It is the power that is expected in the equipment of this style since it eliminates the need to put a different charging connector.
Ports are limited to two Thunderbolt 3s and a four-pole 3.5mm audio jack; It also includes Wi-Fi 802.11ax and Bluetooth 5.0, as well as a micro-SD card reader. Those who are not used to the Thunderbolt 3 port may lose sight of its virtues or consider that needing a multi-adapter to take advantage of it is a nuisance, but it is just the opposite. Thunderbolt 3 is a port that supports charging, data and video, and therefore the user decides which adapter to use: one with HDMI and several USB type A, one with a DisplayPort, some USB type A and type C, etc.
Being a user of a MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt 3 ports for years, in the end I only use peripherals with USB type C, and at home, I have a Dell U2720Q monitor, which provides me with three USB type A, one USB type C, various video and 94 W load, and all accessible through a single Thunderbolt 3. Versatility is not to be missed from this connector. It is appreciated that Dell includes a USB Type-A to USB Type C adapter with this equipment.
The included keyboard gives a nice typing feel with its scissor switches, and once you get used to it it has a low typing failure rate. I certainly liked it a lot, and considering that I spend hours and hours pulling lines of code every day I really appreciate it. The keyboard includes a start button in the upper right corner that doubles as a fingerprint reader. The keyboard is backlit in white, adjust brightness from the keyboard as usual. The included touchpad is also of very high quality, accurate and truly comparable to that of top-of-the-line equipment in this field such as the MacBook. Perhaps it lags slightly behind in the sense of use, but it is still very good and the best I have tried on a laptop in recent times.
Dell XPS 13 9300: performance
The processors for the ultraportable ones are of low consumption and therefore have a lower heat generation, represented by their thermal design power (TDP). In the case of the Core i7–1065G7, the TDP is 15 W . It is a physical eight-core processor with multithreading — 4 no. / 8 threads, or 4N / 8H for short — , operating between 1.3 GHz and 3.9 GHz. This TDP will be noted when it comes to maintaining performance over time, and therefore in intensive applications such as Cinebench R20, it will not be comparable to other higher TDP processors. Nor should it be, because in ultraportables what matters is fluidity on a day-to-day basis, and being decent in more intensive CPU tasks.
In general, it is a processor with more power than those that have been used so far in ultraportables, such as the Core i7–8565U, but slower than those that are also 4N / 8H with a TDP of 35 W such as the Core i5 -9300H, but it’s not much slower either.
As for the graphics unit integrated into the processor, it is an Iris Plus G7, which is of an optimized architecture with respect to the one previously used, and with greater power in general. It has 64 execution units, which at eight shaders per unit yields a total of 512 shaders. It’s a low-power graphics unit, but it still hits a theoretical 1.13 TFLOPS, which is like a dedicated Nvidia GT 1030 graphics card. However, that is theoretical, and in practice, it has considerably less performance. You can move electronic sports games to HD and 60 f / s without problems, such as Overwatch or Heroes of the Storm, and in Fortnite can reach FHD. The biggest problem you have is that the frame rate can often fluctuate a lot
The interesting thing about this equipment, and any other low graphics power that has a Thunderbolt 3, is that you can use external graphics cards. In my case, I am a regular of them since I use a MacBook Pro and it has these ports, and I usually play with an RX Vega 64, but in this case, I have decided to change to an RTX 2060 since I have recent performance tests with a Core i9–10900K for comparison. The external box used is an ASUS ROG XG Station 2, which also provides 100 W of power to the connected equipment, thus covering the energy needs of the XPS 13 9300 more than enough.
Dell’s implementation on this computer is PCIe 3.0 × 4 32 Gb / s, the maximum for Thunderbolt 3 and its connection of 40 Gb / s, which may limit the graphics card a bit, but in reality, what is going To limit much more is if you have to make the game intensive use of memory or not because they share bandwidth. If you use it intensively, the bandwidth of the Thunderbolt 3 cable is insufficient and will, therefore, limit the maximum frame rate. The next comparison is from Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which is slightly demanding in terms of the processor, although there are worse games than this one in that section.
n this case, the external graphics card is practically limited to 62 f / s. The game is tested on an external monitor via DisplayPort from the external graphics, which is what makes the most sense to play. Being at QHD and maximum quality, it may be in part because of the lower mononucleosis power of the processor, although it also introduces a greater variability of frames per second. Where in the 10900K it has a 99th percentile of 58.5 f / s, in the Core i7–1065G7 it has a 99th percentile of 36.1 f / s. At a lower resolution, many more frames per second may not be achieved, such as FHD, due to the Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth problem.
But at the same time, at a higher resolution, you will have no problems in squeezing the graphics card to the maximum, as long as you do not go too far from 60 f / s. In many other games, you can achieve> 100 f / s, but it depends a lot on the game. But the conclusion is that it is an ultraportable that will handle external graphics cards well, although it is recommended not to spend too much on the box or on the graphics card if you are going to play FHD.
Finally, regarding the solid-state drive (SSD) included in this ultraportable XPS 13 9300, it is of very good quality. It has a PCIe 3.0 × 4 interfaces, reaching 3370/3089 MB / s read/write sequentially and 416/354 MB / s read/write small files of size 4KB.
screen
The main novelty of this XPS 13 9300 is its screen, and perhaps it is the best of all. With the new 16:10 format, there is a little more space for information to enter, and it is a format that I like more because it gives the feeling that the content is less compacted. In those that are 16: 9 it has always given me the feeling that it is a narrow format, although in laptops I have been used to 16:10 for many years as a user of a MacBook Pro.
Precisely in comparison with the screen of the Mac, many laptops tend to be damaged, but the 34 cm diagonal (13.4 inches) screen of this XPS 13 9300 is where it makes clear how far behind Apple is staying. In this case, I have been able to compare it with a screen of a MacBook Pro 16, the equipment that I use every day, and it has nothing to envy that of the XPS 13. At the outset, there are no light leaks and it has a good uniformity of the panel with the black screen.
In several respects, it is superior to Apple’s product. First, the resolution of 3840 × 2400 pixels, which gives greater sharpness. The second, for interpreting high dynamic range images, with the DisplayHDR 400 certificate. I will focus on this last section in a few moments, after talking about the touch screen. This point is completely indifferent to me on a laptop because I do not like to fill the screen with fingers and it is very uncomfortable to be switching between the keyboard and touching the screen. It ends up getting tired and is impractical. It is good that there is the option that the screen is touch, but the real final utility working with the equipment is very low. The addition does not bother, but it is not much use either.
Returning to HDR, the implementation of this panel made by Dell is excellent, and it does not give any problem with Windows 10. The operating system has advanced a lot and in the default mode of use in sRGB the reproduction is excellent. It detects well when to make the switch when activating 4K HDR video on YouTube, and sRGB color rendering is good in using apps. I have tested it next to the screen of the MacBook Pro 16 and a Dell U2720Q monitor, which is the one I use every day, and in all the visual sensation of the color scale is very, very similar.
There are no really obvious color differences when you see, for example, this web page on any of the three screens, and therefore, on a daily basis, keeping the HDR activated all the time should not be a problem. Although, yes, those with an eagle eye could notice that the MacBook Pro has a slightly more vivid color. But considering that the XPS 13 9300 is a small-screen ultraportable, a more professional-oriented team that prioritizes portability and little about the best screen quality possible, it’s an excellent screen.
The operating system and the laptop detect the type of content well at the moment. Also, keep in mind that the screen has no local dimming, so in the end it’s a decaf HDR, boosting brightness when the scene is very bright, and expanding the color scale to make colors more vivid when needed. The end result is pretty good, and more so than the U2720Q which costs Windows a bit more to use HDR correctly.
The last point on the screen that I want to talk about is reflections. In this sense, the screens of the MacBook Pro in recent years have been superior with special Apple filters that greatly reduce reflections. Dell is not far behind and this screen, at least in the 4K model, reduces both the reflections and the screen of the MacBook Pro 16. The screen included in this XPS 13 9300 is first-rate, small but huge.
Temperatures, noise and autonomy
The laptop’s cooling system is centered on two small fans and a heat pipe system from the central part of the computer where the processor is located. The noise these fans make when they are at maximum is not annoying, but you can see that they move a lot of air. At a normal use distance of about 60 cm, the noise level is above 39–40 dB, which is a high but reasonable noise.
After prolonged use of the equipment, for example, playing, the temperatures in the keyboard area reach 50 ºC in the central area where the processor is below, but playing is not a problem. The WASD zone is located at 39–40 ºC, which is a bearable temperature, although more in winter than in the middle of summer. The upper left area is above 46 ºC, and the upper right is around 44 ºC. The lower part of the equipment reaches temperatures around 44–49 ºC around the upper part and especially around the processor, while the rest of the equipment stays at a temperature of around 36 ºC. The heat does not make the keyboard unusable at any time, but it can make it somewhat uncomfortable depending on the moment.
Regarding the 52 Wh battery, if you are exclusively browsing the internet or watching videos using Wi-Fi, you can get a range of nine to twelve hours without too much trouble. Although I do not have a version with the FHD screen instead of the 4K to compare, if you choose this equipment with the FHD you should be able to get at least one more hour of autonomy, which could make it more interesting to some buyers. Even so, the quality of the 4K screen along with the fact that it is tactile can attract another group of users who are looking for screen quality and do not look so much at autonomy. An autonomy that, even with that 4K screen, is quite good for an ultraportable. The full recharge of this battery takes about three hours.
conclusion
Dell is one of the five largest manufacturers of notebooks, and in that effort to provide variety to its catalog, it usually reaches designs like those of this XPS 13. The equipment is an ultraportable in its own right, with a great design with an edge screen. minimum and vivid colors compatible with HDR, and a good processor for a computer of these characteristics, with the option of using an external graphics card.
The biggest drawback for some will be that it only includes two Thunderbolt 3 connectors, but you could not have an ultraportable of these characteristics, thickness and weight if you had to start adding a multitude of connectors. Everything is solved by taking a multi-adapter to other connectors, such as one that has HDMI, a pair of USB type A and a USB type C for charging, data and video. It may be a hassle to always carry it with you, but it is also a hassle to carry a laptop charger and most users carry it. After a few years using MacBook Pro only with Thunderbolt 3 in the end it is not as inconvenient as it seems, because in 2020 USB Type-C is normal, and it was not in 2016.
As I mentioned, the feature set is good, but portability comes at a high cost because this ultraportable isn’t cheap. The price for the base model is around 1,329 euros — with 8 GB of RAM, a Core i5–1035G1, 512 GB of SSD and an FHD + screen — but those looking for portability and versatility will not find better things on the market. It is the usual price of ultraportables like this. In these teams, I always emphasize the need to include Thunderbolt 3 for those who like to play or need to have access to a better graphics card for professional work. As I have shown, if you connect an RTX 2060 you can play at 60 f / s, or much more depending on the game. Therefore, it is an excellent ultraportable.