Laptops

Dell powers up XPS flagship laptop

Dell powers up XPS flagship laptop
Dell has treated its flagship performance laptop to Intel's latest processor, powerful graphics and long battery life
Dell has treated its flagship performance laptop to Intel's latest processor, powerful graphics and long battery life
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The Dell XPS 15 can be had with an 8th Gen Core-i5 (up to 4 GHz), Core i7 (up to 4.1 GHz) or Core i9 processor
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The Dell XPS 15 can be had with an 8th Gen Core-i5 (up to 4 GHz), Core i7 (up to 4.1 GHz) or Core i9 processor
The Dell XPS 15 can be optioned with a 15.6-inch UltraSharp 4K Ultra HD InfinityEdge touch display
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The Dell XPS 15 can be optioned with a 15.6-inch UltraSharp 4K Ultra HD InfinityEdge touch display
Thin and light: Dell's XPS 15 has 14.06 x 9.27 x 0.45-0.66 in (357 x 235 x 11-17 mm) dimensions and tips the scales at 4.5 lb (2 kg)
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Thin and light: Dell's XPS 15 has 14.06 x 9.27 x 0.45-0.66 in (357 x 235 x 11-17 mm) dimensions and tips the scales at 4.5 lb (2 kg)
Dell has treated its flagship performance laptop to Intel's latest processor, powerful graphics and long battery life
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Dell has treated its flagship performance laptop to Intel's latest processor, powerful graphics and long battery life
View gallery - 4 images

After breaking out an upgraded XPS 13 laptop and XPS 15 2-in-1 at CES in January, Dell has announced its most powerful laptop yet – the 2018 XPS 15. To be fair, it's a mild refresh on the previous model but does come with Intel's latest 6-core 8th generation processor and can be optioned up to Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti graphics.

The new XPS 15 performance laptop can be had with 8th Gen Core-i5 (up to 4 GHz), Core i7 (up to 4.1 GHz) or Core i9 processing brains, supported by up to 32 GB of 2,666 MHz DDR4 RAM. Storage options include a 128 GB SSD/1 TB HDD hybrid drive or 1 TB SSD. And there's a 15.6-inch UltraSharp 4K Ultra HD InfinityEdge touch display available, with Corning Gorilla Glass 4, support for 100 percent Adobe RGB color gamut, 400 nit brightness and 1,500:1 contrast ratio.

It has machined aluminum construction with carbon fiber palm rest, 14.06 x 9.27 x 0.45-0.66 in (357 x 235 x 11-17 mm) dimensions and tips the scales at 4.5 lb (2 kg), if optioned with a 97 Whr battery, SSD and touch display. Dell also says that the XPS 15 offers over 21 hours of battery life per charge.

Connectivity shapes up as Thunderbolt 3, DisplayPort, USB 3.1 and HDMI ports, an SD media reader, Bluetooth 4.1 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. Users can login via Windows Hello, and there's an optional fingerprint reader integrated into the power button.

Elsewhere there's a backlit chiclet keyboard and seamless glass touchpad, two 2 W speakers, and a 720p widescreen webcam and dual array digital microphones.

Seen as a viable Windows alternative to the Macbook Pro 15, prices for the Dell XPS 15 start at US$999.99 when it goes on sale in May (it goes up for pre-order on April 16). The packaging isn't usually something of note, but Dell's flagship will ship in packaging that includes recycled plastic trash recovered from waterways.

Source: Dell

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2 comments
2 comments
Daishi
What's interesting about this is what's missing. Intel and AMD announced a collaboration of Intel 8th gen mobile chips that used onboard AMD (Radeon RX Vega M) graphics chips in one package named "Kaby Lake G" that was demoed at CES in January on Dell XPS 15 with a potential spring availability. The onboard chip is supposed to improve over Intels own integrated "Graphics 630" and outperform even the NVIDIA GTX 1050. The specs here seem to indicate that Intel opted not to move forward with offering Kaby Lake G in XPS 15 this spring. Maybe NVIDIA encouraged them not to (through pricing) or they had kinks in the new platform to work out still but it would be interesting to find out what happened.
jofjdi
@Daishi - actually, Dell used the G chip in their 2-in-1 XPS 15 update for 2018. Interesting that they went with discrete for the clamshell. Either way, both look like good machines!