Dell XPS 15 Battery, Heat and Noise

Dell XPS 15 Battery, Heat and Noise

Dell did a fairly good job handling the thermal load on the high-performance components stuffed to the XPS 15. Airflow throughout the chassis is very good and also the method is competent to expel many of the CPU and GPU's thermal load quickly once the load increases. During our benchmarking, the device quickly ramped up its cooling fan speed to manage the bigger heat levels while still maintaining a small noise output. The chassis felt only mildly warm to the touch under continuous loads, with merely one recorded hotspot at the base. External temperatures shown below are listed in degrees Fahrenheit:

The XPS 15 emerged with either a 6-cell or 9-cell Dell Inspiron 1545 Battery  Our configuration included small 56Wh 6-cell battery, which performed pretty much while still maintaining a clean flush appearance on the bottom in the notebook chassis. In this testing while using the screen brightness reduced to 70%, keyboard backlit disabled, wireless on and refreshing a website every 60 seconds, and Windows 7 set towards the Balanced profile the XPS 15 stayed on for five hours and 16 minutes. For a notebook having an upper midrange processor and decent dedicated graphics, this was very good. Expect roughly 7 to eight hours within the larger 9-cell HP Pavilion dm4 Battery.

The newly redesigned Dell XPS 15 brings a lot of cool features on the table, but may seem to miss the mark inside design department. With previous XPS notebooks being flagship models from Dell, it's disappointing to see this type of bland and normal looking system. I'm sure it's rather odd when you have a look at "budget" models such as Inspiron 15R and pay attention to flashier colors and sleeker profiles. Building was a boost at least, with metal panels protecting the screen and metal on the palmrest and keyboard trim in the notebook. The plastic chassis felt strong, but left something to become desired when it arrived at accessing internal components. Users planning to replace hard drive will find it very difficult, because the notebook requires full disassembly whenever they need to upgrade with an SSD down the road.

System performance was excellent using the Intel Core i5 560M and NVIDIA GeForce GT420M performing well in a number of tasks. The sound system was my personal favorite feature within this notebook HP Pavilion DV7 Battery, providing booming bass and great audio quality. Overall if you can't mind the looks, the XPS has quite a excellent value, starting at $799 with the base configuration.