Dell XPS 15 (9530) (2023) Review

Last year's Dell XPS 15 (9520) left a lot to live up to, and the new 2023 edition of the flagship desktop replacement rises to the challenge with Intel 13th Generation and Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 Series silicon. The XPS 15 model 9530 (starts at $1,299; $2,499 as tested) keeps its predecessor's premium metal-and-carbon-fiber design and gorgeous edge-to-edge display while its new internals drive up performance potential (albeit a bit more on the processing than graphics side). Our test unit is outfitted with a vibrant OLED touch screen as well as a potent GeForce RTX 4070 GPU for demanding professional workloads (and after-hours gaming). All this, plus a reasonable starting price and plenty of configuration options, make the revised Dell XPS 15 one of the best and most flexible luxe laptops for a range of audiences, earning it our Editors' Choice award in the desktop replacement segment.

By now Dell's XPS design language is the farthest thing from new to me, though I've seen many more laptops than most folks. It's truly a matter of if it ain't broke, don't fix it, with high-end styling that's become familiar in 13- and 17-inch as well as 15-inch sizes. The XPS 15 again gets its premium look and feel (and price) from an all-aluminum exterior.

The Dell's sleek physical design helps, too: Measuring just 0.71 by 13.6 by 9.1 inches (HWD), it's seriously compact for a 15.6-inch laptop. I'd forgive you for thinking the screen was smaller than that at first glance. The system is still reasonably portable at 4.2 pounds.

The quality materials extend beyond the exterior. The keyboard deck is finished with a smooth, soft-touch carbon fiber—well established in the XPS family and Lenovo's flagship ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but rare in other product lines. The touchpad is roomy and snappy, though the keyboard arguably isn't a high mark: The keys are a bit shallow (not surprising with such a svelte design), so the typing experience is merely fine rather than exceptional. If you didn't like anything about the XPS 15 design last year, you'll find it hasn't changed this year; the update is solely internal and performance-focused.

The physical build and materials aren't the only contributors to the Dell's luxe look, however. The displays of XPS laptops are always striking, due largely to their razor-thin bezels. The XPS 15's nearly borderless screen is not just eye-catching but helps fit a 15.6-inch panel into a smaller chassis. While the base display is a non-touch "full HD+" screen (1,920 by 1,200 pixels rather than 1,920 by 1,080 due to its 16:10 aspect ratio), our test unit was upgraded with what Dell calls a 3.5K (3,456-by-2,160-pixel) OLED touch panel. As you'd expect from OLED technology, its picture quality is brilliant and vibrant.

A downside to the XPS 15's emphasis on thinness is limited connectivity. The laptop has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, an SD card reader, and a headphone jack. While it makes sense on the ultraportable XPS 13, having only USB-C ports (with DisplayPort functionality) on a desktop replacement is frustrating.

USB-C peripherals are more common than ever, but we're hardly rid of USB Type-A connections just yet. To its credit, Dell ships a USB-C to USB-A and HDMI dongle in the box, and the audio jack stays where it belongs (not disappearing like the XPS 13's). Unfortunately, one of our main gripes about the previous model remains in the form of a lowball 720p webcam, whose picture quality is serviceable but noticeably fuzzier than that of the 1080p webcams we increasingly see elsewhere. A laptop this expensive deserves at least a 1080p camera, if not one of the 5- or 8-megapixel webcams seen on recent HP units.

Again, while the design with few exceptions looks and feels top-quality, none of it is new to this edition. While there's nothing wrong with a purely performance-oriented component update, it just makes this iteration less exciting. If you have a model 9520, you don't need to trade it in. If you have a demanding workflow or an older XPS 15, the new parts are enticing.

As with most Dell laptops, you'll find plenty of configuration options for the XPS 15. Indeed, you'll need to look closely at Dell's website, since at this writing last year's model based on Intel 12th Gen CPUs was still available starting at $1,099. The 13th Gen model 9530 systems start at $1,299.

That price buys you a Core i7-13700H processor, Intel Arc A370M graphics, 16GB of memory, a 512GB solid-state drive, and the 1,920-by-1,200-pixel non-touch display. Our test unit nearly doubled that price to $2,499, keeping the same CPU but boosting memory to 32GB, storage to 1TB, and the screen to the 3.5K OLED touch panel. It also upgraded the graphics processor to the considerably more powerful Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070.

That last is perhaps the main contributor to our review unit's cost, so if you don't need near-top-of-the-line graphics power for professional design, CGI rendering, image or video editing, or gaming, you can live without the exorbitant addition (a $650 upgrade to the base model). For lighter workloads, you can save a few hundred bucks with an RTX 4050 or 4060 GPU.

If you can afford it, however, the GeForce RTX 4070 is a power-packed mobile GPU (though limited to 40 watts in this thin system), so it's an exciting addition. The lower RTX 40 Series GPUs will end up in many non-gaming systems for light professional use, and the RTX 4070 is a step up even from those.

Another $650 upgrade that Dell didn't opt to send us is Intel's mighty Core i9-13900H, which based on our testing would be even faster for demanding apps. As with the RTX 4070, professionals who know they need ultimate power should consider spending the big bucks, though everyday users likely don't need to play in that tier. The Core i7-13700H's contains six Performance cores and eight Efficient cores are more than capable of handling moderate to heavy workloads.

As for the display upgrade, you can't order the OLED panel with the Intel Arc graphics, but need to combine it with the RTX 4050 or higher. Quasi-workstation customers can order up to 64GB of memory and 8TB of storage (two 4TB SSDs).

To determine how effective the new components are, we put the XPS 15 through our usual benchmark suite, comparing its results with last year's version and some recent competitors seen here.

All are premium laptops of various sizes that, like the XPS 15, are aimed at professional digital content creators and enthusiast-level users. Among them, you'll find a decent array of recent AMD, Intel, and Nvidia components.

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Three further benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Normally, our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, an automated extension to the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor that assesses a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia apps. However, we've been running into compatibility issues with the software version we use and the latest hardware, so we'll look to switch versions or solve this glitch in the near future.

You won't find many surprises here—several of these systems share the same processor, so we see largely similar performance across these tests, with all five obliterating the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent productivity for everyday office tasks. The sole AMD Ryzen 7 7000 series laptop managed to hang with its Intel competitors, just half a step behind at times. In terms of processing performance, you can't really go wrong with any of these systems if you're looking to crunch through some media editing or content creation. You'll find thicker, even more powerful systems in the mobile workstation category, but for a balance of power and portability these machines are hard to beat.

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We also try two OpenGL benchmarks from the cross-platform GFXBench, which are run offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions. The XPS 15 isn't a gaming laptop, so I didn't run our real-world game benchmarks, but we know the GeForce RTX 4070 is a more than capable gaming GPU.

Non-gaming laptops with integrated graphics tend to plod through these tests, but the discrete GPUs in this group showed their graphics and 3D chops with impressive results. For super-heavy-duty animation or modeling workflows, you'll want something from the workstation aisle, but video editors and mainstream content creators will be more than satisfied.

Despite its admirable scores, I'll say that the GeForce RTX 4070 may not be the best value pick for the XPS 15 since it's limited to 40 watts of power (other mobile designs can feed the GPU up to 115W). The theoretically lesser GPUs in the other laptops proved close enough to make the RTX 4070's higher cost questionable. We couldn't test a Dell with the RTX 4060, but for its $150 savings it's almost certainly close enough in performance to serve you well.

Of course, we're talking about a small percentage of the laptop's total cost, so the Dell's 40-watt ceiling is hardly a deal-breaker, though it's something to be aware of. You can learn more about wattage differences and the limitations of laptop versus desktop GPUs in our desktop versus mobile GeForce RTX 4090 testing piece.

We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To rate notebook displays, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Desktop replacements spend much of their time plugged in, but long battery life is always a plus when business takes you out of the office. The XPS 15 passed with flying colors and more than 14 hours of stamina. You'll see shorter runtimes if crunching through content creation rather than playing video, but should still have plenty of headroom to work away from a wall outlet.

Not surprisingly, the new XPS 15's OLED panel delivered wide color coverage bested only by the Samsung, and a more than ample max brightness of 422 nits (OLED screens' sky-high contrast makes anything over 300 or 350 nits a boon, whereas we usually look for at least 400 nits from IPS panels). The SpyderX Elite numbers confirmed our eyeball tests, which showed bright and brilliant colors.

The 2023 Dell XPS 15 is more or less exactly what you'd expect from the company flagship. Its fresh components deliver measurably superior power and longevity, while the machine's premium build and design remain intact. It may not be overly exciting, but XPS loyalists and upgraders should be more than happy.

As far as drawbacks, our review unit is quite pricey, and the GeForce RTX 4070 GPU can't reach the potential here that it can in higher-wattage laptops. Still, the model 9530 has a reasonable starting price and lesser GPU upgrades are affordable. While it's far from a reinvention—and it's well past time to get at least a 1080p webcam in there—the XPS 15 easily repeats its Editors' Choice win as a top-notch desktop replacement.

Fully focused on new silicon, the latest Dell XPS 15 laptop adds long battery life to leading performance accessed by a gorgeous OLED touch screen, retaining its best-in-class status.

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