Thanks to its large stereo speakers and integrated Waves MaxxAudioPro software, the XPS 17 filled my apartment with booming, rich sound.
The MacBook Pro is a bit more limited when it comes to game compatibility, and its Radeon 5500M GPU turned in a lower 27.2 fps on the older Rise of the Tomb Raider title.
That’s notably better than the 786.5 result we got from our XPS 15, which packs a weaker GeForce GTX 1650 Ti GPU.ĭell’s laptop handled a range of big AAA titles in 1080p at impressive framerates, including Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (42 fps), Borderlands 3 (47 fps) and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (48 fps). To that end, the XPS 17 scored a strong 848.6 on the Pugetbench Photoshop test, which measures how well a system can open a large image and perform various modifications to it. This distinction makes the XPS 17 certified as part of Dell’s XPS Creator Edition line as well as Nvidia’s RTX Studio series, making it suitable for basic graphic design, photography and music production. Armed with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q GPU capable of ray tracing, the XPS 17 turned in strong results on our graphics tests - and can even double as a solid gaming laptop. The XPS 17 has one big advantage over its smaller brethren: discrete Nvidia 20-series graphics. While it’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, the MacBook Pro’s best-in-class SSD turned in a blistering write speed of 2,805 on the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. The 1TB SSD in our XPS 17 proved speedy, copying about 26GB of files in just 34 seconds for a transfer rate of 789.6 MBps. Dell’s machine took a fairly brisk 8 minutes and 41 seconds to transcode a 4K video to 1080p on our Handbrake test, coming up just a bit behind the MacBook Pro’s 8 minutes. The XPS 17 scored an impressive 7,740 on the Geekbench 5 general performance test, topping the 7,250 we saw from our 16-inch MacBook Pro (Intel Core i9 CPU, 32GB RAM). I regularly worked in split-screen mode with more than a dozen Chrome tabs open while bouncing between programs like Slack and Spotify, and never experienced any slowdown as I piled the tasks on. Packing a 10th Gen Intel Core i7-10875H processor, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD, the XPS 17 chewed through every task I threw at it without missing a beat. Both of those numbers top what we saw on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which covered 113.9% of the sRGB gamut and turned in 429 nits of brightness. It also gets very bright, measuring an average 504 nits of brightness on our light meter. The XPS 17’s benchmark scores backed up its impressive real world performance, as the laptop reproduced an impressive 171.6% of the sRGB color gamut (anything above 100% is ideal). The film looked quite colorful to boot, with the baby blue skies contrasting nicely with the grassy plains and brown rock structures. And thanks to the massive real estate and minimal bezels, I found working in split-screen mode to be a decent substitute for my usual multi-monitor setup.ĭisney’s The Lion King reboot looked absolutely stunning on the XPS 17’s display, which allowed me to make out the smallest creases on Rafiki’s face as well as the incredibly realistic computer-generated hairs on Mufasa and Simba. The XPS 17 delivered satisfyingly deep blacks that made on-screen text look inky and easy to read, and the icy blue waters on the laptop’s background popped off of the display.