The Dell XPS 15 9550 Review: Infinity Edge Lineup Expands
by Brett Howse on March 4, 2016 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
After everything we've seen so far, what is there to say about the XPS 15? As a pure exercise in style, mimicking the look and feel of the XPS 13 was definitely the right way to go. The same Infinity Edge display allows Dell to squeeze a 15-inch notebook into the space that most 14-inch models take up. The aluminum outside feels great in the hand, but the contrasting dark carbon fibre weave on the keyboard deck makes the keys easier to read, and it also does a better job resisting fingerprints. The soft touch coating makes typing on the XPS 15 very comfortable.
XPS 15 Compared to 15.6-inch Lenovo Y700
The keyboard is roughly (if not exactly) the same as the XPS 13 keyboard, which I liked. The 1.3 mm of travel is kind of shallow for a laptop this large, but overall it is pretty good. There are better keyboards around, but it would not take long to get used to typing on the XPS 15. The trackpad is excellent, with plenty of room to work, and nice smooth scrolling. The Microsoft Precision Touchpad drivers lack some of the customizability of other trackpad drivers, but the gestures available are enough for what I need.
Performance is very good, thanks to a quad-core Skylake processor and a NVIDIA GTX 960M graphics card. This isn’t a dedicated gaming system, but the GPU can hold its own and even allow you to play modern games as long as you are OK turning the graphics down a bit. The CPU performance is strong, although as with the Lenovo Y700, the Skylake quad-core didn’t bring a big jump in performance over Broadwell.
The display shipped on the review unit is the 3840x2160 UHD panel with support for the Adobe RGB color space, but the wider gamut can't make up for the disappointing accuracy out of the box. Once calibrated though, this display can hold its own with pretty much anything out there. Text is very crisp, and colors are very vibrant. It’s a shame that there’s not an easier way to use Adobe RGB, but with more devices starting to support this color space perhaps Windows will work on how it deals with different gamuts. We can hope.
The downside of the over 8 million pixels though is the less than amazing battery life. With a large 84 Wh battery, I was hoping for more than 7.5 hours on our light test, but that wasn’t the case. The efficiency is not fantastic, and it is also hindered by LED backlighting that supports a higher gamut, although we did run our testing on sRGB mode. Overall battery life isn’t much different than the XPS 15 9530 that we tested a while back, despite the IGZO display and latest generation processor. It’s hard to get around driving light through that many pixels. The 1920x1080 IPS panel offered in the base model would certainly help here, though not having tested that model it's hard to say just how much it would help.
Dell didn’t load the XPS 15 down with too much extra software either, which is nice. The Dell PremierColor application is great though, and being able to make improvements to the built in Windows Snap assist is a good move. Much of the time I’m not interested in extra software, but if an OEM can improve upon something that is built in, it’s hard to argue with them adding it in.
Overall, the XPS 15 is one of the sleekest 15-inch laptops on the market. If I was looking to purchase something of this size, the XPS 15 would be near the top of my list, thanks to the excellent build quality, great design, and compact size. When you work it, it does get loud, but the combination of good qualities in the XPS 15 are hard to ignore.
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milli - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
I'm having huge stability problems with this laptop. The problem is Optimus.The only way I've gotten it to be stable, is to use the Dell provided drivers and disable Optimus.
I'm not the only one with this problem:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/41erin/blue...
This laptop badly needs a BIOS update to fix this issue.
smilingcrow - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
I give leeway for photos as I know it's not easy photographing electronics at home if you have no experience but these would look bad even on eBay. Don’t recall feeling that way about any other photo shoot on any IT web review so this is a stand out.Is it too much to expect Anandtech to issue guidelines and tips for newbie photographers? I don’t think so. Amateur hour.
theduckofdeath - Saturday, March 5, 2016 - link
Hehe, that was my thoughts, too. "Dell sticks to their proven design ideas from the XPS 13" (paraphrased). Too bad we'll never know what that is.close - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
Were you just piggy backing on a BIOS/performance related comment with a remark about photography just to get attention? I would say you give no leeway for photos which is why probably you've run out of people who's vacation photos you can criticize and ended up here :).On a related note, I wonder if the battery performance is strictly related to the choice of LCD panel. And since we're on the battery topic, I'm really impressed with the WiFi speed. It's starting to look like we're closer to moving away from wired connections completely.
milkod2001 - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
I presume guys who write articles here are paid by amount of words/articles written and not by hours spent with camera and Photoshop.By looking at mostly poor quality of images it does not look like PURCH has given each writer a few grand for camera, lenses, accessories and guys probably just use their own crappy stuff.
Since Anand and others have left it looks like there is still big afford to write good quality articles. But other stuff coming with it goes down to hill and there is a very little improvements if any.
Just to name a few: the endless and never responded request for EDIT button for comments, some amateurish never fixed website 'features' like galleries -you click on some images, it will bring user to new tab(unnecessary) , click on some image, it will display large image and nothing else, no X or back button etc.
dsumanik - Sunday, March 6, 2016 - link
5 years ago anandtech would have tested and caught a bios issue like that, now the readers are more informed lolclose - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
You have 3 available CPUs, 2 GPU configurations, 2 LCD panels, and different software configuration possibilities but you instantly assume that all laptops exhibit the exact same issues and they will be visible on a demo unit in the days or weeks it's available for testing.The link to the discussion about this issue includes a handful of comments and if you had the common sense to read them you would have seen that plenty of them suggest that it was fixed by using the Nvidia driver provided by Dell. Since this is a review, not a troubleshooting article I suggest you should not confuse it with a manufacturer support page.
And people could tell the difference 5 years ago.
milli - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
No Close, all models exhibit BIOS problems. Optimus is just the latest. Before BIOS 19, there were a bunch of other issues.http://bit.ly/21gI00Z
http://bit.ly/1QZFIO8
After spending close to $3000 on a laptop, I'm very disappointed in Dell as they can't get even something like Optimus running stable.
close - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
What I was saying was directed to the person claiming Anandtech should have reported this in the product review when clearly it doesn't affect every laptop and also I'm quite sure reviewers only have a narrow time slot to play with the device before it goes on to the next reviewer.And I maintain my suggestion for him since he appears to think such issues should be reported in a product review: the manufacturer's support site is the place to go if you're wondering how a product behaves in the long run.
Anandtech is the place to read reviews about a product, standardized tests run on every piece of hardware and some numbers that you can't find on the leaflet.
A review isn't made to showcase beautiful photos like some people seem to think (that's the job of the product marketing team) nor to listing a long line of potential issues compiled from support sites and other forums.
So I understand *you* were just cautioning potential buyers reading this review, the comment from "dsumanik" (just above) is plain ignorant to put it delicately.
dsumanik - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
I stand by my original statement, the readers around here are now more informed than the editorial/review staff. No amount of excuse making will change this. In the past Anand (the person) worked with manufacturers on a regular basis to identify and correct issues like the one pointed out with this machine. We will never hear of a resolution to this problem on this website, unless it is in the comment section. And yes, if you are in the business of reviewing products, it IS your responsibility to investigate the issue...a simple check on the forums and a warning paragraph would have sufficed, you'd think the reviewers would haver a checklist to follow by now lol.