Dell XPS 13 Question!

SoftenButterCream · July 13, 2015

Hello, I'm a senior now, and want a laptop to take with me to college a year later, and between my travels. I was wondering if the laptop can handle my needs... I'm referring to the 1080p i5 model. Would it make a difference opting for a i7 model? Not really good with laptops thanks .

Gaming:

Maplestory
CS:GO
League
Hearthstone
WoW

Productivity

Photoshop & Light Room editing about 3 times a week
Maybe some 3D render for anatomy in the future.

Nonco · July 13, 2015

Hello, I'm a senior now, and want a laptop to take with me to college a year later, and between my travels. I was wondering if the laptop can handle my needs... I'm referring to the 1080p i5 model. Would it make a difference opting for a i7 model? Not really good with laptops thanks .

Gaming:

Maplestory

CS:GO

League

Hearthstone

WoW

Productivity

Photoshop & Light Room editing about 3 times a week

Maybe some 3D render for anatomy in the future.

Ive been looking into the same kinda stuff lately.

I love the XPS 13 but it wouldnt be able to handle much gaming. It could play games, it would just be on low settings, maybe medium, but its not a graphics powerhouse unfortunately

imBread · July 24, 2015

The i5 model will be more than enough for what you'll be doing.

As for the games, Maplestory and Hearthstone should run perfectly fine,

CS:GO can run at 60fps on medium settings (at 1080p).

League of Legends can run at 30fps on high settings and 60fps on medium settings (at 1080p, although it handled the QHD+ resolution pretty well too).

I'm not too sure about WoW but these tests were done with the following configurations : i5/8GB/256GB SSD/QHD+ Touch Display

Just keep in mind that the Dell XPS 13 doesn't have a dedicated graphics card so it wasn't designed to play demanding games. So it's actually pretty decent for an ultrabook but if you opt for the QHD+ Touch version you'll have to bring the resolution down to 1080p for some games. WoW was barely playable on it from one review I read :<

The QHD+ Touch Display is a bit of an overkill on a 13.3" laptop imho, I'd rather compromise for better battery life although the touch screen would be missed.

Your Photoshop and Light Room editing will be just fine, Adobe Premier also works well. Can't say much about 3D rendering for anatomy but I'm guessing it won't be much of a problem.

Hope this helps! I'm getting the i5/8GB RAM/256GB SSD/Non-touch FHD later this month or early next month for university as well so I'll update you on how mine fares! Cheers mate! Let me know what you decide on in the end!

Also here's the link to the playlist of gaming tests done on the Dell XPS 13 :

Haven't watched his test on WoW but here you go!

EDIT : Forgot to add the League of Legends test, here it is

UPDATE : Apparently some consumers are having problems with gaming on this latop depending on where they purchased it from. If you bought it directly from Dell its likely to have some bloatware that uses up an abnormal amount of CPU(I'm talking to you McAfee and Dell Updates).

A quick fix would be to uninstall them AND more importantly install the Thermal Driver update from Dell's website because there appears to be something throttling the CPU preventing it from using it's full power. Doing so helped people get their games from 20fps to the high 70~80fps

UPDATE 2 : I think the driver on Dell's website is a little outdated so it'll be even better if you get the one from Intel's, but you'll have to uninstall the current driver before you're allowed to get it from Intel's website.

PS : You won't find any other problems with your productivity on the laptop, this is ONLY if you encounter frame rate problems with your games initially and it's not likely to happen anyway but if it does this is a pretty quick fix and easy fix.

D2ultima · July 24, 2015

Question:

Have you considered the Alienware 13? The specs is basically the same, except it has a GTX 960M (750Ti) instead of relying on the intel iGPU. They're basically the same price as well, as far as I know. If you're worried about gaming, at least.