Dell XPS 17 review: The big screen returns in a slim, stylish shell

It’s one of the smallest 17-inch laptops for creative use I’ve seen — barely larger than its middle sibling, the XPS 15 9500 and only a bit more substantial than a MacBook Pro 16. And in many ways, it’s one of my favorite big boys to date. Pretty, but powerful enough for general use that I’m not yelling at it all the time, sufficiently small and light enough to make it lap friendly and with a decent balance between speed and battery life and no sacrifices on the keyboard.

The design is essentially the same as the XPS 15, and even uses the same keyboard, but pads the sides with bigger speakers and adds an extra USB-C port; it also has beefed up cooling over the 15-inch model to accommodate the higher-powered GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q graphics processor. And while the XPS 15 is great for photo editing, the 17-inch is even better if you don’t have external monitors, thanks to the larger 17-inch screen. 

As much as I like it, though, my initial impression holds: I’d gladly sacrifice a little thinness for more power. To shave off the few millimeters that make it smaller than the Razer Blade Pro 17, the Gigabyte Aero 17 HDR and other models with i7-10875H processors (or the equivalent) and the 4K-ish, 100% Adobe RGB display, the XPS 17 sacrifices on the GPU front and maxes out with an RTX 2060 Max-Q. It would have been more compelling with even an RTX 2070 Super Max-Q. There will be a model coming up with the likely faster Core i9-10885H, though.

And being skinny means losing the convenience of any ports, save USB-C. The XPS 17 does have four of those, two of which are Thunderbolt 3, and Dell ships it with a dongle that adds a USB-A and HDMI connection, but I really miss having more USB-A ports; even with the dongle and a CalDigit TS3 Plus hub, I’ve still got to do some connection juggling to handle all my devices. And one of the ports is for power, so you’re down to three right out of the gate. Still, four is better than the three on the XPS 15.

Finally, when a manufacturer starts heralding all the work it put in to squeeze a webcam into a tiny bezel or how much work it took to overhaul the cooling system to support the components in the thinner design, my brain always goes to “you mean, I might have had a better webcam and higher-end graphics if you’d just left it a little thicker?” A system like this deserves better than the middling 720p webcam and barely RTX graphics.

Obviously for creators

Our “Creator Edition” test configuration does deliver a nice balance of size, power and price for basic 3D work, gaming or video editing; the RTX 2060 Max-Q holds it back in some cases, especially for working in 4K or in professional graphics applications. For photo editing, though, you can save a few hundred bucks by dropping down to the GTX 1650 Ti. 

I really don’t recommend the $1,400 entry configuration with 8GB memory and no discrete graphics. If you need to opt for a system so underpowered for budgetary reasons, then consider going even further down to something with a lesser display and less glamorous look, such as the sub-$1,000 Inspiron 17 3000. It’s not that the entry-level config is a bad value — it’s actually a pretty good price given the components — but paying that much for only 8GB and integrated graphics just feels… wrong. But it would give you something pretty to look at as it limps along.

Our exact configuration isn’t available in other regions, specifically in the UK and Australia. You can get it with 16GB memory in the UK for £2,899 or with a 2TB SSD and GTX 1650 Ti for £3,099. In Australia, there are no RTX options and instead Dell badges anything with an i7 as a Creator Edition; there, the options max out with an i7-10750H, GTX 1650 Ti, 1 TB SSD and 32GB memory for AU$5,499. 

Color coding 

The 16:10 3,840×2,400-pixel display isn’t quite as accurate as the one on the XPS 15 9500 out of the box — it’s a little bluer and less accurate — but it covers 100% of Adobe RGB and 94% of P3, is sufficiently accurate for general color work (Delta E less than 3) and is still better overall than a lot of the IPS touchscreen displays. Plus, it’s brighter than the 15 at about 530 nits with higher contrast (about 1700:1), and meets DisplayHDR 400 standards, for whatever that’s worth. (We test screens using Portrait Displays’ Calman 5 Ultimate and an X-Rite i1Display Pro Plus.) 

It also supports Dell’s PremierColor color management, which means you can tweak it to a better level of accuracy. As with the XPS 15, Dell’s factory calibrated profiles actually clip the gamut boundaries to the color space; in other words, even though the display can produce colors well outside sRGB, it won’t if you’ve opted to use the sRGB color profile. That’s really helpful if you need to check out-of-gamut colors. You can create custom profiles with a calibrator using PremierColor as well, but only with the popular X-Rite i1Display Pro; it doesn’t even support the Plus yet, so I couldn’t test it. (If you want to calibrate it using your own software and a different calibrator, remember to turn PremierColor off.)

As an Nvidia Max-Q Optimus-supporting system, which uses the discrete graphics for processing but doesn’t have any displays connected to it, if you want to force it to use the graphics processor all the time you’ve got to flip a switch in the BIOS. Though it’s normal to have to reboot to change it in older-generation Optimus systems — newer Advanced Optimus doesn’t require it — Dell goes the extra mile to hide it in the BIOS. Most other companies have a software or physical switch. 

Though performance isn’t always better using the discrete GPU, it can make a significant difference in gaming or professional graphics applications. And, for instance, you can’t run a monitor at more than 144Hz refresh, like the 165Hz HP Omen 27i I’m testing, unless you’re in discrete GPU mode.

Of course, that eats up the battery, which is why many manufacturers default to Optimus, like Dell. That earns it reasonable, but not stellar, marks on battery life: It lasted a little over nine hours on our battery tests. In my everyday use (mostly just writing and heavy Google Apps), it was closer to four hours. But that’s not too bad for me.

The Razer Blade Pro 17 (review still in progress) goes the other way, shipping with the more power-hungry discrete GPU mode enabled. That can result in some misleading performance comparisons; in Optimus mode, more power is allocated to the CPU, which means it’s faster on CPU-intensive activities, such as generating thumbnails. So the performance gap between the Dell and the Razer, which use the same processor, gets narrower if you compare them that way rather than on the default settings as we do. 

Still, the Dell generally outperforms it by quite a bit on processor speed. But the XPS 15 still races past its big sister with the same CPU — not necessarily enough to outweigh the benefits of the XPS 17’s bigger screen for tasks like photo editing, but something to consider. The real appeal may be to those of us old enough to be nostalgic for the long-gone, but not forgotten, 17-inch MacBook Pro.