Dell XPS 13" 9300 (2020 Icelake)

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Really good machine, even brought back the IR camera which is so much better than fingerprint (but you get both anyway with this one).

16:10 like the 2-1 but much better bezels and even kept the scissor keyboard of the non-2-1.

This is the laptop to beat.

 

That screen without the bottom bezel looks fantastic. From a design perspective, it is as radical as the thin bezels of the 9550. Beautiful.

The CPU performance does not seem quite as revolutionary. There were some recent 15 watt CPUs that were easily tweaked to boost power envelope. If possible here (but probably unlikely), that would represent a good bump in performance. Details tend to trickle in on the ThrottleStop thread.

 

The good news is that even dual core 15W CPU's ffrom a couple of years ago is more than powerful enough for almost everyone who is in the market for a 13" ultra portable - not just for casual use but certain professional uses too (which isn't doing rendering etc all day). So these being quad core and having GB scores in excess of ~15k is certainly enough horsepower for years to come. For most users these days I think RAM and dGPU are more likely to be bottlenecks than anything - and this Icelake CPU has brought about an iGPU which is so much better than before.

I am currently also using a dual core 7W MB Air and I am able to develop applications end to end on it without a hiccup.

If anything, these days 13" laptops have such powerful CPU's that the heat/noise has exponentially gone up over the years.

 

More interesting to me is it finally hits 32Gb of RAM, about time!

 

Looks awesome and some performance is stellar.

Some issues on SSD speeds, DPC latency, some benchmarks (Primier Pro 4k export!), some video glitches. Hopefully BIOS and driver revisions sort these out.

 

I'm getting my wife the white touchscreen version. I'm getting the 2 in 1 for my work device. Dell is knocking them out of the park.

 

How LONG can your XPS 13 run (say for example) at 3.9 Ghz before it clocks down to 1.3 Ghz ?

 

Of course it doesn't really run near 3.9GHz for any sustained amount of time. These reviews give you some insight on the plaform.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-9300-Laptop-Review-Smaller-but-slower-CPU.458539.0.html
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-...t-disappointing-CPU-performance.455311.0.html

 

I can run my 7390 2-in-1 at 2.9GHz for 15+ minutes in Prime95 with an AVX load, that's not too shabby... That is with an undervolt and a repaste.

 

That is great real-world performance.

 

Yes. It doesn't run long at turbo speed because it has no fan. Running at 1.3 Ghz most of the time is really slow.

 

You're right, it doesn't have one fan, it has two...

The article mentions it runs at 1.8-1.9GHz. Not fast, but better than 1.3GHz.

 

Unfortunately, the 9300 suffers from Dynamic Backlight Control (DBC) constantly changing the brightness between dark and light content displayed on-screen. it feels equivalent to 6 stages of brightness, changes the way colors actually appear, and is ridiculously annoying, thank God it's mainly on battery as I don't really notice it when on a power adapter.

In the past, Dell issued firmware updates to disable this garbage, and also had BIOS options to shut it down. Why is it not here this generation? However anyone can complain to Dell please do and advise, because this machine is literally almost a perfect ultrabook with a backlight plague.

EDIT: Dell support through Messenger worked pretty well, they confirmed there is no DBC on this machine. Intel Command Center is the culprit. It's screwy and unreliable, but finally after reinstalling it, the settings stuck and the screen stops dimming...

 

XPS 13 2 in 1 or regular laptop, who has used both and which do you prefer?

I have a 9350 about 3 years old so looking to upgrade, I did purchase the 2 in 1 from Costco with maxed out specs a decent price in Canada as the 32 gb of ram wasn't available on the 9300 2020 edition at the time I purchased the Costco one.

 

My XPS 9300 arrived from Dell yesterday. I chose the i7 UHD+ touch screen with 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM and spent this afternoon setting it up with all the Dell and Windows updates and I absolutely love it. No issues whatsoever!

While updating it did get quite warm and there was a tiny bit of fan noise but from some of the reviews I was expecting it to get much hotter and louder, but it didn't.

Anyhow, afterwards I ran CCleaner and fixed some registry errors then did a Disk Cleanup and optimised the drive. I have not heard any fans since and it runs extremely nice, silent and cool.

I have owned a XPS 9550 i7 4k touch from a new upgraded from 16GB to 32GB of RAM and also a XPS 9350 4k touch with 8GB of RAM bought used and have always done a fresh installation deleting the bloatware and unwanted windows programs to make the laptops work as best as possible while having them in quiet mode to prevent fan noise. However, with this one I have left everything on as it came and it just works perfectly, even when running on battery.

This machine is really quite something! An beautifully crafted engineering masterpiece that just seems perfect in every way, and miles ahead of the earlier XPS models I've had.

No deleting unnecessary Dell bloatware or never used windows programs. No setting it to quiet mode. No clean install. No repaste or undervolt either. What more can anyone want?

Can you tell I'm impressed?

 

The SSD that came preinstalled with mine is a SK hynix PC611 NVMe 512GB. I don't need any more capacity so I take it there is no point in upgrading the SSD, at least not until the Samsung Evo 980 Gen 4 is released?

These are the benchmarks: