New xps 15 order - Configuration help

So I've been waiting on ordering my new XPS 15 for a few months now since I have been TDY for work, but I will be returning soon and need to purchase a new laptop. The configurations keep changing so I need some advice. Ideally, I'd like to get it as cheap as possible (doesn't everyone). I am military and also can probably swing a student discount.

I don't want the FHD screen, want at least the i5 and an ssd. On the fence about the larger battery since I will be using it at a post-doc school for the next 3 years, but its not like 6 hours away from a charger. Lots of low intensity browsing of powerpoints, vitalsource (computerized books), pdfs, etc. I like to play games (specifically civ 5) that tend to be cpu heavy - city builders are other examples of this. But, I also want to play something like gta 5 - at low res. I am planning on keeping the laptop a long time. As you can see in my sig, my current laptop is 5 or 6? years old and I bought it refurbished from dell outlet.

Currently I'm leaning to the i5/8gb/1080p model for 1199 minus any available discounts.

1. Is the i5 powerful enough for my purposes? It comes down to whether it will dramatically affect any of the cpu intensive games I play, from my youtube research it appears no. Everything will be light years better than my current laptop.

2. Real life battery life for i5 or i7/1080p with 54wh battery? I know there are memory leaks and you can offset with undervolting etc, but what is a real life estimate, no bs, for i5/i7 with the small battery. I haven't gone through all those threads in detail yet.

3. Any downsides to 1080p screen? I don't care about touch and feel like the 4k is just a resource hog.

4. Is the 8gb memory one stick or 2x4gb? Assuming its 2x4gb should I upgrade to 16gb or 32gb? If its 8gb, is there any downside of just sticking in one 16gb stick?

5. I'm planning on following this guide: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/xps15-9550-4945-32gb-cache-ssd-upgrade.787418/ to upgrade the 1tb/32ssd to a 256 or 512 950 pro and keep the 1tb as storage drive. Does that make sense, or should I be getting a different 5400 rpm drive for storage?

6. When/where do I get the best deal? I'm a tad hesitant to buy off the outlet site just because the laptop is so new some of the 'refurbished' models may have some teething issues.


Thanks

 

Technically, yes, the Core i5 6300HQ will be fine for what you're doing. But I'd say that if you plan on keeping this laptop for several years, then the Core i7 6700HQ is a nice upgrade. It's a faster clocked CPU, and is a 4-core Hyperthreaded part (Core i5 6300HQ is 4-core non-hyperthreaded).

Expect about 5-6 hours of WiFi web browsing, on a FHD screen. No significant difference between Core i5 / i7 battery life.

For your purposes, no.

The 1080p FHD screen is a matte finish, whereas the 4K touchscreen is glossy with Corning Gorilla Glass as its top layer. The 4K screen is also higher on Adobe RGB color accuracy. But that is completely irrelevant, unless you're a graphic designer that needs to create paper print materials.

Skip this entire discussion, and just get 16GB. It will be enough RAM for the lifetime of the laptop.

Yes, upgrading SSD is a good idea. If you're on a budget, you may want to consider something besides the Samsung 950 Pro. Yes, the 950 Pro is the "fastest" SSD out there, because it's NVMe compatible. But you're paying a hefty premium for that drive. You may want to consider a more "traditional" M.2 AHCI (M.2 SATA) drive instead.

For your purposes, in real-world performance, you're not going to notice a difference between a top-end Samsung 950 Pro or something like a Samsung 850 EVO. Yes, the 950 Pro benchmarks like a beast. But it's not going to yield you any significant real-world performance gains, for what you're doing with your laptop.

And yes, keep the 1TB mechanical HDD as bulk storage for media (photos, music, videos, pr0n, etc). 5400rpm drives are fine for that purpose. In fact, a 5400rpm drive is better than a 7200rpm mechanical HDD for bulk media storage; because a 5400rpm drive will run cooler, quieter, and use less power than a 7200rpm drive.

And performance / speed is irrelevant for bulk media storage, since a 4GB BluRay rip MKV file will play back equivalently well on a "slow" 5400rpm drive, or an ultra-fast SSD.

You're trying to buy a newly released laptop. Honestly, call Dell, ask them to price a laptop for you, and ask them for all of the student / military / government discounts you can get. You're looking for a very specific configuration of laptop... so you might as well just buy new, stack discounts, and get exactly the laptop config you want.

 

Thanks for the detailed reply.

I'm not on a super tight budget here but the i7 vs i5 is interesting how the dollars and cents shake out. On the chat wit hdell right now and getting the 10% off promo (available for a couple days) and the 2 % student/mil discount.

The i7 with 256ssd is coming in at 1400 with tax. The i5 with 1tb is coming in at 1158.

i7 upgrades: total 1400+140 = 1540
ram: $40 (buy one 8gb stick to make it 16)
hdd: ~100? (already has the m950? - not pro - 256 gb ssd), but i will need to figure out whether it comes with the caddy, cables and spacers as well as buying the cheapo skinny 5400 rpm drive.

i5 upgrades: 1158+140 = ~1300
ram: $40 (buy one 8gb stick to make it 16)
hdd: ~100 (850 evo 250gb. Your suggestions make sense. I've never even used a ssd but I know they are lightning fast. The 950 pro is double the cost, but for what benefit. From reading the guide thread, it looks like you have to fiddle to get the nvme to work anyways - since when installing you are doing it through ahci. not a big deal, but it makes sense that I may not get the benefit from the fancy drive)

So I guess the question I need to ask myself, $200 worth it over the length of time I'm keeping it to have the faster cpu, but have to mess with getting the hdd caddy, cables etc vs i5 with plug and play m.2 drive.

Thanks again, if anybody has any other comments please chime in. I would love the larger battery but it would cost me the 'storage' drive and an extra associated cost with the initial purchase.

 

Between those two options, get the Core i5 model with the 32GB SSD + 1TB HDD configuration. The Core i7 CPU upgrade is a "nice-to-have". But by no means critical.

What's more important is that you get a laptop configuration that already comes with the smaller 56Wh battery, and the 2.5" SATA parts (caddy, cable, etc). If this laptop is going to be your single computer, you want to be able to cram as much storage in there as possible... which means you want a 2.5" mechanical HDD in there for bulk storage. And furthermore, if you bought the Core i7 w/larger battery, you're going to have a pain-in-the-rear of a time to try and find a 56Wh battery, 2.5" HDD caddy, and 2.5" SATA cable. Dell doesn't sell those individual parts. And the XPS 15 9550 is so new, that you aren't going to find a lot of those parts on eBay (which are typically salvaged parts from defective laptops).

So save yourself the hassle, and get the configuration with SSD + HDD in there already.

 

So I contacted dell and the i7 config I'm looking at has the small battery and the 256 ssd. According to the sales guy, the caddy, cables and spacers are already there on that one too. Who knows if that's true?

I do have a synology nas at home, but the 256 gb is just not enough so I will need a bulk storage drive regardless.

 

Quick additional questions:
1. 8gb standard memory, is that a 4x2 on the xps 15?

2. Samsung 850 evo 250/500 gb vs crucial vs sandisk? Any thoughts? Thinking $75-90 for 250 or $150-175 500 gig price range.

 

1. Yeah, it is a 2x4 GB config.

 

1). Yes, 2x4GB modules. That's why if you want 16GB, better to just buy it upfront.

2). Samsung 850 EVO. It's pretty much the go-to recommendation for SSDs over the past few years. Every other SSD is pretty much compared to a Samsung 850 EVO in performance, reliability, and price. So far, there hasn't been an SSD that beats the 850 EVO for performance and price.

You can find faster SSDs, you can find cheaper ssds. But you can't find a faster, cheaper SSD.

Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk

 

1. Is the i5 powerful enough for my purposes? It comes down to whether it will dramatically affect any of the cpu intensive games I play, from my youtube research it appears no. Everything will be light years better than my current laptop.

i5 is good enough, especially for games. There is no real difference between the 3dmark scores of the i7 vs i5. My i5 gets 4250 on 3d mark fire strike, compared to most i7 scoring around 3900.

2. Real life battery life for i5 or i7/1080p with 54wh battery? I know there are memory leaks and you can offset with undervolting etc, but what is a real life estimate, no bs, for i5/i7 with the small battery. I haven't gone through all those threads in detail yet.

I'd recommend the larger battery, just so you have the option. The power adapter isn't big, but it is an extra pound or so.

3. Any downsides to 1080p screen? I don't care about touch and feel like the 4k is just a resource hog.

Slower response time. It's a little more ghosty than the UHD.

4. Is the 8gb memory one stick or 2x4gb? Assuming its 2x4gb should I upgrade to 16gb or 32gb? If its 8gb, is there any downside of just sticking in one 16gb stick?

It's 2x4gb. the 8gb should be enough, and upgrading it later will be cheap. Just wait. 8x1 is a downside only if it's single channel.

5. I'm planning on following this guide: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/xps15-9550-4945-32gb-cache-ssd-upgrade.787418/ to upgrade the 1tb/32ssd to a 256 or 512 950 pro and keep the 1tb as storage drive. Does that make sense, or should I be getting a different 5400 rpm drive for storage?

No comment, I have the battery so can't install a HDD.

6. When/where do I get the best deal? I'm a tad hesitant to buy off the outlet site just because the laptop is so new some of the 'refurbished' models may have some teething issues.

Buy it from the place with the best RMA/exchange. There's a good chance that if you buy it sight-unseen, it may have one of the myriad of issues with it.

 

To add to the 4K vs 1080p display discussion, the 4K one has excellent color accuracy as in it is one step short of HP's DreamColor 2 display and that is saying a lot. Aside from being 8-bit per primary color instead of 10-bit per primary, it still reaches 100% sRGB and 100% aRGB (~97% NTSC) gamut. The colors will look more vibrant and saturated, but the 4K display sucks a lot of battery.

Regarding i5 vs i7, what the i7 has going for ti is higher clock speeds, hyperthreading is nice, but not a game changer when it comes to gaming. Some games on the other hand still rely heavily on a main thread and offload other stuff to the other cores, but that main thread ends up being what makes or breaks the fps and higher clock speeds in that case do help.

8 GB vs 16 GB RAM: 8 GB is enough for most people, mine has 16 GB, but it's not for gaming purposes, it's because I sometimes have to run calculations and if I want to be able to work while running said calculations as well as not hit the page file, I need the extra RAM. I'm sitting at 8.1 GB in use, but the software I am using to run calculations (COMSOL) is eating a good 5 GB of RAM by itself and I've brought it to the realm of even 50 GB of RAM in use on a dedicated workstation. Stick to 8 GB and you can always upgrade later.

 

Thanks for all the replies. I'm 90% set on an i5/1tb/1080p/8gig right now. Price is right, I will be adding a 850 evo m.2 and 16gig ram as soon as I verify fit and finish and everything is operating properly. Can always upgrade the 1tb to an ssd later.

Only downsides is not having the i7, which I doubt I'll utilize...mostly powerpoint, lots of chrome, pdfs, excel, lots of watching mkvs and downloading nzbs, and some turn based strategy games with a little gta thrown in there just because. Larger battery will be nice but if i can get 4-5 hours with wifi off, just using ppt / pdf then I'm fine. Having the extra media storage will be nice when I travel so I can load it up and not rely on poor internet connections.

Will be ordering dell retail, I've been extremely pleased with my m11x refurb but that had been out 8-9 months when I got mine from the outlet.

As always this site has been extremely valuable and I thank you all for your help.