The Dell XPS 13 (9300) Review: Return of the King
by Brett Howse on July 16, 2020 10:00 AM ESTBattery Life
One area that the XPS line has historically done very well was in battery life. This has been a combination of Dell building very efficient devices, as well as providing above-average battery capacities. For the 2020 XPS 13, Dell is offering a 52 Wh battery, which is somewhat smaller than they have in previous models. We shall see what kind of an impact that has on the overall runtime of this notebook. To fairly compare models, all devices are tested with the display brightness set to 200 nits.
Web Battery Life
Dell starts out strong with an excellent result on our web battery life test. It managed to achieve over 13.5 hours of runtime on this fairly demanding web workload.
The normalized result removes the battery size from the equation so we can get a clearer picture on overall device efficiency, and we can see why the XPS 13 has lost none of its amazing battery life despite Dell shrinking the battery capacity. Dell continues to lead the field here, at least with the 1920x1200 display that we reviewed. Certainly the higher-resolution, wide-gamut 3840x2400 panel would impact this result significantly.
PCMark 10 Modern Office Battery
A new benchmark added to the stable is the PCMark 10 Modern Office Battery test, which runs through several common office scenarios on a ten-minute loop. If a device is able to finish the tasks quicker, it gets to idle for a higher percentage of the ten-minute test loop, so efficiency is important, but performance also plays a factor. The XPS 13 once again achieved a very strong result, almost matching the web runtime.
Movie Playback
On the movie playback we generally see devices offer even more battery life than the other tests, but the XPS 13 showed such platform efficiency in the previous results that it was not able to extend that much here, but it is still a very strong result.
Breaking the movie playback into number of times you can play a very long movie, the XPS 13 almost achieves six complete playbacks of The Avengers before shutting down.
Charge Time
Dell ships a 45-Watt AC adapter with the XPS 13, which charges over a USB-C connector. Since there are Thunderbolt 3 ports on both sides of the notebook, it allows you to charge from whatever side is most convenient, which can help with cable management and is always a nice bonus.
The small charger is plenty to run the notebook, but the charge rate is not spectacular. Luckily, the excellent battery life does mitigate this. Dell does offer an ExpressCharge option which will charge the battery to 80% in one hour and fully charge in two hours, however the user has to specifically choose this if they desire it using the Dell Power Manager software.
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grant3 - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
There's an excellent reason why ultrabooks might underperform: their cooling capacity is limited by the form factor.If CPU performance, or price:CPU Performance, were the only metrics which mattered to people, then ultrabooks & apple would not exist.
Spunjji - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
@grant3 - the cooling system on that Acer Swift is pretty terrible!@Deicidium - the XPS 13 9300 launched in January this year - that's 6 months ago. It's the current competition for AMD's current mobile chips that launched one month ago. A comparison with a product that hasn't released yet isn't "more appropriate". 🤦♂️
Deicidium369 - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
Ice Lake is almost a year old. The more appropriate comparison is the upcoming Tiger Lake, Anandtech has been slow to get a review unit for an almost year old design, while the next gen is being prepped for release.Santoval - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
"Valid" in what sense? sorten is giving Intel a competitive benefit (or, alternatively, gives AMD a handicap) by comparing an AMD "craptop" with an Intel ultrabook; it's not the other way around.Spunjji - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
Performance: No, not for Ice Lake.Power Consumption: Yes, but only for Ice Lake.
Price: Not even funny.
When you combine all three AMD currently come out easily on top, and yet...
Meteor2 - Thursday, August 20, 2020 - link
It's incredible how much people can argue about objective numbers.Deicidium369 - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
Tiger Lake is coming in the next month or so - Lenovo and Acer already have their systems working the Tiger Lake Core i7-1165G7 - 4 core + 96EU Xe LP wrecks the most powerful Renoir in iGPU (actually matching or slightly exceeding the MX350) and with double the CPU cores (4 Intel / 8 AMD) the AMD is only 17% ahead. So Yeah, way less performance from the AMD.Problem with AMD is they are still trying to get Skylake levels of performance, but Intel has well moved on from that architecture. Intel is solid as they come in ultralights/ultrabooks.
sorten - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
Not sure what you mean when you say "Problem with AMD is they are still trying to get Skylake levels of performance." Zen 2 mobile chips easily outperform Ice Lake and Comet Lake.Yes, we all expect the Xe iGPU to outperform AMD's iGPU. Intel has been humiliated for so long in this area that they've put all of their efforts into becoming competitive. In some respects, both brands targeted their competitor's strength, and gave up ground in theirs.
I'd personally prefer the CPU advantage, because if I'm doing anything with graphics that any decent iGPU can handle, I'd just use the Dell's TB3 port to hook up an eGPU. But everyone has their own priorities, I understand.
Cliff34 - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
The problem is that AMD doesn't support Tb3. So if you need Tb3 for anything you will end up buying Intel.PixyMisa - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
AMD does support TB3, as evidence by the fact that you can buy AMD devices with TB3.There just aren't many of them.