The Dell XPS15 9520 picks up where the previous model left off, retaining its best quality and improving performance and battery life.
Dell XPS 15 MSRP $2,253.00 Score Details DT Editors' Choice “The Dell XPS 15 is at the top of its game and remains the best 15-inch laptop you can buy.” Pros Cons We rated Dell’s XPS 15 as the best 15-inch laptop you could buy. It offered the best combination of an attractive, well-built thin and light chassis, solid performance, and a spectacular 3.5K OLED display. Unless you needed workstation or gaming performance, the XPS 15 was the of its size you could buy.
The design isn’t just aesthetically perfect. It’s also incredibly well-built, with no bending, flexing, or twisting in the lid, keyboard deck, or chassis bottom. Apple’s MacBooks Pros, Lenovo’s ThinkPads, and HP’s Spectres are as well-built, but few others can match the XPS 15. Even the hinge is well designed, with a dual-clutch mechanism that makes opening with one hand a breeze while holding the display firmly in place.
A quick note about performance modes. Given the prevalence of manufacturer utilities that allow the user to choose between modes that tune the fans and CPU speed to run cooler, more quietly, or faster, I’ve started reporting both “balanced” and “performance” mode benchmark results. You’ll see them reflected in the table.
I didn’t expect the fastest performance from the XPS 15 9520, and I didn’t get it. Instead, I got a laptop that’s impressively quick for being so thin and light. The XPS 15 9520 is more than fast enough for the most demanding productivity users while being reasonably speedy in creative tasks. If you’re a professional creator, you’ll want something thicker and with a faster GPU, but anyone else will find the XPS 15 9520 to be a compelling balance of size and speed.
Display and audio Dell offers three displays for the XPS 15 9520, all 15.6 inches in the productivity-friendly 16:10 aspect ratio. Options include Full HD+ non-touch IPS, UHD+ touch-enabled IPS, and 3.5K touch-enabled OLED. My review unit equipped the latter, and it was bright and colorful out of the box with OLED’s typical inky blacks.
The audio system includes Waves NX 3D technology, and the speakers were tuned by Grammy Award winner Jack Joseph Puig. Does all that actually make a meaningful difference in sound quality? Absolutely. The XPS 15 9520 has some of the best audio in a Windows laptop, bested only by the MacBook Pro. There’s tons of volume, mids and highs are detailed, and there’s some real bass. Listening to a movie trailer, there’s a noticeable 3D effect and a wider sound stage.
One of the few changes made to the XPS 15 9520 outside of the chipset is splitting the webcam and infrared camera into two components. That improves the webcam’s image quality, although it retains the previous model’s 720p resolution — which is behind the times as more laptops are equipped with Full HD webcams.
Battery life was strong for a laptop with a large, power-hungry OLED display and fast components. You’ll get a full day of work unless you push the CPU and GPU, with a little left over. And if your workflow is demanding, you’ll still get far longer on a charge than most laptops with this kind of power. Given that the XPS 15 9520 differs only in its 12th-gen chipset from the previous model, it’s fair to say that Intel’s newest is at least a bit more efficient.