Dell’s Crazy Fast Ultrabook – XPS 13 (2018)
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,336 words · ~6 min read
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on paper the dell xps 13 2018 has the
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best screen the highest performance and
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the best built chassis out of all the thin and light laptops on the market
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but just because you know someone has the
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right ingredients doesn't necessarily mean that they'll
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put them together correctly
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so then is the xps 13 a delicious cake
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well there's only one way to find out
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that's not bad oh oh
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oh there's some eggshell
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this video is brought to you by spectrum glasses spectrum glasses are an
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affordable long-term solution that helps your eyes manage high energy blue light
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emitted from computer screens use offer code Linus through the link below and
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save 10 today now the dell xps 13 9370 2018
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straddles the line between playful and professional it has just a touch of
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flash especially our subjectively flipping awesome rose gold version but
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manages it without looking or feeling tacky at all
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the white keyboard area accented by carbon fiber is one of if not the
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stiffest to ever come through our Labs and apparently it is extremely resistant
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to stains with dell going as far as to say that if
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you draw on it in permanent marker it'll
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just wipe right off now this was a dry erase but
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you know hopefully we'll do a b-roll shot or something to show it with a permanent marker
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now for thin and light the xps 13 is a
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little bit on the thick side but that hasn't stopped dell from giving up on
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usb type a ports for some reason to their credit though they have
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included three usb type cs two of which are Thunderbolt 3 external
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GPU lovers rejoice and also a headphone port and a micro sd card reader so
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for the next year or two you might be regularly reaching for the included a to
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c dongle but native type c devices are becoming more
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and more common all the time
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now let's address the video title Intel allows partners to configure the
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TDP a measure of power consumption of
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their 8th gen core i7 mobile processors
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and dell has gone full throttle on this one allowing it to draw
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up to 27 watts and reach up to 4
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gigahertz turbo speeds which makes this device feel really snappy over short
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bursts but when we see manufacturers push
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performance to the limit in compact systems we often encounter thermal
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throttling so how about the xps 13.
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well turns out they've actually done a great job here
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under full load it can't quite keep cool
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at first briefly throttling in an attempt to stay
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quiet during short sprints but then when
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the system realizes that big things are happening like a long video export for
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example the fans kick in to bring everything under control and the real
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world results are impressive our xps 13 with a CPU that costs over a
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hundred dollars less matched or beat the competing lenovo
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thinkpad x1 carbon and absolutely ran circles around any notebook with a 7th
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gen u series processor but
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a powerful engine is only as good as the rubber that meets the road or the
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photons that hit the eyeballs in this case
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and our model actually looks really good here too it sports a 4k 13.3 inch touch
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display with HDR support it's exceptionally bright the colors are
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amazing and you can basically have your nose
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even if yours is smaller than mine touching the screen and still not see an
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individual pixel there's just
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one small problem it's a 400
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optional upgrade adding insult to injury there are only
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two screen options and the 1080 one
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isn't available with touch i mean we get that
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bigger numbers sell better but realistically you don't actually need 4k
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on a screen this small so we want to see a 1080 touch option for a more modest
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increase in price that might make us feel better about the
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slightly undersized trackpad this thing is just okay the surface coating feels
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good but i found myself wishing that it was a little bit taller just like my
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wife and having trouble with accuracy even
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after playing around with pointer acceleration settings
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maybe one solution would be to break the mold and experiment with a slightly
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taller aspect ratio on the screen like microsoft has been doing that would also
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give them an easy fix for the improved but
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if we're being honest still pretty horrible webcam placement
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i mean i know that not everyone uses the webcam on their laptop a lot but
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i do and i'm pretty sure that the people i
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call don't want to look up my gargantuan
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snout the whole time that they are talking to me it even interferes
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sometimes with Windows hello facial recognition which made the inclusion of
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a fingerprint sensor and the power button actually that much more awesome
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this is sick which means i guess we're back to good stuff
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let's talk about the keyboard it
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is really good alex prefers the longer travel of the x1
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carbon but for me the soft
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quiet keystrokes managed somehow to not feel mushy and the short travel allowed
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me to get up to nearly my full desktop mechanical keyboard speed in a matter of
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minutes and the speakers are great too especially for a laptop this size with a
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nice clean sound that makes them well suited for something like tossing on
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some tunes while you're playing cards with your friends
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and you can even have a pretty long game too since this 7 hour result in our
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battery life test is based on a continuous load you should get through a
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workday pretty comfortably without the charger
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now let's be clear here there were some negatives in this video but none of them
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are anywhere near deal breakers and with the first reasonable config starting at
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1200 the xps 13's price
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is pretty good
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with some caveats a similarly spec'd lg gram includes a
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touchscreen has better battery life and is much lighter but it falls behind on
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performance build quality and Thunderbolt 3 for the 13 inch version so
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if you're into easy docking or future expansion for your notebook
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that's a big deal so overall we're giving two
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recommendations here one for potential buyers if you're willing to pay to play
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the xps 13 is a well-built high performance and compact machine
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and then we also have one for dell fix the screen options there needs to be
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a cheaper touch screen for you guys to be competitive on the low end and then
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while you're at it deal with that webcam placement eggshell in this otherwise
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truly delicious electronic cake
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that's actually really good cake
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you know this is really good the thermaltake p90
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it's an open frame tempered glass mid tower case that's split up into three
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compartments for your graphics card power supply and other cooling
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components it's got five millimeter thick tempered glass side panels that
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let you put your system on display it's got three different layouts that make it
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wall mountable horizontal lying or vertical standing
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and it features seven drive bays check it out today at the link in the video
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description so thanks for watching guys
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if you like this video you can uh disliked it you can hit that
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