Dell XPS 15 for university?

Anyone have an XPS 15 and can comment on its reliability and battery life? I am thinking of getting one for university (specifically the i5 56 Wh model), but looking at all the complaints from others online, I'm not sure if I want to get one. My alternative would be a T460p, but considering how Lenovo has taken thinkpads recently, I'm very hesitant on buying one.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables
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What are you doing on it?

I just bought a 200$ laptop with a good battery life since all I really do on it in school is browser the internet or take notes.

Then I put 800$ toward a gaymen computer that can do the rest from home.

I would mostly be either watching YouTube or doing essays on it, but I'd also like to be able to emulate older games (hence why a 960m would be enough for me). I realize that a laptop with a dedicated gpu and long battery life is hard to find, but the XPS 15 seems to fit my criteria.

you dont need a good gpu too emulate older games.

you're going way overkill.

Dude lmao, just buy an inspiron 11 3000 with 4GB ram.

That should be enough to run older games perfectly and gets good battery life. You're overcompensating here.

What I mean by older games is like GameCube and wii games with texture packs, TF2, Skyrim, etc. Honestly, I would be fine with a 950m, but considering that emulation needs a better CPU than gpu and the XPS 15 has a quad-core (I like to multitask with different programs often), it seems to be a good fit for me, but I'd love to know whether it will actually last the next 4 years or so.

Thanks for the responses anyways!

Fyi those should run fine on a 768p laptop with gt 940m, but yeah the xps will perform better and has a much nicer screen /design.

If you're willing to drop the dosh, then go for the xps.

>inspiron 11 3000
yes, this also comes with a trash tier screen that makes you want to scrub your eyes out

Copied from a different thread by me, but I've owned 3 different XPS in the last 18 months so ask away

I'm on the Skylake i7/16gb/1tb model; when it came out a year ago it was $2400. I didn't pay that (long story) but this thing is pretty painful to use. One, I would pay $300 extra for a NOT 4K display (1080p please) that isn't touch. Why? Longer battery, easier to drive, and windows is still shit at DPI scaling. Seriously, so much stuff I do is broken because of the garbage DPI scaling support. I can't explain the amount of jank present in that.

Also, I've had hibernate disabled for a few months because this chipset/CPU or something has a shitty bug where it can't transition to sleep states reliably (last December my logic board died in my bag because it turned on and fried itself).

Macs have warts, sure, but not like this. I hate the super-high-res laptop meme and the touchscreen meme. You can't buy 16gb XPS13 without the high res screen, otherwise I'd have jumped to a new one already.

I wonder how it feels being this autistic...

While I'm not that guy, I sold 10-12mil in consumer grade laptops in college. I will say the inspiron line he's suggesting falls on the border of 'a great gift for someone you don't like' and 'I wish I had $50 more to get an actually good laptop.'

The build quality and longevity of those shitty cheaper inspirons is really rubbish, and asserting 4GB ram is a good place to start in 2016 is literally the rawest manifestation of autism. I'm not saying for the hurr durr powerusers of Sup Forums, but to combat how crappy things like Chrome have gotten in terms of respecting memory with their sandboxing and everythting, you're going to want to be at 8GB to be comfortable

What the fuck are you talking about? I can easily handle ~14 tabs in opera on my t100ta even though it's only 2GB ram.

God fucking damnit I hate how tech illiterate Sup Forums has become.

I have 16gb ram and 7 tabs open. Nobody uses opera, but Chrome is even worse than edge these days.

After looking at a 768p laptop for most of middle and high school (some cheap $200 HP laptop), I'm fine with 768p, but after using a 1080p monitor for so long, I'd much rather have a 1080p screen.

Battery life is specifically why I don't want the 4K model. I did look at 4K monitors before, and while they are crisper, battery life is more important to me.
I'm not sure if that hibernate issue has been fixed. I hope it has though

Sorry about your situation. I'm very glad the XPS 15 has upgradeable ram, so I can get any model and just go straight to 16gb.

How has your battery life held up? I saw online that some people reported high battery wear under a year, which is ridiculous.

Thanks again for all the responses in this thread.

the xps 15 is good and if you buy it you will like it. may want to wait for the series refresh though

Battery life in a laptop will usually wear down pretty quickly, especially with a dedicated gpu.

That's a lot of heat within a small enclosed space.

>nobody uses opera
Nobody cares about your opinion either.

why not just run the display at 1920x1080 ?

I've used my machine every day for the last 13 months - pretty brutal on the battery between deep cycling and working docked for long periods of time. I haven't noticed any degradation to phone home from, I get about 4.5 hours away from a wall running in outlook/visio before things get squirrely.

This is the output from a powercfg I just ran:

NAME DELL JHXPY53
MANUFACTURER SMP
SERIAL NUMBER 1387
CHEMISTRY LiP
DESIGN CAPACITY 57,532 mWh
FULL CHARGE CAPACITY 47,173 mWh

They tested this with 1440p phones.

It's not the gpu doing more work that kills the battery, but the screen having to light up so many more pixels.

An lg g3 only gained like 15 minutes SoT running at 1080p.

and cant you turn off touch from the OS?(googled it, you can) then you have a normal FHD screen with gorilla glass

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables
shut up retard shill go back to your liberal arts school :^)

you can run at 1920x1080, but you're still lighting up every pixel on the screen. you're just rendering the image at a lower res, the power is expended in lighting the screen moreso than driving a 17W cpu or whatever it is

well sure, but you eliminate most of your complaints by running at 1080.

double post, so kill me
I don't mind the touch; its actually really nice to be able to pinch-zoom in a meeting while presenting. Super slick. I never accidentally trigger it or anything. My bigger problem is the fact that everyone for some reason thinks that a 4K screen is desirable - the jank you get when docking and undocking as the desktop window manager has a seizure and third party applications can't figure out how to rescale DPI wise (which means I need to restart windows for them to not be 'ant-sized') is incredible.

>It's not the gpu doing more work that kills the battery, but the screen having to light up so many more pixels.
granted my 15" Macbook pro doesn't come close to the promised 9 hours, it easily gets over 6/7, and this has over twice the amount of pixels than 1080p

screens don't use THAT much energy

If it comes down to buying a new battery, I am not totally against that idea. I've pushed my $200 HP laptop pretty far, to the point where it was thermal throttling (I did not realize it was throttling because I was very tech-illiterate in my younger days), and yet I still got about 2 hours out of it.

I don't think the games and work I'll do on the XPS will push the laptop 100% for extended periods of time, but I would like to make sure it can actually handle it without something breaking and me resorting to dell customer service.

I dont think emulators benefit from multi core, so a 2 core cpu will probably give you the same performance as a 4 core for that. As for the gpu as you shouldnt be playing at uni anyway you could get an external one if you buy a laptop with a pci-e port. That way you can get a very cheap laptop with awesome battery life and put the extra money to a gpu and screen to play at home.

What's your major OP?

Information Security major here with an XPS 15 9550, FHD screen and 56 WHr battery. Traded out the 8GB of RAM for 16GB, and took out the 1TB HDD to put in a 512GB SSD.

I've had to install various programs for virtual machines, coding and different types of SQL databases and clients. It plows through all of them pretty well.

It would help to know your certain use case, since it would determine whether an XPS 15 or XPS 13 is better for you. But if you go with an XPS 15, make sure you get the 84 WHr battery. 4.5 hours is the average I get on it when doing work in class, and out of it.

>I would mostly be either watching YouTube or doing essays
>emulate older games

dont really need a 960m for that

Look into throttlestop.

I use it to downclock my vaio when I play games so it doesn't get as hot.

A dual core might actually be a little better because they typically turbo higher than a quad core.

Then again a quad core could also handle background processes much better...

>>screens don't use THAT much energy
i'm at 2 out of 10 on brightness

I am majoring in ECE, and I realize that I may not have the time to even play anything during the year.

I could get an XPS 13 and just use an eGPU solution, so when I am at home I have the GPU if need be (I already have a GTX 950 and it is perfect for my needs currently).

The reason I am taking the i5 with the 56 Wh battery is because of cost; I want the computer to be around $1000.

4.5 hours with the 56 Wh configuration is alright, but I'd probably shouldn't be expecting more with a dedicated GPU.

What do you think you need the gpu for again? Like, how serious of a game do you think you'll be playing off your laptop that a 950m is the difference between runs and doesn't? The 520 or whatever that's onboard the 6th/7th gens keeps pace with the CPU - dedicateds in machines this sized (particularly the 13) are just invitations for more battery draw/heat for how infrequently they get used.

I have 2015 XPS 13 and it last all day. The only problem is the Broasdcom wireless cars.

>I would mostly be either watching YouTube or doing essays on it, but I'd also like to be able to emulate older games

Might sound a little crazy but look at the Acer Chromebook 14.

amazon.com/Acer-Chromebook-Aluminum-14-inch-CB3-431-C0AK/dp/B01CVOLVPA/

For $230 you get

>Decent build quality with metal chassis
>Lightweightness
>1080p IPS display
>Really long battery life
>Intel CPU and 4GB Ram

You can do college essays fine with google docs and you can run emulators if you install linux with crouton.

I would be playing games like TF2, Fallout New Vegas (maybe Fallout 4) on occasion, and looking at the HD 520, 720p maybe a struggle for the newer games, but I'll look into it. I looked into the T460p, and considering that has the 940mx (much better than the HD 520), with the large battery life as well, I might as well get that then. As stated in the OP though, Lenovo seems to be taking a wrong turn with the thinkpads and I'm not sure if I would like to deal with it.
>inb4 Sup Forums

For what its worth, I play TF2 and league just fine on the skylake i7... unsure about the fallout series only because I've never played them.

OP, and everyone else who makes basically the exact same post, what will you be using your laptop for?

Because "for college/university" means fucking nothing. Either explain what you will be running with the computer, and if it's for taking notes in lectures then you're being memed, just buy a used thinkpad or a chromebook and don't be a fucking mongoloid

,

I really wish I had an excuse to buy that but I don't.

If you're going to buy one wait for the Jan refresh, will possibly have a 10xx nivdia card it which will be a huge improvement over a 960.

Seriously though, you're wasting money if all you're doing on it is writing essays and playing emulators.

Thanks for the input, but as I said in , I branch out into other games that will require a good GPU. However, I just a device that will be able to do this reliably with a decent battery life.

I have a chromebook in addition to my XPS. I use it as a bed browsing machine... for $329, solid (Toshiba chromebook 2, 4gb, Celeron, 1080p). Battery is forever, doesn't get hot, etc. Just forget about your world of windows applications