Thread: XPS 16 - Full review Finally !!

I finally got to use the laptop for a few hours. Took some benchmarks for your guys, i did not have many games so did whatever i could

I will first start with the looks.
The laptop looks really sweet ! The surfaces are all black piano finish and as expected are a fingerprint magnet ! The laptop does not feel too heavy and can be carried around, but its "thing" is not its portability, its the performance and looks !







Powered by the Intel Core i7 720QM, this is one of the first few laptops to feature the new core i7 technology for the mobile platform. It has 4 cores with HT clocked at 1.6GHz up to 2.8GHz on turbo and 6MB of L3 cache. The Graphics card was the ATI 4670 mobility with 1GB of DDR3 memory. This is a very common mid range mobility GPU, we shall talk about its performance a little later.

It also has 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 memory at 1333MHz. The laptop i used had a back lit keyboard, which looks beautiful when used in the dark. The screen was a 15.6" full HD screen (native resolution of 1920x1080).It had a slot load DVD writer.

Overall, i was really pleased with the Quality of the product.

Now, lets come to the performance, we tried only 4 games sadly. Here is their list:

• Call Of duty: Modern Warfare
• Call of Duty : Modern Warefare 2
• GTA 4
• Microsoft Flight simulatorX

We also played NFS Shift, it worked fine at 1920x1080 resolution with medium settings and no AA. However, i was unable to benchmark it.

Benchmark results:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare



a.k.a COD4 is still one of the best games out there and I think its still really popular. The game was playable with minor stuttering at resolution of 1980x1080. All in game settings were maxed and AA set to x4.




Min- 12 Max - 41 Avg - 24

Call Of Duty : Modern Warfare 2

This is a sequel to the hugely successful game call of duty 4, made record day 1 sales across the world. The game might not have lived up to its expectations, but nevertheless is good fun to play.
Settings were all maxed out, 1920x1080 resolution,x4 AA.



Min-6 Max - 39 Avg - 28

GTA 4 :


The Newest version of the Grand theft Auto series had a little benchmark tool. We have used that and after spending a lot of time, i am still amazed as to why the performance was so poor. When we played the game at "auto detected" settings, the got a pathetic 8 FPS average, leading to unplayable gameplay. Those settings were clearly too much. We then reduced all the settings to medium and the resolution was 1920x1080. We got a much more playable result of 23 FPS. We were still not satisfied as the game suffered from a lot of stuttering during most part of the actual game. Then we reduced the resolution to 1280x720 and were expecting a lot better experience. To our surprise, the benchmark reported only 25 FPS . We re ran all the benchmarks at same settings and we got the same result. Still trying to understand what is causing this really low performance, but looks like its the processor is the bottleneck and not the GPU. Will update here if i can resolve the issue.

Flight SimulatorX :
nah, i am not a real fan of the game, but my friend was. For fun, we cranked up all the settings to max (ALL) and wanted to see how it performs. To be frank, i wished i did not waste time on that. It was a waste. The performance was terrible. We got an average of 3FPS. It was like a slideshow ! I know its really CPU intensive, but then i did not expect this kind of performance with a Core i7 series of processor (specially after seeing the performance of their desktop counterparts)


Overall, i was hugely disappointed, specially with GTA 4. The battery life was ok, around 2hrs (was watching a movie). It had a standard 9 cell battery. The rear of the laptop did get pretty hot, even after 15 minutes of gaming....

For a price Of Rs70,000 and with the XPS tag i would expect better performance...

I would Rate this product a 7/10, its not bad, but i wanted more out of it.

I would like to thank our old member harshaM for giving me his laptop so that i could review it.

good review rajan!

7/10 isn't bad.this one looks really cool
DELL is good.
Guess they would make better in future.

can't rep.

its good but then i was not really blown away by its performance or anything...

Originally Posted by imrock

can't rep.

You guys owe me big time

UPDATE: We have found the reason for the low frame rates in games like GTA 4 and Flight simulator X. It is because the system draws 130W when the CPU and GPU are at full load. But the adapter is only 90W. Hence, Dell has modded the BIOS so that the CPU decreases its speed to 900MHz instead of 1600Mhz so stay within that 90W bracket. Hence, we notice a huge dip in performance.

The fix, well none officially. But there are modified BIOS available on the internet that prevent this down clocking. Hence you can flash your BIOS with that and buy a 150W adapter for the laptop.

Good review rajan

Rep+'s.....

Good one.

Sorry! can't rep

Originally Posted by rajan1311

UPDATE: We have found the reason for the low frame rates in games like GTA 4 and Flight simulator X. It is because the system draws 130W when the CPU and GPU are at full load. But the adapter is only 90W. Hence, Dell has modded the BIOS so that the CPU decreases its speed to 900MHz instead of 1600Mhz so stay within that 90W bracket. Hence, we notice a huge dip in performance.

The fix, well none officially. But there are modified BIOS available on the internet that prevent this down clocking. Hence you can flash your BIOS with that and buy a 150W adapter for the laptop.

rep+ from me....................

UPDATE:A way to improve the performance a bit is by reducing the brightness of the screen. This reduces the power consumption and reduces the throttling issue a bit.

How much does XPS-16 cost?

Originally Posted by stick0

How much does XPS-16 cost?

Arey why so lazzy....its there in the article...its approx Rs70,000.(69.5k odd)

UPDATE:The throttling issues seems to have been fixed. They have released a new BIOS and will give a 130W adapter for free. This was after hours and hours of having to wait and talk to some person who has no clue about the issue from dell customer care. Will update the numbers when we get the adapter in a few days.

UPDATE:guys we got the 130W adapter from dell and the throttling issue seems to have been improved. We now get a solid 45FPS at 720p with medium settings in GTA 4.

Good one........................

Its been too long.
The throttling problem is fixed. Dell India has started to ship 130 watt adapters free of cost along with the release of the new bios A07. I received mine yesterday. I experienced no throttling whatsoever.
Multipliers are always above 12.
First of All, GTA 4 is bad game to benchmark just like Microsoft FSX. Both are known for mediocre frame rates.
The SXPS16 is great laptop and the WLED screen is beautiful but runs a bit hot.
For those who want more performance but with a less beautiful screen and no optical drive and a future proof laptop, go for the HP Envy 15 generation 2(32 nm dual core cpu + 40nm dx11 ATI 5830)
I used throttlestop while benchmarking