Dell XPS 15 9530 Review

1. Introduction and Unboxing2. Packaging and Bundle3. Dell XPS 15 95304. Testing Methodology and Configuration5. Sisoft Sandra6. PCmark087. 3Dmark8. 3Dmark119. 3Dmark Vantage10. Cinebench 11.5 64bit11. Unigine Heaven12. Unigine Valley13. HDD Performance14. USB 3.0 Bandwidth Testing15. MKV 1080p Playback Performance16. Video Encoding17. Thief18. Titanfall19. Hearthstone20. League of Legends21. Thermal Dynamics22. Battery Life23. Closing Thoughts24. View All Pages

Titanfall is one of the biggest releases of the year and is slated by many to be the true replacement of the stagnant Call of Duty franchise. While very new though, its engine is an old one, being based off of a modifed version of the Source engine, making it playable on the Xbox One, as well as on lower end PCs.

Unfortuantely once again trying native resolution testing with the XPS 15 proved problematic, with the training level lagging so much (even on lowest settings) that we couldn't get through the doorway after the sprint. Reverting to 1080p fixed this. That had its own issues (game shrinking to 50 per cent of the screen with a big black border) but at least it was playable.

Since there was no built-in benchmark with this game, we played several levels of the campaign over a few hours, regularly running FRAPS to note the frame rate throughout the entire round. The average results from each game were then collated together to form the results below.

The settings for this benchmark were all low or disabled and a resolution of 1920 x 1080p.

It's not the smoothest experience ever, but it's playable and for a brand new AAA game, that's impressive for a laptop like this.

I ran through several games of Titanfall to test a general usage experience and it was fine – except playing in the light is difficult due to the overly reflective screen.

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