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

This being a new system, it's worth seeing what sort of extra software and bloatware comes along with it.

NB. the Steam install was ours

Notice it does come with a pre-installed McAfee Livesafe Internet Security, which while not endorsed by the man who founded the company, is still relatively well respected and you get a year's free subscription to the pro version.

While it did pop up occasionally during testing and is perhaps a little heftier in terms of its CPU usage than we would like, it's ultimately not too distracting and does at least mean you don't need to make downloading antivirus your first port of call when purchasing this notebook.

There's a few different hardware options with the XPS 15 9530 (see first page of this review), but this particular version comes with the 4th generation Intel i7-4702HQ CPU with 6MB of l3 cache. Its default clock speed is 2.2GHz, but this can be boosted up to 3.2GHz.

 

Memory wise, it's sporting 16GB (2x8GB) of dual channel DDR3 running at 1600MHz and an extra 2GB on the mobile GPU, a discrete Nvidia GT750M which runs at 941MHz and 1250MHz on the core and memory respectively. However that only kicks in when stressful applications are run, until then it makes use of an Intel HD 4600.

Software

Sisoft Sandra
PCMark 8
3DMark
3DMark 11
3DMark Vantage
Cinebench 11.5 64 bit
FRAPS Professional
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Unigine Valley
CrystalDiskMark
ATTO Disk Benchmark
Cyberlink MediaEspresso
Thief
Titanfall
Hearthstone
League of Legends

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment

Kingston HyperX USB 3.0 drive
Canon 300D DSLR

Some game descriptions are edited with courtesy from Wikipedia.

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