The 2020 version of Dell’s venerable XPS 13 ultraportable laptop has a slightly larger display in a redesigned chassis that’s minutely more compact than its predecessor’s. It also boasts a significantly more futuristic design. With CNC-milled aluminum and ultra-thin screen bezels, the XPS 13 (model 9300) has a striking look in line with its high price tag. (It starts at $999.99 and is $1,749.99 as tested, a few hundred dollars higher than competing systems with Intel Core i7 processors and full HD screens.) Our current midrange ultraportable pick, the Dell Inspiron 14 7000, is a better value, and part of the reason the 2020 XPS 13 sees a drop from 4.5 stars in its last iteration: It now has competition from both inside and outside the house. But, the value equation aside, the XPS 13 is way cooler than the Inspiron. It's the best high-end, clamshell-style ultraportable you can buy, and the clear choice for Windows users who want to make a statement.
Thin, Light, and Solid
The XPS 13 is thin and light, and it feels satisfyingly solid. It measures 0.58 by 11.6 by 7.8 inches (HWD) and weighs 2.8 pounds in the configuration reviewed here. Those are comfortably within the limits of how we define ultraportable laptops, though they’re not in the vanguard. The 1-kilogram (2.2-pound) mark is the current holy grail for 13- and 14-inch laptops; systems that hit it include the HP Elite Dragonfly and the Acer Swift 5.
While it’s true that the XPS 13 is a bit heavier, the extra weight helps give it a solid, sturdy feel rather than a clumsy one. The density of the build is apparent as soon as you slide it out of its sleek white box and run your fingers over the aluminum lid and edges. Dell says the edges are anodized twice to prevent scratch damage from repeated plugging and unplugging of peripherals. I’ve never encountered this damage on other laptops, but I do worry about it every time I slightly miss the port opening when I’m trying to plug in the power cord.
Dell XPS 13 (9300) Review
Opening the lid results in even more to ogle. The two color options include Platinum Silver with a black carbon-fiber palm rest or Frost White with an Alpine White composite-fiber palm rest. Our review unit uses the latter scheme, and it is gorgeous. The palm rest is especially snazzy, and it incorporates a UV- and stain-resistant coating to prevent yellowing and discoloration. The overall look is nearly identical to the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, a version of the XPS 13 with a 360-degree convertible hinge that we reviewed late last year.
Similar Products
Dell Inspiron 14 7000 (7490)
Apple MacBook Pro 13-Inch (2019)
HP Spectre x360 13 (2019)
Lenovo Yoga C940 (14-Inch)
Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (13.5-Inch)
Asus ZenBook 13 (UX334)
The XPS 13’s display is available in three versions. Our review unit has a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel touch-enabled panel. Thanks to the 16:10 rather than the more common 16:9 aspect ratio, the resolution is a bit higher than full HD (1,920 by 1,080 pixels), but considerably less than the Retina Display of Apple’s MacBook Pro or the PixelSense display of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3. However, the XPS 13 can also be configured with a 3,840-by-2,400-pixel panel that leapfrogs not only those two laptops, but also the dimensions of standard widescreen 4K displays (3,840 by 2,160 pixels).
I admire the Retina Display’s excellent picture quality, and I’m usually disappointed when I use a full HD laptop, since I can often see visible pixels that result in slightly grainy text. They’re not as noticeable on the XPS 13, however, and images appear especially vivid, which I attribute partly to the taller aspect ratio that results in slightly more pixels than a 1080p display has and partly to the Dell's 100 percent sRGB and 90 percent DCI-P3 gamut support. I also appreciate the extraordinary rated maximum of 500 nits of brightness, which means the XPS 13 can even be viewed comfortably outdoors (though not in direct sunlight) if you crank up the brightness setting. So I'm inclined to recommend this screen over the more expensive 3,840-by-2,400 option.
The entry-level version of the XPS 13 comes with a non-touch version of the 1,920-by-1,200 panel, which is a shame since most other direct competitors (many of which are 2-in-1 convertibles like the HP Spectre x360 13) offer touch support as standard fare.
The Minuscule Camera Is Back
A webcam with IR sensors is located above the center of the display. It offers average video quality for a laptop camera, which is to say that indoor shots are fairly grainy. Dell says it has improved the camera quality by adding a new four-piece lens and temporal noise reduction, but if you’re planning to hold a Skype session in your bedroom at night, you’ll still probably want to use your phone. The camera’s chief innovation is its minuscule size—until recently, no laptop was able to fit both IR sensors for face recognition and a camera in a narrow display bezel like the one on the XPS 13.
Just how narrow are we talking about? The new XPS 13 fits a display that’s 6.8 percent larger than the old one (a result of moving from 16:9 to 16:10) into a laptop that’s 2 percent smaller than its predecessor, which means that the screen now takes up 91.5 percent of the laptop’s body area.
The XPS 13 was already small, and making it even smaller for this generation certainly doesn’t help the input/output port selection very much. There are just two USB Type-C ports, a headphone jack, and a microSD card reader. That means you’ll need an adapter or a special cable to plug in an external monitor or a USB Type-A peripheral. On the plus side, both of the USB ports support Thunderbolt 3 data transfer speeds. The XPS 13 isn’t alone in its port scarcity. As laptops grow smaller, there’s simply no room for larger ports like HDMI video outputs.
Another silver lining is that the XPS 13 offers the latest Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 5 wireless connectivity standards, good for stable internet connections and wireless keyboards and mice.
If you primarily plan to use the XPS 13’s built-in keyboard and touchpad, you’ll be pleased to know that they’ve also received attention in the redesign. The keycaps are larger and the touchpad has grown by an impressive 17 percent. Larger touchpads are always a good idea—in general I find the XPS 13’s touchpad not quite as good as the MacBook Pro’s gargantuan one, but I find its keyboard much more comfortable than the Apple laptop's startlingly shallow keyboard.
Hello Ice, Goodbye Comet
The new XPS 13 ditches Intel’s “Comet Lake” processors in favor of “Ice Lake” CPUs. Both are members of the chip giant’s latest 10th generation family of processors, but the Ice Lake ones are better suited to the thinnest and lightest of ultraportables thanks to their slightly lower clock speeds, power consumption, and heat generation.
Our test unit comes with an Intel Core i7-1065G7 processor, a four-core chip with Hyper-Threading that runs at a base frequency of 1.3GHz. The Core i7-1065G7 has integrated Intel Iris Plus graphics. The laptop also has 16GB of memory and a 512GB solid-state drive. These specs are the minimum we expect of a laptop that costs more than $1,500. The base configuration includes an Intel Core i3, 8GB of memory, and a 256GB SSD. That’s similar to a few other close competitors’ starting configs and prices, including the Apple MacBook Air.
To evaluate the XPS 13’s computing performance, I compared the results of its benchmark tests with those of a few other competitors, which include the Asus ZenBook 13 and Lenovo Yoga C940 in addition to the Surface Laptop 3 and MacBook Pro 13. Overall, the XPS 13 acquits itself nicely, placing first or second in nearly all of our intensive multimedia and graphics tests. (See how we test laptops.)
We measure general computing performance using PCMark 10 and 8, holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. This also yields a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.
The XPS 13’s PCMark results show modest deficiencies relative to the other systems here, but they don’t carry over into real-world use. I never once experienced any slowdowns or lag while installing apps or performing any of the tasks described above.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The XPS 13 leads the admittedly quite competitive field here, showing that it’s marginally better than its competitors if you need to do some occasional light multimedia work.
The Cinebench results closely mirror those of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that's highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video to a 1080p MP4 file.
It’s a timed test, and lower results are better, but it’s all relative: If you need to perform these conversions frequently, there are more powerful (and much larger and more expensive) laptops that can handle the job in around half of the 15 minutes that the XPS 13 took.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total execution time. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here. The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
Here, the Nvidia GeForce-equipped ZenBook 13 did in fact top this group, but it was only about 4 percent faster than the XPS 13.
Casual Gaming? No Problem
The XPS 13 isn't a gaming laptop, but it should be able to run some less-demanding titles just fine, especially if you turn down their graphics quality settings. Graphics performance is highly dependent on these settings as well as the game or app you’re running, as our 3DMark and Superposition game simulations show. 3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.
On the Sky Diver test, the XPS 13 won by a small but significant margin, beating even the ZenBook 13 with its discrete Nvidia graphics chip.
But the ZenBook 13 turned the tables with its superior score on the 720p Low Superposition test. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess.
The XPS 13’s battery life is excellent, with the laptop lasting for more than 17 hours on our video rundown test, which involves playing a locally stored video file at 50 percent screen brightness with airplane mode turned on. Battery life has markedly improved; a few generations ago, the XPS 13 (9380) introduced in early 2019 lasted for 11 hours on our test. While any single battery testing method won’t necessarily reflect the experience of individual users, it’s still nice to see such a dramatic improvement.
Classiness in Spades
The XPS 13 is Dell’s flagship ultraportable, and it must weather stiff competition from the likes of Apple, HP, Lenovo, and others. So it’s no surprise to see that Dell has invested heavily in the physical design, making it smaller and lighter while simultaneously improving many (but not all) of its features.
But the Texas tech giant has also invested heavily in its other products, including the Inspiron 14 7000, which offers many of the same features as the XPS 13 in a chassis that’s a bit larger and heavier and slightly less elegant, but also solidly constructed and much less expensive. Dell's pricing changes frequently, but currently an Inspiron 14 7000 configured nearly identically to the XPS 13 tested here is $1,149, a savings of $600. That makes the XPS 13 harder to justify, and it's the main reason why it only gets four stars, down from five stars a few generations ago.
Perhaps it’s best to think of the XPS 13 as a status symbol, a machine that pushes the boundaries of what a laptop can be even as its benefits trickle down to other models lower in Dell’s food chain. You’ll need to pay a premium for it, just as you need to pay the infamous Apple tax for a MacBook Pro, but in return you get a superbly designed laptop with oodles of cool factor.
The 2020 version of the Dell XPS 13 is an excellent ultraportable laptop, with head-turning looks and plenty of power for everyday tasks.
Like What You're Reading?
Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Sign up for other newsletters
