hey everybody its la inside bin and we’re taking a look today at a new laptop from Dell this is the Dell XPS 13 2 in 1 and like any good two and one it functions as a laptop but also as a media player when you flip the screen around like so you can turn it into a tablet with pen support and we’re going to check out that pen in a little bit and of course you can operate it in tent mode a really nice looking machine here and we’re going to be taking a closer look at what this machine is all about in just a second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure if this came in on loan from Dell so we’re done with this it goes back to them all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewing or approving what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this laptop is all about so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware the price point on this one begins at $1000 and works its way up from there the one we’re looking at today is kind of in the mid to high end of the line it costs about $1700 as configured this one has a new ice Lake Intel processor an i7 1065 g7 this also has Intel iris graphics built in so you’re going to see some fairly decent performance in games it’s not going to be a gaming laptop but it will do better than prior generations did for gaming without a discrete GPU on board the starting point has an i3 ice Lake processor so the less expensive ones will not perform the same as what you’re about to see with this i7 version there’s sixteen gigabytes of RAM installed on this one with 512 gigabytes of storage you do need to configure the RAM and storage when you buy it because you can’t upgrade either I believe all the stuff that you would normally upgrade on a laptop are soldered on the motherboard here so you are going to be limited to what you purchase up front so be aware of that and no a lot of you don’t like that so just know that going into this one it’s not very upgradable all of the laptops in the line have a thirteen point four inch display it’s IPS touch of course because this can go into tablet mode so you have all of the things you would expect from that and I’m really pleased with the display it is super sharp I love the viewing angles on this it’s a 1920 by 1200 display and what’s nice is that the display itself sits very very close to the glass there’s not much of an air gap here so if you’ve
played around with higher-end smartphones this has a very similar look to it it’s a really nice screen and they’ve done a nice job integrating everything into this package with very thin bezels even at the bottom here they managed to fit the webcam at the top it’s not terrific though it’s 720p and I noticed that with my overhead circular lights here the light was kind of beaming down as a ray as I was using it here in the studio so you might see some weird things based on the optics that they had to shrink down to make this camera work but in the end of the day for web conferencing I think it’s better to have the camera here then down here which we’ve seen on prior dell models where the camera is kind of shooting up your nostrils so that at least was an improvement there the fit and finish on this is very nice you’ve got metal on the outside I think this is either a plastic or a carbon fiber here on the keyboard deck and the past bell has been using some carbon fiber material it’s got a very nice feel to it relatively thin as you can see here it feels a little heavy to me at 2.9 pounds or 1.3 to kilograms but the weight gives it a really nice solid feel to it the weight itself though isn’t as balanced as some other premium laptops are so when you get the screen up about halfway here it will lift the keyboard up with it but overall I think it’s a pretty solid design there is a 4k option available for the display
and I think that might add a little bit of weight to the package here but to be honest in this size I think the 1920 by 1200 display is more than adequate the keyboard is pretty nice it’s a little bit on the clicky err side of things the travel on the keys in other words how far they push down is not all that deep but it does have very nice size keys and good keyboard spacing and I found it wasn’t hard to type on it it reminds me a little bit of the newer Apple keyboards but I think the technology they’re using here to make this thin keyboard is different and more reliable so I don’t think you’re gonna get the keys sticking like we were on the Apple I’m still dealing with a few laptops around the house here with that problem the keyboard is backlit they integrated a nice fingerprint reader here into the power button so you can get the computer turned on and unlocked with one keystroke which was cool to see that the trackpad here is excellent Dells been putting some nice track pads on their devices for a while now what’s neat about it is that you can click on it almost throughout the entire trackpad not just the lower portion so even up here I’m able to execute clicks and of course you can do your two finger click for right clicking and do some other customization that you might want to do there nice trackpad here and it works well this has two thunderbolt three ports onboard you’ve got one on this side and one on the other side and what’s nice about thunderbolt is
that it’s backwards compatible with USB see but it’s a lot faster so you could plug in an external graphics processor for example you can use docking stations a lot of stuff out there that you can pop into these Thunderbolt ports to get some really good performance out of them these are four-lane thunderbolt ports so they give you the full speed of that specification and they’re full service too so you can have the power adapter plugged in to either side and be able to charge the laptop get display out and of course connect your USB and Thunderbolt devices so it’s good to see funderbolt being supported on the little laptop like this and I was quite pleased with that you’ve got a micro SD card slot here so you can store your media or something like that on there and maybe go with a less expensive smaller main hard drive and then on the other side here you have a headphone jack so you can plug in your headphones for perhaps a little better audio quality now the built-in speakers sound surprisingly good on this they put them on the bottom and typically I’m not a big fan of downward firing speakers but these actually work pretty nicely because they kind of angle off to the side and it’s got very good stereo separation decent loudness nice and clear so they did a very nice job on the speaker set here battery life on this is not bad either I in getting a lot better at managing power to these chips and as a result you’ll get a little bit more juice out of these things we’re seeing about nine to ten hours of battery life doing light tasks on the laptop light tasks I would consider to be Microsoft Word and some web browsing maybe watching a video or two but nothing too strenuous if you play games or do something that’s going to tax that
processor more the battery will deplete faster I also recommend using a lower brightness on the display to further the battery life on there but it’s pretty good for all-day usage and again your mileage will vary based on what you are doing with it and this is not a fan list laptop unlike the prior generation it’s running with a 15 watt processor that has to be actively cooled with a fan the fan isn’t all that loud and it doesn’t come on all that often if you start running a game we’re doing something that’s really taxing the chip like video editing that’s where you’ll probably hear the fan kick on it wasn’t all that loud though compared to other laptops that we’ve looked at that are about this size and form factor so it’s not all that distracting but again you’ll hear a fan when you are pushing the laptop but generally if you’re doing Word documents or web browsing or even a little video watching we’re not hearing it come on all that much what I am hearing though is something called coil whine especially when the built-in SSD is under load and you’ll hear that kind of like a buzzing clicking kind of sound coming out of this section of the computer for a few minutes I thought maybe there was a spinning hard drive inside because you often hear the drive head moving back and forth with a little click you’ll kind of hear that hear if you’re in a very quiet room I looked online on some forums and it appears to be something that this one and some of the prior ones were dealing with so you might hear a little bit of noise on this one even when the fan is off but the hard drive is active so you should be aware of that now there is also active pen support and they have an optional pen that you can
add to the mix and what’s nice about this is that there’s a place for the pen to go so if you just get it close to the side of the computer here it will magnetically attached and it will stay on the laptop here so you can walk around with the pen and have a place for it to go it secures itself pretty nicely here with a magnet let’s take a look now and see how it works now the Dell pen here will cost you about a hundred bucks or so there are less expensive active pen options out there but this is the only one that attaches itself properly to the side of the screen when you get the pen close to the screen the computer will detect it there’ll be a little cursor that appears underneath it and then if i push my pen down here to write on the screen and rest my wrist you’ll see that it’s only registering the pen so it’s got all the good risk detection stuff you would like to see in an active pen device my big ripe with the pen though is that the erase button is right here and I keep resting my thumb against it and it’s very sensitive so I’m always just accidentally hitting that as I’m going to write on it so as a pen experience it isn’t bad but the large size of the screen here means that as the pen draws away you might find that your wrist does start doing stuff on screen so you can see here with my wrist just slightly lifted up I activated this menu down here and then everything goes crazy so the pen experience on Windows is still not as good as what I’ve experienced on the iPad pro I think Apple still
has the edge here but if you’re looking for a decent workable pen I think this one is not bad and you’ll have usable pen support on this there’s pressure sensitivity here with the Dell pen so we can just lightly press down on the screen and what get one kind of line here and then we can push harder and get a darker line as we draw across here so you do have some of that there’s apparently some tilt detection here as well which will give you a different line if you have the pen at a tilted angle I haven’t found many apps that really take advantage of that that detection or that that feature but it is there and available to you if you are looking for tilt sensitivity this pen has it so let’s take a look now at performance we’ll begin with some basic web browsing just so you can get a sense as to how fast everything responds here so we’ll pull up the nasa.gov homepage we’re on my AC wireless here at the house I believe this supports the new Wi-Fi 6 standard so it might be time for me to upgrade my Wi-Fi around here and as you can see the web pages that were visiting spring to life very quickly and I’ll render very quickly that is what I would expect added a laptop at this price point so all good there we also checked out my youtube channel and ran a 60 frames per second video at 1080p as expected no drop frames everything was working fine there on YouTube so I think if you’re doing Netflix or any kind of video watching on here it should be a very good experience we also ran the browser bench org speedometer test that’s a test that measures how well it does on the web and there we got a score of two hundred and 5.3 on version 1.0 of that test and 118 on version 2.0 a very good score out of this
new processor and I think it’s on par with a lot of desktops that we looked at just a year or two ago so all together a very nicely performing laptop for doing work and other businesslike tasks so let’s move on now to gaming we’ve got rocket League that you can see running on screen 1080p low settings we’re getting about 80 to 110 frames per second not bad at all for an Intel GPU when we set the settings up to high we got around 40 to 55 frames per second again pretty decent for an Intel processor note though that this has the iris graphics I don’t think you get iris graphics at the entry-level version so you’ll see some differences with that 999 computer but if you’ve got the iris graphics on that Intel chip this is what you’re going to see let’s take a look now at GTA 5 there we were getting at 1080p low settings 30 to 40 frames per second not bad playable for sure not quite 60 but I bet if you turn the resolution down to 720p and tweaked it a little bit more you could probably get close to that these are scores we typically see on a computer with a low-end discrete GPU or an AMD chip so this is good improvements here from Intel on the 3d graphics side one last game to check out and that is the witcher 3 there at the low settings 1080p we were getting about 20 to 30 frames per second again not spectacular but playable if you’re out on Road and for something this thin in light are relatively light it’s good to see the graphics performance starting to get there on these things where you can actually play a somewhat up-to-date game in a somewhat playable framerate and that was impressive to see now we were unable to run fortnight on this I think due to some driver issues we also had trouble running the 3d mark benchmarks that we typically run on these machines as well also due to driver issues they’ll let us know that they’re having trouble getting that working right at this moment but I did notice that notebook
check net which is a great website for super in-depth laptop reviews was able to get that test working maybe they got their hands on some drivers that I couldn’t get my hands on so we’re going to use their score on the 3d mark cloud gate test here because I very much trust the work that they do and if we take a look at the 3d mark cloud gate test we can see the folks at notebook check with the same configuration got a score of 14000 796 on the two-in-one and at first glance that is every bit as good as the dell inspiron 7000 that has a discrete GPU that was something we looked at back in 2017 but you got to look at these scores a little more carefully to see where the numbers are coming from and in this instance we’re getting a better score because the CPU on here is much more powerful than that seventh generation I 5 processor was and that’s why the scores are the same if you dig into the graphical results here on graphics test 1 & 2 you can see the 1050 is much more powerful than the Irish GPU on this Intel chip so you really got to look closely at these numbers to see exactly where this performs I was so surprised to see that this came in fairly close to an MX 150 GPU we looked at on a laptop about two years ago and that is probably a closer estimation as to the kind of performance we’re getting from this although a discrete GPU I think will still be a little faster because these benchmarks tend to be a little bit synthetic and I think game
developers tend to target enhancements and performance tuning to some of these Nvidia chips that of course this laptop lacks but nonetheless it’s still pretty good for games a lot better than what we were seeing out of Intel gpus just a year ago now due to the driver issues that we’re having with the laptop at the moment we can’t get the 3d mark stress test to run which is how we measure throttling here on the channel but I would point you at that notebook check net article that did a fairly extensive look at a couple of different ways to measure CPU throttling in our testing with the games we found that it was able to hold itself fairly consistently at the performance we saw we didn’t see these big dips and spikes that you sometimes see with computers that wildly throttled themselves so I think overall the performance should be relatively consistent but unfortunately we can’t get you the exact 3d mark stress test score but we were able to get Linux running on it we booted up in boom to nineteen point one zero we found that video works here obviously along with Wi-Fi Bluetooth and audio so all that is good and we found the performance in Linux to be pretty darn good just as good as it was in Windows if not a little bit better so that’s been great we also found that the touchscreen works on here along with Thunderbolt devices too without having to install any drivers at all so if you are looking to run a boon to I think this is a good way to do it and I’m
sure other Linux operating systems should pretty much work on this fairly well as well provided of course their driver packages are up to date so good Linux performance here overall a very decently performing laptop I was very impressed with the games that we were able to run on it we don’t typically see these games working that well on Intel machines but they are here I provided you have those iris graphics on the one that you choose so that’s important to know the only thing I have really to knock this one on is the coil whine that I’m hearing when that drive is going on sometimes hearing at 2:00 when the USB port has a lot of data activity it’s not very loud it kind of sounds like an old hard drive or something but it’s there and if you’re in a very quiet environment it’s something you’re going to hear coming out of the machine although it’s not terribly loud it’s something that I didn’t expect to hear so that’s the only real knock I’ve got against this one otherwise it seems to be performing very nicely I love the form factor this Green looks great and all together a nice two in one from Dell until next time this is La and Simon let me know what you think down in the comments below and thank you very much for watching this channel was brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold level supporters the four guys with Porter’s podcasts Chris Allegretto Tom Albrecht Brian Parker in Cali an Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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