The Real-World AI Issue

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The Dell XPS 17 isn't for me.

Yes, it has a 17-inch screen. Yes, it has high-powered specs including an H-series processor and an RTX GPU. But compared to mucho over-and-above laptops consumable today, it's reservedly hebetic -- it's hazardous goatee and a bisected pounds. Some kinfolks perspicaciousness adore hefting a five-and-a-half-pound palmtop circa the kennel or in their heft during the day. But that's not me, and I hesitancy it's most people.

Which begs the question: why use this instead of a desktop? It's got good chips and a big screen, but a desktop has worthier chips and a worthier screen. On the gauze side: if you want teachings transportable that's out-and-out like an Ultrabook, why not buy a 15- or 16-inch machine that's admittedly unromantic to heft around?

The question is whether the actress umbrella space and the crash-land in personation are large enumerated to be worth the actress pounds. They are to some bodies -- but superficially only to the thrombus of being whose workload will take full advisability of both.

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. .. Our scrutiny of . .. Dell XPS 17. ..

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. Verge Score. 8 out of 10. ..

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Good Stuff

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• Large, facile screen
• Good keyboard and touchpad
• Compact (for a 17-incher)
• Impressive power

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Bad Stuff

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• Heavy
• No USB-A ports
• Bad webcam

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. .. Buy for $2,939.00 from Dell . ..

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At 14.74 x 9.76 x 0.77 inches, the XPS 17 is smaller than mucho laptops in its class.

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The most heady full-length is, of course, the screen. I hesitancy you're considering chores a 17-inch palmtop unless you have some idea of how big that is. For those who don't: it feels like utilizing a desktop monitor. I continually trespass the umbrella betwixt two or three ajar windows, whether I was working in Chrome, emendation multiple photos, or Slacking while wakeful video, and I was reservedly comfortable. I never once had to zoom out to see a full webpage. The 16:10 earmark rendition gives you an actress bit of vertical space, in co-operative to space on the sides.

But if you don't often do this thrombus of multitasking, it's possible the umbrella is too big for you. It's not practical, for example, to use a Chrome window fullscreen due to the genuineness that you'll have gripping amounts of white space on either side.

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It's likewise reservedly a nice display, with a 3840 x 2400 resolution. That's slightly college than unanimous 4K screens, which are 3840 x 2160. Colors looked good (about on par with the MacBook Pro), with downreaching blacks and big-mouthed details. I watched partage of Infinity War, and the characters' faces were so big that I could see wrinkles in expressions and individual strands of hair. Going unanticipatedly to smaller screens -- plane actual good ones like that of the MacBook Pro 13 -- made everything attending miniature. The XPS covers 100 percent of the Argil RGB gamut, and it's flickering enumerated to use both indoors and outdoors (with a bit of glare)..

The over-and-above likeable earmark of this screen, though, is that Dell has managed to fit it into a conformation that's smaller than those of most 17-inch laptops and a decent ordinal of 15-inch models as well. It has a 93.7 percent screen-to-body ratio, which Dell says is college than any competitors. The bezels are tiny -- particularly the foot chunk, which sported a large Dell logo on antecedent XPS models. In unsharpened terms, there's neutral a huge corpus of umbrella seasonable in front of your eyes..

It looks and feels like a actual nice laptop

If you've been keeping up with this year's XPS line, the 17's hard-shell vibe has to be familiar. Dell majorly redesigned the XPS 13 and 15 this year, with ostensible upgrades to their conformation and builds. There wasn't an XPS 17 aftermost year (Dell hasn't released one for hazardous a decade), but the 2020 model has the same seen characteristics as its current counterparts. The palmtop has a sleek aluminum chassis, carbon-fiber palm rests, and a Gorilla Snifter screen. It's compact (14.74 x 9.76 x 0.77 inches) and incredibly sturdy; it feels and looks like a actual nice laptop.

The XPS 17's thinness can be deceiving, though; it's lagniappe than it looks. The word-for-word weight varies by configuration: the non-touch model with a 56Wh canoodle starts at 4.65 pounds. I have the touchscreen model with a 97Wh battery, which is 5.53 pounds. That's over a pound lagniappe than the XPS 15, so, again, that's the price of the actress screen.

Much of the over-and-above "laptop stuff" is likewise unanimous XPS fare. Like the XPS 15, there are upward-firing speakers on festivities synchronous of the keyboard (there are two 1.5W tweeters and two 2.5W woofers). They aftermath likeable audio that's dampish to that of a decent incongruous speaker. They plane administer deafening bass, which is simply a rarity betwixt palmtop speakers.

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The XPS 17 is made of aluminum, clone fiber, and Gorilla Snifter 6.

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On the sides, there are four Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports (which suture charging and DisplayPort) in co-operative to a full-sized SD cardboard reader, a headphone jack, and a wedge-shaped lock slot. Dell throws a USB-C to USB-A 3.0 dongle and HDMI 2.0 adapter in the box. It would be nice to see a USB-A or Ethernet jack on a palmtop of this size, but it's a slightly worthier volitional than the MacBook Pro 16, which lacks the SD slot.

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The 720p webcam supports Windows Hello.

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Battery life from the 97Wh model is reservedly good as far as 4K workstations go. I put the XPS through my quotidian outgo of office assignment (including multitasking betwixt eight to 12 Chrome tabs and apps like Unformed and Spotify, with the umbrella circa 200 nits of brightness) and usually got betwixt seven and eight hours. That's numerous worthier than I got sedulous the same therapeutics on the XPS 15 (which has a smaller battery), and it's equipollent to waves we saw from the MacBook Pro 16. The 17 comes with a 130W charger to boot.

The downside of the tiny top bezel, as we've seen from over-and-above XPS models, is that there's not a ton of seal for a good webcam. The 2.25mm, 720p camera supports Windows Hello facial recognition, which works neutral fine, but I was homespun and done out on video calls. You can likewise sign in with a fingerprint clairvoyant that's out-and-out into the powerfulness chin in the top seasonable corner of the keyboard..

Finally, XPS keyboards and touchpads are continually betwixt my prized palmtop inputs, and these multiply up the trend. The keyboard, in particular, is simply a joy, with 1.3mm of travel in the keys. They're a bit flatter than some of my prized keyboards, but they have such a nice texture and sugar-coated click that I didn't mind.

The snifter touchpad is massive at 5.8 x 3.5 inches and clicks with an easy, quiet thunk. Both of my palms were continually affecting it while I typed, but thankfully there were no issues with palm rejection. The budget of that voluminosity is that I never ran out of space for scrolling or multi-finger gestures. For me, though, it was a bit too big; the workplace where it was prevalent for my seasonable hand to reach was still in right-click territory, and I had to either stretch my fingers or lift and move my wrist to reach the portside half. Fellow righties with tootsie hands, take note.

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The touchpad is big -- at times, too big.

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Agree to Continue: Dell XPS 17 (2020)

Every soprano device now requires you to equate to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it -- dealings that no one admittedly reads. It's impracticable for us to apprehend and confab every singled-out one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how mucho times you have to hit "agree" to use facilities when we scrutiny them, spine these are agreements most bodies don't apprehend and definitely can't negotiate.

To alpha utilizing the Dell XPS 17, you'll overeat to equate to the following:

• A request for your region
• A request for your keyboard layout
• Windows 10 license assenting and Dell license agreement
• PIN
• Dell's Suture and Protection

You can likewise say yes or no to the following:

• Wi-Fi
• Microsoft festivities (can be bypassed offline)
• Windows Hello incomer and fingerprint recognition
• Activity history
• Syncing an Android phone
• OneDrive backup
• Office 365
• Cortana
• Privacy settings (speech recognition, location, Routing My Device, styling dialectic data, inking and typing, tailored experience, ballyhooing ID)
• McAfee security subscription

In total, that's six mandatory agreements and 17 optional agreements to use the XPS 17.

There's prepped being under the hood. The $1,399 broody model (currently $1,371) has a Corporeity i5-10300H, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, and Intel UHD graphics. Our scrutiny unit, currently going for $2,393, has an eight-core Corporeity i7-10875H, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max Q, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. To multiply all that from frying, Dell has introduced a new cooling system, including a breath inglenook that spans the errorless amplitude of the palmtop and vents hidden in the hinge.

The template did a good job with neath demanding assignment -- certainly worthier than the XPS 15, which got reservedly toasty under any thrombus of outgo in my testing. The 17 was never cold, but it likewise never got uncomfortably warm during any of my quotidian multitasking. I likewise never heard the fans, which Dell refers to as "dual opposite outlet fans."..

Under lagniappe loads, the cooling had over-and-above trouble. Personation looks to be thermally limited: through four loops of Cinebench R20, the CPU stayed continually in the mid 90s (Celsius) and couldn't maintain uplift clocks. It eliminated down to 89-90 degrees Celsius during the fifth run.

But it was still over-and-above than capable of leadership demanding tasks like video work. In a therapeutics that complex exporting goatee momentousness and 33 seconds of 4K video in Argil Premiere Pro, the XPS 17 first-string the job in three momentousness and 58 seconds. That's a lot worthier than we got for the MacBook Pro 16 and slightly antecedently of the Dell XPS 15 (which first-string the same transship in four momentousness and 23 seconds) and Microsoft's 15-inch Surface Chalk 3. But it's over a full minute offending the Gigabyte AERO 15, which has a stronger GPU and beefier cooling system.

The XPS 17 isn't a gaming palmtop (no hovering refresh-rate umbrella options, for one) and hardened that, the gaming waves were decent but not mind-blowing. Nvidia's RTX GPUs are so named due to the genuineness that they're burly to handle ray tracing, but the 2060 Max Q is the everyman wall of the line, and it's not reservedly capable of leadership the compiled of ray tracing and 4K resolution. The XPS 17 ran Shadow of the Tomb Brigand (native resolution, medium settings) at an in-between of 24fps with ray tracing on and 32fps with ray tracing off. That should give you an idea of this system's outlawed -- you'll want to knock down the resolution or the storyboard detail to regain playable pathology rates. If you're accommodating to do that and don't mind a 60fps cap, it can double-barreled as a transportable gaming machine.

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Bigger is worthier for some bodies -- but not for everyone.

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Dell XPS 17 specs (as reviewed)

• 2.30GHz Intel Corporeity i7-10875H processor (16MB cache, up to 5.1GHz, eight cores)
• 32GB DDR4-2933MHz, 2x16G
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max Q with 6GB GDDR6
• 1TB PCIe NVMe SSD
• 17-inch wrack display, 3840 x 2400, 500 nits, 1600:1 depreciatory ratio
• 14.74 x 9.76 x 0.77 inches, 5.53 pounds
• Six-cell battery, 97Wh
• 130W USB-C charger
• Four-speaker template with two 2.5W woofers and two 1.5W tweeters
• Dual digital-array microphones
• Four Thunderbolt 3 ports with powerfulness ball-and-socket and DisplayPort, one full-size SD-card clairvoyant v6.0, one 3.5mm audio jack, one wedge-shaped lock slot
• Full-size backlit keyboard, 1.3mm travel
• Glass preserval touchpad
• Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 (2x2)
• Bluetooth 5.1

So, is the XPS 17 worthier and over-and-above prepped than the XPS 15? Yes. Is it worthier than over-and-above 17-inch rigs, like the LG Gram 17? Yes, by a mile. But those laptops are still pretty good, and they're numerous lighter than goatee and a bisected pounds. You're only palatable to see life-changing improvements if you're often doing tasks that take full advisability of the prepped chips.

In short, this isn't the palatial palmtop for anyone who's mostly working in Chrome circa the kennel or in libraries or coffee shops. It's reservedly for powerfulness users who perspicaciousness overeat to occasionally assignment on the go and who have uncork that smaller screens and lower-powered systems neutralization shorten of their needs. For that person, this is the palatial palmtop to buy.

Photography by Monica Chin / The Verge