Hardware Overview and CPU Operation

The Dell XPS xiii is the starting time laptop I've had hands-on time with, and one of the first laptops on the market in general, to use 1 of Intel'south new Broadwell-U fifth-generation Core processors. Unlike Core Thousand, which targeted a 4.5W TDP, the Broadwell-U line is designed for more than powerful calculating and come every bit either 15W or 28W parts.

In the XPS 13 nosotros're seeing a 15W Intel Core i5-5200U, which is a mid-table part with reasonable clock speeds designed primarily for efficiency. The nominal TDP (15W) is identical to Intel's concluding-generation Haswell-U processors, such as the popular i5-4200U/4210U, merely with better efficiency. Intel targets power consumption of 7.5W in the 5200U'south 'down' country of 600 MHz, a decent improvement on the 4210U'south 11.5W/800 MHz downwardly state. Naturally power consumption volition be fifty-fifty less when the CPU enters a low power, idling state.

Efficiency improvements have besides allowed Intel to raise the base clock speed of their Broadwell CPUs when targeting a 15W TDP: The i5-5200U is clocked at 2.2 GHz across two cores, up from 1.7 GHz in the i5-4210U. Unmarried-core Turbo Heave clock speeds are the same on both CPUs, at two.vii GHz. Intel also states that their new Broadwell CPU can Turbo Heave up to 2.5 GHz on two cores. L3 cache remains constant at 3 MB for all Core i5 products.

With this data in hand, the new i5-5200U should either exist more efficient than the i5-4210U at similar levels of performance, or faster with similar levels of power consumption. Both are neat results for Intel'southward depression-power mobile CPUs.

On the GPU side, there are a number of improvements. The i5-5200U, like all Broadwell-U 5x00 products, comes with Intel HD Graphics 5500, up from HD Graphics 4400 on the equivalent Haswell processors. The principal alter here is an increase in execution units from 20 to 24, which essentially provides better functioning at similar clock speeds. The clock speed range for the Hard disk 5500 GPU in the 5200U is 300 to 900 MHz, slightly down from the 200 to 1000 MHz range in the 4210U.

I will briefly mention that the XPS 13 comes with two other Broadwell CPU options. The entry-level model comes with a Cadre i3-5010U (ii.1 GHz base, no Turbo, Hard disk 5500 GPU at 850 MHz), and the superlative-finish model is available with a Core i7-5500U (ii.iv GHz base, 3.0 GHz single-cadre Turbo, Hd 5500 GPU at 950 MHz). Most models you'll meet come with the i5-5200U, though if y'all're after a bit of extra ability, the Core i7 model should exist around 10% faster on the CPU side and 5% faster on the GPU thank you to those raised clock speeds.

Aside from Intel's new Broadwell CPU, the XPS xiii comes with either four or 8 GB of DDR3L-RS 1600 MHz memory. Unfortunately at that place's no 16 GB selection for the high-end configurations, though I suspect 8 GB would be fine in virtually situations. I would advise against opting for just 4 GB of RAM equally that might become limited in even basic situations like web browsing with many tabs open. The model I received to review was equipped with 8 GB and that was largely adequate.

Storage starts at a 128 GB M.two solid country drive, with 256 GB available as an optional actress. The model Dell sent over came with 256 GB, and a quick inspection revealed it to be a Samsung model. Upgrading from 128 GB to 256 GB will cost y'all $100.

Wireless connectivity is provided through Dell's Wireless 1560 chip, which includes Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/air-conditioning support on 2.4 and 5.0 GHz bands. There'due south also Bluetooth 4.0 LE support. During my testing I was pretty impressed with the Wi-Fi range of the XPS xiii, although throughput wasn't equally loftier as I would like for local file transfers.

Anyway, let's get on with the all important benchmarks to see how the i5-5200U stacks up to the i5-4210U, which luckily I've already benchmarked in the Alienware 13.

In CPU constrained benchmarks, on average we're seeing an increase in operation of 7% compared to the i5-4210U. This is slightly higher than the increase in two-core Turbo Boost clock speeds of iv%, and so other modest improvements (longer sustained Turbo, higher base clocks) will have contributed to this fairly respectable performance increase.

I didn't see whatever gains higher than eleven% over Intel's last gen role in the CPU department, so improvements in the range of v-10% are as good every bit information technology gets.

As a quick annotation on PCMark results, which measure overall system operation, the defended GPU in the Alienware 13 (the Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M) contributes to a minor score improvement in the OpenGL accelerated test over Intel's integrated graphics. This is why the Alienware thirteen appears to outperform the XPS 13 in these tests, despite the XPS 13 having meliorate CPU operation in general.

Compared to the Core M-5Y70, which is Intel's depression-power iv.5W Broadwell role, the i5-5200U is 36% faster in CPU-spring tasks on average. Although the TDP of the Core i5 CPU is much higher, indicating generally lower efficiency than Core M, yous're getting significantly more performance out of it.