Dell XPS 15 Touch Screen (9520) Laptop Review

Every year, upgrades to major models are made to Dell’s high-end XPS line, which frequently appears on lists of the finest laptops. The Dell XPS 15 (2022) falls between 13-inch and 17-inch laptops among the three available screen sizes. At first appearance, it would seem to be the Goldilocks of XPS systems: just right—not too little, not too big, not too lightweight, not too heavy. However, is it actually “just right”?

Dell’s 2022 XPS 15 is a well-built laptop that works admirably despite having a tiny range of connectors and a mediocre webcam.

Dell XPS 15 9520

Technical Specifications

pros and cons

Dell XPS 15 Touch Screen Review

Display

The OLED display on the Dell XPS 15 provides an edge-to-edge image with incredibly slim bezels when it is open. The 16:10 panel’s 3,456 by 2,160-pixel resolution—which Dell refers to as “3.5K”—is almost as high-resolution as 16:9 displays with a 4K (3,840 by 2,160) pixel count. Everything you’ve come to expect from OLED is present in the 15.6-inch panel, including extra-sharp clarity, brilliant color, and deep, rich blacks. Despite the fact that it has a touch screen, you might want to keep a cloth nearby to remove fingerprints and smudges.

The 3.5K OLED panel from Dell was among the best available, offering almost 400 nits of brightness and gorgeous color that completely spanned the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts. You’ll have to give up OLED’s deep blacks in exchange for a backlit IPS display like the one on the MacBook Pro if you need anything brighter. But the XPS 15 is difficult to match if you’re looking for a 15-inch laptop that is just stunning.

Design & Built

The XPS 15 is the epitome of what the perfect full-size laptop should be, thanks to the hard work of Dell’s designers and engineers. The plain, bare-metal lid and frame provide a striking silhouette when closed. And suppose Dell’s Platinum Silver finish isn’t your cup of tea. In that case, you can always choose Frost White, which provides the XPS an even more stern appearance while still being fashionable in an office atmosphere without being over the top.

Featuring Windows Hello face recognition for safe logins, the XPS 15 fits a 720p webcam above the display despite the minimal bezels. While there is no sliding privacy shutter for the camera, there isn’t a notch that extends into the show like on the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro.

The 3.5K OLED panel from Dell was among the best available, offering almost 400 nits of brightness and gorgeous color that completely spanned the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts. You’ll have to give up OLED’s deep blacks in exchange for a backlit IPS display like the one on the MacBook Pro if you need anything brighter. But the XPS 15 is difficult to match if you’re looking for a 15-inch laptop that is just stunning.

With dimensions of 0.73 by 13.6 by 9.1 inches and a weight of just 4.31 pounds—one pound less than the Asus ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED and half a pound lighter than the MacBook Pro 16—the XPS 15 is one of the slimmest and lightest full-size laptops available. Better still, the Dell is able to reduce weight without sacrificing functionality or battery life.

Keypad & Touchpad

The keypad is spacious and has huge, evenly-spaced buttons as well as rather large Fn keys. The arrow keys are all slightly wider than the QWERTY keys, and the Enter key is double-height and exceptionally wide. Positive movement is there, with a slight amount of resistance on the downstroke and a soft bounce-back. There isn’t much keyboard noise; in fact, because I type with a gentle touch, I only made the tiniest “click-clack.” The on/off button, which is located at the right end of the Fn key row, has a fingerprint scanner built into it if you’d prefer not to use facial identification.

Large in size is the touchpad. Dell’s touchpad is incredibly comfortable to use because it nearly utilized the entire height that was available to it. I have absolutely no issues.

Performance

We matched the Dell XPS 15 Touch Screen (9520) against some of the best 15- and 16-inch laptops on the market for our benchmark tests, including several with OLED panels and comparable technology, including the aforementioned Apple MacBook Pro 16 and Asus ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED. We also added the Asus Vivobook Pro 16X OLED as well as the XPS 15 OLED, Dell’s forerunner from late 2021. (9510).

Tests

Our main productivity test is UL’s PCMark 10, which evaluates a system’s capability for office-focused tasks including word processing, spread sheets, web surfing, and video conferencing by simulating a range of real-world productive and content-creation processes. To evaluate the boot drive of a laptop’s load time and throughput, we also conduct the Full System Drive test in PCMark 10.

Then, using three CPU-intensive, multithreaded tests, we put the CPU under a lot of strain. In a ten-minute test run, Maxon’s Cinebench R23 renders a complex picture repeatedly using the Cinema 4D engine. Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs replicates real-world applications like speech recognition, machine learning, and PDF rendering. To compare how rapidly PCs perform this difficult media operation, we also transcode a 12-minute film clip from 4K into 1080p quality using HandBrake 1.4.

The PugetBench for Photoshop productivity test from Puget Systems, a maker of workstations, evaluates a PC’s performance for multimedia and content creation using Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s well-known image editor. It is an extension that automates a number of standard and GPU-accelerated Photoshop operations, such as opening, flipping, resizing, & exporting a picture, as well as the use of masks, gradients fills, and filters.

The model 9520 provides an improvement in almost every performance metric over last year’s already outstanding XPS 15, which used an 11th Generation Intel Core i7 processor. This includes managing video files and multitasking across a variety of apps.

Gaming & Graphics

However, it isn’t always the winner in these testing, frequently coming in second to laptops powered by top-tier AMD or Apple CPUs. And the system’s power and heat restrictions, which allow it to outperform laptops with dedicated graphics but prevent it from matching the AAA gaming fps you’d get with a desktop GeForce card, temper the extra power of a separate Nvidia GPU.

In order to assess visuals, we utilize two DirectX 12 game simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Time Spy and the more subdued Night Raid, which are acceptable for laptops with integrated graphics (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Additionally, we do two tests from the cross-platform GFXBench 5, which places a heavy emphasis on both high-level, game-like picture rendering and low-level tasks like texturing. Its 1440p Aztec Ruins & 1080p Car Chase samples are produced offscreen to support various display resolutions, work graphics & compute shaders using hardware tessellation and the OpenGL programming interface, respectively.

Despite having the same Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti GPU as last year’s model, the new XPS 15 offered just slight upgrades. The improvement appears to be due to the upgraded processor. However, these figures don’t point to a powerful gaming laptop. Instead, they recommend a terrific system for productivity and content production, with some space for after-hours gameplay as long as you’re willing to reduce the resolution and level of detail.

Connectivity

The XPS 15’s port selection is the one thing that might be thought of as insufficient. The model 9520 doesn’t exactly lack in capability thanks to its three USB-C connections (two Thunderbolt 4 and one USB 3.2), an SD card slot, and—even with the AC charger plugged in—two quick ports. A USB Type-A, Ethernet, or HDMI port, however, can be absent.

Even though a wired Ethernet port or a dedicated HDMI output are more crucial features, the card slot is still a welcome addition for anyone using a conventional camera to take pictures or films. Thanks to Dell, the laptop comes with a USB-A and Ethernet adaptor. It’s the XPS 15’s one and only design concession, and while it’s a little one, you’ll still need to carry it in case you wish to use a common peripheral.

Wi-Fi 6E offers the fastest rates and Bluetooth 5.2 gives you access to a wide range of accessories and headphones, making wireless connectivity more flexible.

Battery

We use the open-source Blender film Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window) to play a locally saved 720p video clip while testing the battery life of several laptops. Prior to the test, we make sure the battery is fully charged and turn off Wi-Fi and the keyboard’s illumination. Additionally, we gauge the screen’s brightness in nits as well as its coverage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts using a Datacolor SpyderX Elite colorimeter (candelas per square meter).

Another admirable outcome was achieved here, with the new XPS 15 offering well over 12 hours of runtime without a power source. Even if it doesn’t match the MacBook Pro’s and certain ultraportables’ exceptional efficiency, that is more than enough to enable you to leave the house even without a charger. If you don’t spend the entire day using the CPU and GPU with demanding programs like Photoshop or Premiere, you shouldn’t have any issue working a full day without a wall outlet.

The 3.5K OLED panel from Dell was among the best available, offering almost 400 nits of brightness & gorgeous color that completely spanned the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts. You’ll have to give up OLED’s deep blacks in exchange for a backlit IPS display like the one on the MacBook Pro if you need anything brighter. But the XPS 15 is difficult to match if you’re looking for a 15-inch laptop that is just stunning.

Conclusion

There are a lot of advantages to the Dell XPS 15 (2022). The build quality is exceptional, and the speakers that come included in every configuration and the 3.5K OLED touch screen in my evaluation setup are also fantastic. There are many configuration options, and it’s impressive that you can pick 4TB of storage (2TB in the UK) if money is no object.

Nevertheless, the 720p webcam is disappointing for such a high-end laptop, and Dell could have aided users with legacy equipment by having onboard HDMI and USB-A connectors. If these problems don’t matter, though, the Dell XPS 15 Touch Screen (2022) might actually be the XPS world’s Goldilocks.