Dell xps special edition review

Although it lacks the stylishness and overall polish of the XPS laptop line, the front is attractive and allows for ample airflow while also being easy to pop off and clean. The rest of the chassis is sort of a basic beige box, but since it's magnesium alloy it's at least lightweight at less than 20 pounds. There's a lot of clearance around the processor and the graphics card so airflow from its fans isn't restricted. The desktop stays remarkably quiet even when you're rendering a 4K video or hitting more than frames per second with games like Far Cry V in full HD at high graphics settings.

The 10th-gen Intel processor in my system performed well, but based on newer systems we've tested with 11th-gen chips, you can expect it to be faster now. The rear panel has plenty of connection options, including four USB 3. There is no Thunderbolt 3 or 4 port, which would also be handy for faster file transfers or running a hub to your desk. There is a USB 3. A small laptop always made the most sense for me because I spend more time commuting and working on buses and trains than I do working at home.

Or at least I did until the pandemic hit, and then my years of commuting came to a screeching halt. I suddenly had a tiny desk at home for the first time in more than a decade and was working on an underpowered laptop for my needs that couldn't be upgraded. You can get it configured for your performance needs, even if that includes video and photo editing and gaming.

It's also a solid pick if you're looking for something small and attractive that can start out with a more modest configuration and be built out as your needs change. It's the flexibility you won't get with a smaller Mac Mini-type computer or an all-in-one but not so big you'll lose a bunch of floor or desk space to it.

CNET editors pick the products and services we write about. When you buy through our links, we may get a commission. For example, the Special Edition offers the option of an unlocked Core i7 K-series processor that you can overclock in the BIOS, while the regular version offers only locked processors. Our review unit is the base configuration with a GPU upgrade. All in all, you get a processor with four cores and no Hyper-Threading that runs at a 2.

Dell offers three other primary configurations of the Special Edition, each further customizable, so if you have your heart set on a faster CPU or graphics card, more memory, an SSD, or a bigger hard drive, you can have it. Its hardware does have some limitations, however, which are especially noticeable when compared to PCs with Core i7 chips. Overall, though, it still provides a mighty fine experience. Its mid-range Core i5 processor constrains overall performance—relative to the top dog in our comparison, which paired a swift Core iK with a GTX , the XPS Tower was 22 percent slower.

We fired it up with the settings on Ultra and the 4K texture pack installed. The Cerise ran at That said, the XPS Tower still delivers a great gaming experience at either resolution. To ramp up the pressure a little more and to see how the XPS Tower would do in a different game , we next fired up Rise of the Tomb Raider. You still hit that minimum of 60 fps. With gaming performance settled, we moved on to testing workstation duties. Cinebench R15 is a pure CPU test that tasks the processor with rendering a 3D scene using either one or all of the cores at hand.

Like any good CPU benchmark, it takes advantage of everything a CPU has to offer, so more cores and higher clocks always work out better. Looking at the results makes us want to call an ambulance for the XPS Tower.

Nobody was expecting it to pull off miracle performance, but even the Haswell i7 processor in our zero-point machine gave that i which is two generations newer a good wallop. That point is also pressed in our next test. For an idea of how a system will perform during longer CPU-intensive tasks, we turn to Handbrake.

The more cores a processor has, the faster it goes. Because the XPS tower rocks a 65W processor that falls in the middle of that lineup, we expected its score to do likewise.