It was 29% faster in Geekbench 5, 24% faster in performance mode in our Handbrake test that encodes a 420MB video as H. The NVIDIA logo, GeForce, GeForce RTX, GeForce RTX Super, GeForce GTX, GeForce GTX Super, GRID, SHIELD, Battery Boost, Reflex, DLSS, CUDA, FXAA, GameStream, G-SYNC, G-SYNC Ultimate, NVLINK, ShadowPlay, SLI, TXAA, PhysX, GeForce Experience, GeForce NOW, Maxwell, Pascal and Turing are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U. We don’t have a laptop in our Pugetbench database with the same CPU and GPU as the XPS 15 9520, but the laptop’s scores are in line with expectations. That aside, I’ll also add that this OLED panel is the better option for casual gaming on this XPS 15 generation.

I also noticed that some of the Performance cores do run hotter than the others in this test, such as Core 3 and Core 5. I found little use for the Cool mode, though, as that offers the power settings of the Quiet mode, but with much louder fans – so limited performance, loud fans, and lower temperatures. Compared to laptops with the same CPU but thicker chassis and more robust thermal solutions, the XPS 15 9520 was a step behind. The RAM and storage are upgradeable, so you could consider this variant if on a tighter budget, if you prefer a matte screen and if don’t need a dGPU, even if you need to accept the tradeoff in battery life. The XPS 15 9520 is more than fast enough for the most demanding productivity users while being reasonably speedy in creative tasks.When you say better performance that's only cause the 3070 ti performs better than the 3050 ti but you wouldn't need the 3070 for video editing anyway? This, however, impacts the performance in sustained loads, as the scores drop as the heat builds-up, and then gradually increase for a few runs, before finally dropping again once the 45W Power Limit kicks in.

The fans spun up completely in performance mode but were surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive, and the keyboard deck and chassis never got more than warm. The miniaturized IO of this XPS 15 generation is a potential deal-breaker for pro-users, though, and something I’d expect Dell to eventually steer away from, as Apple did with the recent MacBook Pros. The display was bright at 391 nits, well above our 300-nit threshold, so it’s visible in all but direct sunlight. It’s still handled by a set of quad speakers that fire through those cuts on the sides of the laptop and through the grills that flank the keyboard. But the trackpad issue drove me insane and having 2 in a row with the same problem made me decide not to go XPS route.

As far as I understand, Dell were able to better optimize the activity of the P and E-Cores than other OEMs, and that shows in real-life use. CONCLUSION: This XPS 15 9520 is more than sufficient for daily use, and even running multiple VMs inside Hyper-V or VMWare Workstation Pro. As with the previous generation, the XPS 15 9520 packs in 86 watt-hours of battery capacity to power high-end components and a high-resolution OLED display. We then went ahead and further verified our findings with the more taxing Cinebench R23 loop test and in Blender, confirming our above findings.

I’ll note that I’m using a newer SpyderX colorimeter than the one used on the other OLED displays in our comparison group. You'd need evidence, though, such as Hwinfo logs showing power drain differences when increasing brightness. Laptop is the perfect balance of size and performance to fuel even more intensive creative projects.The Dell XPS 15 9520 picks up where its predecessor left off, retaining its best qualities and increasing performance.