My trusty, beefy and heavy Alienware M17x has been showing signs of dying and is now clearly in need of replacement. I have some nice discounts available at Dell so I’ll go that way. While I love my nice large 17 inch 1920x1080 screen on the M17x, and the power of the system, it is HEAVY and it runs hot enough it can be hard to sit on my lap. Also, the battery life is practically no more than about an hour to hour and a half, making it not very useful on a long flight.
So - I think I’ve decided on the Dell XPS 15. One thing that is furstrating these days at Dell is you can’t “build your own” - it used to be you could select every option for every aspect of the system, now you only get a few choices.
One of those choices is a 4K screen vs. a 1920x1080 screen. 4K is defined as 3840x2160 by them. The 4K is an extra $400. So, what are the pros and cons of the 4K vs. the 1920x1080 screen? I plan on having this for at least 3+ years. Most of what I will do will be work (as in MS Office), web browsing, writing, a lot of video editing, and some gaming (but usually strategy, etc. - games that work well on a laptop. FWIW this comes with a i7-6700HQ quad core and nvidia GeForce GTX 960M) but gaming is not a primary use - I do most of my gaming on my PS4.
So - plusses and minuses for the 4K vs the 1920x1080 screen? Wil it have a big effect on battery life? Thanks. Oh yeah - getting non-touch screen and this will be what forces me to move to Windows 10 (sigh.)
If you’re gonna roll with 4K and a 960M, expect to decrease resolution on virtually all games. I was watching a review of the new EVGA 17-incher just yesterday talking about how the 980M (basically a 970) really couldn’t keep up at the laptop’s native resolution (most gaming laptops packing 4K screens opt for the larger, louder, heavier, hotter full desktop-class 980).
For web browsing and the like, of course, the 960’ll be fine, and I do love me some hi-rez displays. . . but yeah, gaming on that at native rez ain’t gonna happen. Hell, even 1080P on a 960M is gonna be dicey for a lot of stuff. I know it’s not your primary purpose, but it’s definitely something to keep in mind, since it’s gonna be more tinkering w/ graphics settings and resolutions, trying to find something it can run but also scales cleanly, etc.
Screen resolution will certainly impact battery life. The big question for Jeff’s use is whether the 4K panel will be enough easier on the eyes for documents as to be worth $400. Having never had a 4K laptop, I don’t know the answer to that one.
I have a 4K 15" laptop that I use for work stuff. I generally like it over my old 1080p 15" laptop, but I would absolutely go someplace where you can get a feel for whether you would consider it a positive. I think it’s a lot like larger vs smaller phones where there isn’t a universal right answer.
The XPS15 is a 15" display, obviously. The 4k display greatly inhibits battery life, and note that the XPS15 consumes too much power to charge on an airplane. So once you’re done with its 6 hours or so, you’re done. Of course that’s enough time to fly cross-continent, so not a huge deal.
I would go for the 1080p, except you can’t get a touchscreen at 1080p, and touchscreens on laptops are really surprisingly useful.
Aside from that discrete GPU, I really like the XPS13 more than than the XPS15. It is dramatically more portable. I would only get the XPS15 if I didn’t intend to travel with it very often.
@spiffy: You sit very close to a laptop screen. You read text on a monitor or phone, versus watching movies on a TV. High-DPI is very noticeable.
Thanks for the replies. Stusser, I agree on the portability factor - I’m traveling right now and this huge heavy Alienware M17x is a pain to lug through airports (though I’ve been doing it for about 3 years. ) But since this is my only PC and not just an adjunct to my desktop (I.e. I don’t have a desktop, this will be my PC for 100% of my PC needs) I’m already nervous about moving down from the 17 inch to the 15 inch.
I’m opting for non-touch screen just because I’ve never had that on a laptop and thus won’t miss it and I’m an old curmudgeon (if I could get Windows 7 on this I would! LOL).
Since I’ve been happy with 1920x1080 on the 17 inch Alienware and it sounds like the 4K has a big impact on battery life, I am leaning for the 1080 at this point.
So get the 13" and plug it into a thunderbolt dock when you’re at home with a 27" monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Portable when you need it and tons of space to spread out too.
Pretty soon there will be thunderbolt docks with enthusiast GPUs built in too, so you can really game on it.
Touchscreens are really nice on laptops. Tough choice there.
I would think that on a 17 inch screen, pixels are going to be wasted creating a resolution which is beneath the ability of your eyes to actually detect.
Looking at a photo of the inside of the XPS 15 with the 84 Whr battery, I don’t see a space to add an additional HD to complement the SSD that comes with it. Am I missing something?
I just picked up a the Alienware 17 with 980M and 1080P. I love it, it’s got great battery life for a 17 I can run all day on battery at work and I’ve never had a 17 inch gaming laptop that lasted more than an hour or two. That’s using the intel video of course once you kick in the gaming card I’m sure that battery gets chewed up but for me it’s a nice balance. After research the 4K just didn’t make sense for me, 1080p was the sweet spot for power, use and cost.
Well, the 4k resolution would make a difference if you were getting up real close to the screen, but 1080p works really great for that now anyway. Seems like overkill for 400 bucks to me.
When I had a gaming laptop (college student) I also had a monitor at home to DVI to for gaming. 17-15inches is just too small to game on. Though it worked for LAN parties quite well.
As an owner of a 27" 4k monitor that’s certainly not true, and I am puzzled by how frequently I hear this claim (always from people who don’t own something 4k). Assuming that I am viewing content that takes advantage of the extra pixels, there is a clear difference between this and 1080p and I sit pretty far from my pc monitor (not tv distance but I am not close).
Of course, with that said, maybe 17" is too small to get a worthwhile advantage.
I have a maxed out XPS15. Agree with what Stusser says above, particularly when it comes to touchscreens - I thought when purchasing it that I’d never use the screen in that fashion and that it would have little (to negative) utility – now I would never buy another laptop without touchscreen. It’s very handy, in ways I didn’t expect.
Ok, that’s good info. So - it seems like if you get the 84 Whr battery you can’t add a second HDD, and even if you get the lesser battery you have to jump through a lot of hoops to add an HDD to accompany the SSD. I’d love to have a 1T SSD but that’s overkill in terms of cost for what I need (currently my 750 HDD that complements my SSD is just to store files I use a lot.)
And damn Dell, they no longer yet you just configure a system. So I can’t seem to pick a system with the combination of features I want. Sigh - maybe I just need to pick something else.
I got the xps 13 and went with the 1080 option for a several reasons. First, I thought I’d get better performance for gaming. Second, I knew I’d get better battery life. Third, the Dell 1080p screen is matte so I wouldn’t be constantly seeing a mirror image of myself. Last, I didn’t think it was worth the extra moolah. Would it be cool to have a to us screen? Yes, I suppose so from time to time but not nearly as cool as it would be if it could do tablet form factor. And then I would have finger prints all over my screen.
Yeah, I keep seeing everyone talking about how they could not go back after using a touch screen, and I use my iPad enough I can understand that. But since I’ve never used a touch screen on a laptop and I’m used to the trackpad/mouse, I guess I won’t feel like I’m missing anything (as long as Windows 10 doesn’t make you feel like you HAVE to have a touch screen - I won’t be using Windows 10 until I get a new laptop.)
I see quite a few people on notebookreview.com talking about the scaling issues they sometimes have with 4K screens. Probably wouldn’t be a big deal, but I’m very happy with my 1920x1080 17" screen on my Alienware M17x, so I suspect I’d be happy with it on a 15 inch screen. And since battery life is a key for me, I’m leaning that way. OTOH, if the config I end up with forces me to take the 4K screen, I’m sure I’ll be happy with it, and even the reduced battery life will be a lot longer than the app. 1.5 hours I get on this beast.
I also just splurged on an xps 13 with 4K touchscreen. (It arrived 2 days ago.) I also didn’t think I’d use the touchscreen at all, but one of the first thing I did was to swipe-page-up on the browser. I’M HOOKED!!!
Yes, the screen is glossy as heck. It’s only noticeable if you’re a fan of Dark Themes. Can someone tell me how to clean fingerprints off of it? Simple wipe with a microfibre cloth?
I’ve not tried to game on this yet, but am looking forward to it, since the GPU is actually comparable to my 8 yrs old ati 3850?
I’ve only seen one bad scaling issues so far: Media Player Classic’s play/pause buttons are fixed-pixel-sized, so they’ve become the size of the letter “o” right here. Steam client & Chrome seems fine.
