Last October Dell quietly updated its suave XPS 13 range of ultraportables. Pretty much since their inception, these beasts have been the undisputed champions of the premium laptop plains. Dell has hit on a winning recipe, and wisely chosen to only update and tweak it on this, its fourth generation.
At the heart of the machine, there’s now a Core i5-7200U or i7-7500U processor. We tested the 2.7GHz i7 Developer Edition, which came with 16GB RAM, a 512GB SSD and the same not-of-this-world 3200 x 1800-resolution glossy touchscreen as the previous model, the 9350. This notebook also ships with Ubuntu Linux, and since we already reviewed the Windows version, this write-up will be fairly Linux-centric.
The main strong point in this outing is the migration to the Kaby Lake architecture. This promises around a 10% performance increase, improved battery life and, thanks to the new Intel HD 620 graphics, accelerated VP9 and 10-bit HEVC video playback.
Beyond that we have a larger battery and a newer ‘Killer’ Wi-Fi chip from Qualcomm. Getting Linux to play nice with new and shiny hardware could potentially be a struggle, but Dell has worked hard to ensure that, while some benchmarks lag behind Windows, everything works …read more
Source:: techradar.com – PC and Mac
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