Dell XPS 15 9520 - Nuclear Review

Originally published in early 2022. Text review adapted from YouTube video script. Original video currently only available at patreon.com/NuclearNotebook.

This is Dell’s XPS 15 9520. It looks like a fancy Ultrabook, packs in some serious hardware, and the press calls it the best Windows laptop.

It’s definitely a bit of a looker, and since there seems to be a general consensus that you can actually game on it, I thought we should probably check one out.

Specifications & Features

The unit I have here is currently the lowest-end configuration available in Australia, with a Full HD-Plus display, Core i7-12700H, GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, 16GB of DDR5 RAM and half a terabyte of storage.

Given that most of the specifications here are identical to what you’ll find in a thousand-dollar entry-level gaming laptop, that $3500 price tag is definitely cause for concern, although as usual for a Dell this one’s almost always on some sort of sale.

The marketing pitch for the XPS is that it’s a creator’s machine, but in reality the only vaguely creator-centric feature is support for Nvidia’s Studio drivers which may prove more stable in creative applications than the more frequently-updated Game Ready drivers.

Dell don’t really have much to say about this one, although I am going to call out this section of the product page that claims 100% of the enclosure, and specifically the chassis, is CNC aluminium and notes some alleged advantages over magnesium.

Yeah, righto. This is magnesium…

And this is carbon fiber…

“100% aluminium” indeed. Off to a great start, then.

In the Box

Inside the posher-than-usual box, you’ll find the laptop itself, a reasonably-sized 130-watt USB-C power adapter which might last longer than three weeks if you’re luckier than I am, a USB-C dongle with a single USB Type-A and HDMI out, and the usual documentation.

External Interface Extravaganza

Around the right hand side of the XPS you’ll find two of what look like air intakes but aren’t – the one at the front is a speaker grille for the side-firing woofers, and the one toward the rear is for the bottom-mounted WiFi antennas. Both are gasketed off so no air comes in here.

Next up there’s a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port – that’s right, for whatever reason this one doesn’t support Thunderbolt – with DisplayPort output and PowerDelivery, a full-size SD card reader, and a combined 3.5mm headphone and microphone jack.

Along the left hand side there’s a Noble lock slot, two Thunderbolt 4 ports with DisplayPort and PowerDelivery support, and once again an antenna slot and woofer grille.

Intake vents for the XPS 15 run along the base of the unit which when combined with the extremely thin and short rubber feet means that cooling is compromised when the machine is sitting flat on a desk.

New for 2022, the lid has been welded shut to address complaints from Reddit users that it was excessively possible to open.

After getting mine open using a hydraulic press and sharpened steel wedge, something I was completely unprepared for was the surprisingly poor fit and finish of the hinge and display assembly.

The display wobbles far more than you’d expect from a device this price range, the lower bezel on both sides flexes in and out as you move the screen, and there’s a noticeable squelching noise coming from the double sided tape inside.

All of this fragility appears to be coming from inside the display and lid assembly, because as you can see, the (very) thick hinges are firmly bolted into the magnesium chassis structure in the main housing, so at least this area is about as heavy-duty as it gets.

Input Devices

Moving on, inside there’s an enormous trackpad occupying about half the palmrest area, and a fairly basic keyboard with a white backlight flanked by two speakers.

The trackpad is a bit of a mixed blessing. The extended size is great, but I had constant struggles with poor palm rejection causing both unintended movements and clicks while typing, and irritating delays in accepting input when I was trying to move the cursor.

The keyboard is pretty decent. I have no complaints about the layout and do appreciate the fast fingerprint sensor integrated into the power button.

The key switch mechanisms themselves are nicely weighted and reasonably tactile, but they do sound a bit plasticky and cheap to me.

Worth noting is that the soft-touch coated carbon-fiber palmrests feel absolutely lovely and I do miss them when switching back to another laptop.

Display

The LCD panel fitted here would be great in a laptop costing around half as much as this one. You probably shouldn’t have to pay more to get one of the higher-end panels but Dell are leaning into displays as an up-sell so it is what it is.

In the uncalibrated out-of-the-box state, maximum brightness hits 540 nits and contrast is an excellent 1700:1.

sRGB coverage is a full 100%, but that’s it, this isn’t a wide-gamut display.

Since calibration is reductive, maximum brightness drops below the rated spec to 480 nits when properly calibrated to sRGB D65.

Sound

The sound system in this laptop is surprisingly decent.

On each side, you’ve got one small tweeter mounted next to the keyboard, firing directly up, and one larger woofer underneath.

This setup is both tuned and amplified well enough that you won’t constantly be reaching for headphones or external speakers for watching YouTube videos or playing games.

Battery

Battery life in our usual tests was spectacular.

While idle on the Windows desktop with the display set to 300-nits of brightness, I recorded 19 hours and 16 minutes.

With heavy internet use and YouTube constantly playing, again with the display set to 300 nits, this dropped to 10 hours 4 minutes.

I would love an explanation from Dell’s engineers regarding the insane discrepancy between this machine and their 2022 G15, given their identical processors and identical battery capacities.

Interestingly, the battery charging circuit is cooled by a copper heat spreader which is then coupled to the lower case with a thermal pad. This is probably made necessary by the support for fast-charging.

Storage

The Western Digital SN810 SSD as fitted to this unit is awesome, and about as fast as SSDs get at the moment. Note that there is one free NVME slot in the XPS for a second drive, although once again Dell aren’t nice enough to include the required screw.

DPC Latency (Windows)

DPC latency issues are rampant on this one. This looks bad in LatencyMon, but it’s super obvious just using the laptop normally.

The sound frequently pops and stutters, and you’ll even see the mouse pointer briefly freezing for no reason every now and then.

It’s pretty gross and completely rules the XPS out for any audio work.

Not So Skinny

Before we jump into thermals & performance I just want to point out that contrary to initial impressions, the XPS 15 isn’t actually much thinner than something like a Razer Blade.

Instead Dell have used the optical illusion of tapering the edges off to make it look skinnier than it really is, so the cooling solution isn’t quite as compromised as you’d think.

Keep this in mind because things are going to get a little bit stupid from here on in.

Fan Noise

The fans on the XPS are extremely slow to kick in, but will eventually spin up and become audible.

You’ll certainly be able to hear them under a sustained workload, but compared to a full-on gaming laptop, they’re distinctly less noisy.

Heat measurements (external)/FLIR

Skin temperatures on the XPS take a while to rise because of all the thermal insulation Dell have applied inside but after an hour or so of light usage you’ll see the palmrest and keyboard area sitting between 30 and 35 degrees Celsius, with similar temperatures on the base cover.

Under a heavy load, the palmrests stay cool but the keyboard heats up significantly, hitting around 50 degrees towards the centre.

On the lower case there are localised hot spots in the mid-40-degree range above the CPU and GPU but the majority of the housing stays at around 30.

Cooling & Power Delivery

The cooler in the XPS is the familiar twin fan “angry owl” design you’ll see in most high-performance or gaming laptops.

There are only two heatpipes, but it’s only expected to cool a 45-watt CPU and a 45-watt GPU.

On the GPU side, that 45 watts includes Nvidia Dynamic Boost, which moves a few watts from the CPU over to the GPU under load, so in theory you would expect around 75 watts shared between the two chips.

This low combined power figure is fully factored into the size of the power supply, cooler, fans, and ventilation, so it’s completely reasonable to expect to be able to fully exploit what limited performance there is under a heavy workload.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case at all, at least not without significant tinkering.

I’ll draw your attention to the unusual sheet of black plastic hiding underneath the cooler.

These (blue) thermal pads on the rear of the cooler are supposed to be making direct, uninterrupted contact with the parts they are intended to cool. They are not.

I’ve done quite a lot of testing to try to work out the point of this thing, and unfortunately it turns out that it definitely is a thermal insulator, and it seems to only be there because someone at Dell decided the skin temperature on the bottom case needed to be a few degrees cooler.

For a simple example of the effect this has, here’s two thermal camera images showing temperatures on the coldplate right above the CPU’s VRM MOSFETs. On the left, the plastic sheet is installed, and on the right it has been removed.

The higher temperature on the right is better, because it clearly shows that the cooler pulling more heat out of the MOSFETs. With the plastic installed, that heat stays trapped inside.

I’m not currently equipped to directly measure the temperatures of the components themselves, but you get the idea. I would expect even the temperatures on the backside of the coldplate to be far higher with the bottom case installed and even moreso if the machine was operating in an environment with a higher ambient temperature.

Given that Dell took years to start properly cooling the XPS 15’s voltage regulators in the first place, this massive step backwards is very disappointing, and you would be right to be concerned about the effects this could have on long-term reliability.

Thankfully, Dell have decided to thoroughly cripple the long-term power delivery, so this might not be quite as big an issue as you’d expect.

Underneath the cooler and the plastic sheet of doom, there’s a 5-plus-2-phase power supply for the CPU, and a basic three-phase setup for the low-power RTX 3050.

Copper coldplates for the CPU and GPU do exhibit some pitting and scoring which is a little worse than I’d like to see but as always, thermal paste is designed to fill these gaps anyway.

Throttling tests

Right, let’s see how this thing handles some heavy lifting.

In a CPU-only workload running Cinebench for 30 minutes, the XPS has a pretty hot and wild start, slinging just over 80 watts at the CPU in the first few seconds but it settles down to exactly 45 watts for the remainder of the test, with the Core i7 running happily at around 80 degrees. No problems here.

But check out the mess that happens when you load up the RTX 3050 Ti at the same time.

This is by far the most chaotic thing I’ve ever seen a laptop do.

The GPU starts out at 45 watts, slams down to around 20 watts, then rockets back up to 45 and stays there indefinitely, holding onto about 1400MHz.

The CPU on the other hand is smashing up and down between around 40 watts and 15 watts, in a way that makes absolutely no sense.

Just look at the core temperatures while this is happening – they’re pretty much ice cold just like you’d expect on a gaming laptop. There’s no thermal throttling here, the cooler is doing a fantastic job of pushing the heat out of the machine.

You might also notice the temperatures are constantly headed downward, and jumping back to the power and speed chart, you can see the same trend happening here.

The Core i7 is gradually starved of more and more power over time. I’ve seen it drop as low as about 12 watts at which point the chip is running well under 1GHz and is basically useless.

To show you what this should, and could, look like, here’s the exact same test run again after applying all the fixes explained in a previous video. The XPS could have been shipped in this state instead of functionally broken, but it wasn’t.

Conclusion

So with all of that being the case, I don’t think there’s any point commenting on the actual benchmark scores I’ve gotten for this one – the CPU is OK if it’s all you’re using, but the data is completely meaningless for combined workloads like gaming, since the XPS manages to keep its power levels up just long enough to turn in misleading results.

In theory, if the machine was competently set up, it would sit here on our Relative Gaming Performance chart.

It should be fairly obvious at this point that you shouldn’t buy this laptop for gaming or other similarly heavy-duty workloads unless you’re comfortable pulling apart and modifying it.

And on that note, I think we’re done here.

If I’m being honest, and that is the whole point of a review, I think this laptop is a good-looking, flakily assembled, heavily compromised and unreasonably expensive netbook, designed primarily by a committee that want a product that does a bit of everything but none of it well.

Hideous DPC latency issues and lack of proper display calibration rule out content creators almost entirely.

The battery life is impressive, but if that’s all you’re after, there’s a good chance you’re better off with something from the fruit company anyway.

Dell really need to go back to the drawing board on this product and decide who it’s actually for, and then engineer it to actually work for that person.

As it stands, no matter who you are or why you need a laptop, there’s probably something either better or cheaper for you than the XPS 15.