The Dell XPS 17 belongs to one of the families that helped to define what a modern Windows laptop looks like. It’s all about executive style, and has been one of the few Windows series that has managed to lure some punters away from MacBooks.
Recent Dell XPS lines have finally started to deviate from the style the series has hooked into for a decade — but the Dell XPS 17 is a stalwart. How you feel about that is going to influence whether you think this laptop is an amazing alignment of all things laptop, or a not quite obviously “new” enough, considering its cost.
It starts at $2049/£2299, but for the more workstation-like machine I have here, you’ll pay $3149/£3499. Or a few hundred dollars less judging by near-constant sales Dell seems to run. Should you buy it? Here’s how I got on with it.
Dell XPS 17 (2023)
A potent combination of power and style makes the Dell XPS 17 perhaps the most compelling direct Windows alternative to a MacBook Pro 16. But it has the price to match.
Pros
- Classic XPS top-grade build quality
- All-day light use battery life
- Sharp, colorful screen
Cons
- 720p webcam
- Predictably, uses a lower power GPU iteration
- Pricey
Design
- Aluminium casing
- 2.44kg
- 374 x 248 x 19.5mm
If you’ve ever owned or used a Dell XPS laptop before, the XPS 17 may well seem familiar. It has the series’ staple combination of aluminium and carbon-fibre reinforced polymer.
You get metal on the lid and underside, and a softer, warmer-feeling ultra-tough reinforced plastic for the keyboard surround.
This pairing screams quality and a sort of executive toughness — but it isn’t out to produce the slimmest and lightest laptop around. If that’s what you are after, take a look at something like the LG Gram 17. It’s not a hybrid either, with a hinge that only opens up to the normal laptop angle, not 180 degrees.
The Dell XPS 17 is much more like the MacBook Pro 16, a laptop where that sense of substance and stiffness is all part of the appeal. It also leads to weight of 2.3-2.44kg (depending on spec), way too heavy to be ideal for portable use.
Still, the Dell XPS 17 will fit into a normal rucksack unlike the 17-inch giants of old. Just look around the screen — small borders at every side mean the footprints of these XL laptops are not as imposing as they once were.
You don’t get any classic fat USB-A ports, but the four USB-Cs are all ultra-fast Thunderbolt 4 connectors. And Dell does chuck an adapter in the box that turns one of these ports into an HDMI and USB-A. Additionally, the XPS 17 has a full-size SD card reader and headphone socket, rounding off a pretty comprehensive clutch of connections for this kind of laptop.
Display
- Up to 4K LCD display
- 500-nit maximum brightness
- Touchscreen
The Dell XPS 17 about as good a screen as you could hope for without jumping to what may well be this series’ next level-up: OLED. It has an LCD screen with either a 16:10 Full HD panel or the 4K one I have here.
No OLED means no perfect blacks, and you will notice this in darker rooms, where blacks take on that slight grey glow. Contrast is decent but no more than that.
Everything else is great, though. The Dell XPS 17 reaches about 500 nits maxed out, enough for comfortable use outdoors in the sun even if it is only half the rated brightness of a MacBook Pro, which can get even brighter when playing HDR video.
Colour depth is excellent. It’s rich and accurate enough for pro-grade image work, even though Dell doesn’t make too much noise about the quality of its XPS displays.
The high resolution is ideal for productivity apps too, more than gaming. It makes interface elements look sharp and crisp even at this size.
A touchscreen is the big win the Dell XPS 17 has over its arch rival the MacBook Pro 16. However, you don’t get an active pen stylus in the box – that’s something you’ll have to fork out separately for.
Touchpad and keyboard
- Textured glass touchpad
- White keyboard backlight
Elsewhere in the XPS range, Dell has started to experiment a bit with modernising elements like the keyboard and touchpad. The XPS 17 remains, thankfully, untouched by these.
There are always teething problems with these young interface tech changes, which is why I say ‘thankfully’. The Dell XPS 17 has a classic mechanical clicker touchpad, rather than the trendy haptic style, and it feels great.
Its clicker has a slightly dark vibe that seems more substantial than a bright click, and the touchpad surface is smooth textured glass. There’s plenty of it too.
The Dell XPS 17 keyboard is a little more ordinary. Its feel isn’t miles off that of Apple’s latest keyboard design, but with a little more key travel and a slightly softer actuation. There’s nothing wrong with either of these changes, but, as ever, if you want an even meatier keyboard you might want to check out Lenovo’s nerdiest ThinkPad laptops. Or even a gaming model with a mechanical keyboard.
There’s two-level white backlight here though, helping towards easier use in the evening.
Performance
- Up To Intel Core i9-13900H CPU
- Up to 64GB RAM (32GB reviewed)
- Up to Nvidia RTX 4080 GPU (RTX 4070 reviewed)
The Dell XPS 17 is a serious performance laptop, within reason. It comes in a whole heap of specs and my review sample is one of the most high-end. It packs an Intel Core i9-13900H processor, 32GB RAM, a 1TB SSD and the Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card.
This is about as powerful as laptops of this type get, and the CPU in particular is the same monster chipset used in the most expensive gaming laptops. It makes the Dell XPS 17 ideal for jobs like video editing, if you don’t want to make the leap to a desktop PC.
There are a couple of little weaknesses here. The Dell XPS 17 does not have the same version of the RTX 4070 graphics card as a high-end gaming laptop, it’s the lower-power version. Why? If you want the truly super-powered GPU, you have to put up with a thicker laptop because it will need a cooling system to match.
The Dell XPS 17 is only 2cm thick. It may have uncompromising performance through some eyes, but there are limits. I saw it draw up to 70W, 60W consistently, where some models reach 140W.
You can still play games like Cyberpunk 2077 just fine, particularly as this latest generation of graphics cards supports Nvidia’s jaw-dropping frame generation tech. It can literally more than double the frame rate, without causing the kind of unsightly results seen in the frame-creating motion smoothing used in TVs.
A cooling system compatible with a real sense of style also means there’s a higher pitch tone to the fan noise too, which can be more obvious than a the lower tones of a meaty workstation or gaming PC. You only need to worry about this too much if you plan on riding the Dell XPS 17 hard all day, and consider the slick design here a mere ‘nice to have’.
Battery life and webcam
- 97Wh battery
- 130W USB-C charging
- 720p webcam
The Dell XPS 17 has a massive 97Wh battery. This is almost as large as a laptop battery can get while still being allowed aboard a plane.
Even this kind of capacity doesn’t go that far in plenty of the gaming laptops in which it is used, but the Dell XPS 17 teases pretty solid light-use stamina out here. Despite using a relatively power hungry Core i9 CPU and a 4K display, which often use a lot more juice than a 1080p alternative, I saw almost dead on 10.5 hours of use between charges.
This was when performing a synthetic benchmark, though, so if your browser tab etiquette is terrible or you want to actually strain the processor a bit, that stamina will take a nosedive. It’s an area where Dell just can’t compete with Apple yet: stamina under pressure. Apple’s processors are currently unbeatable at keeping power consumption low even when doing tough jobs.
I did see the Dell XPS 17 last around six hours of light writing work when the screen brightness is maxed-out. Be careful and you can get the laptop to last a full day’s work, which is impressive considering what’s inside.
This is not a bad laptop to take on occasional work trips or holidays, despite its relative heft. And it has a good set of speakers for movie streaming in a hotel too.
They have a small serving of actual bass, plenty of volume and a nice wide sound image. Apple’s MacBook Pro 16 sounds better, but the first time I heard that it seemed remarkably close in quality to a decent small wireless speaker.
The webcam of the XPS 17 is less of a strong point. It’s a 720p camera, in an era when almost all new and expensive laptops have switched over to 1080p, or something even better.
Sure enough, the web chat image is quite soft and stodgy, an issue highlighted further by the large display. Dell needs to sort this next time around, but it should have really done so with this generation.
Verdict
The Dell XPS 17 is a laptop that can take on multiple personalities. It’s a style PC, it’s a workstation, am entertainment unit when there’s no TV nearby, and a more-than-respectable gaming laptop.
Sure, it costs a fortune, and doesn’t represent the cutting edge of tech that the XPS series is meant to be all about. This design, while handsome, may seem a bit long in the tooth to some. And the use of a relatively low-spec webcam is disappointing when almost all the other big-name releases this year use higher-res sensors.
You probably shouldn’t buy this laptop for every day portable use either. While I have done so during testing, upwards of 2kg is really a bit heavy for this job. Have I loved using it, though? Absolutely.