Dell XPS 17 (9700) Preview: Hands-On With A 4K InfinityEdge Beauty
Luckily, we have a brand-new XPS 17 in-house, and we’re giving it a thorough workout through our benchmark regimen. We’re not quite ready to give you our complete review on the machine, but we thought that we’d jot down a few early impressions on the XPS 17 to give you a little primer.
The XPS 17 is a return to form for Dell, and its large footprint is perfect for those that want a lot of screen real estate to work with, and don’t mind the added girth that comes with it. Even so, the XP 17 isn’t exactly a heavyweight monster – it weighs in at a relatively spry 4.65 pounds, for models without a touch screen. However, our example weighs in at 5.53 pounds, which still isn’t bad for a machine with a 17-inch display.
Our particular review sample is packing a 10th generation Intel Core processor backed up by a whopping 64GB of DDR4-2933 (the maximum for this model). We’re also graced with a 2TB PCIe SSD, a brawny NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q discrete GPU, and the 4K UHD+ Infinity Edge display option (a 1920x1200 Infinity Edge display comes standard).
Overall, we’ve been impressed with the build quality of the machine, which you would expect from the XPS family. In addition, the keyboard continues to comfortable place for you to rest your fingers, and we were definitely satisfied with the key travel. However, some might not be pleased to learn that there is no 10-key setup of to the right-hand side of the machine (which is usually found on 17-inch class notebooks). Instead, Dell decided to place an emphasis on the excellent stereo speakers – you’ll have to be the judge if this setup fits in with your workflow.
With that being said, this is just an early hands-on look at what we have in store for you with our upcoming XPS 17 (9700) review. We’ll be getting into more detail on the integrated webcam (which people are relying on more heavily these days due to COVID-19), performance from the Comet Lake-H processor and GeForce RTX GPU, and battery life figures. Stay tuned for the review; it’ll definitely be worth the wait.
