Dell XPS 15 2-In-1 (9575) Review: An Ultra-Powerful, Premium Convertible Laptop
Dell XPS 15 2-In-1: Storage, Productivity And Content Creation Tests
To start things off and get a sense for how the new XPS 15 2-In-1's storage components perform, we fired-up ATTO for a quick sanity check on sequential disk transfer speeds across various file sizes, with both read and write workloads.
ATTO Disk Benchmark, Testing NVMe Solid State Storage
Our Dell XPS 15 2-In-1 was outfitted with a Toshiba NVMe solid state drive that isn't the fastest we have seen, but still offers plenty of throughput. Reads peaked a bit over the 3GB/s mark and writes hovered around 940MB/s to 1GB/s.
Geekbench And Cinebench
We kicked off our general purpose benchmarks with a cross-platform CPU compute benchmark called Geekbench and then ran Cinebench R15, a 3D rendering benchmark that tests both the CPU and GPU engines in the processor. Cinebench is developed by Maxon, which is better known for its Cinema 4D software employed in professional 3D rendering and animation studios. We use both of Cinebench’s integrated tests for CPU and GPU.
The three fastest machines in the multi-threaded Cinebench CPU test -- the XPS 15 2-In-1, XPS 13, and latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon -- are all tightly grouped, with only a 6 point spread separating the machines. In the OpenGL GPU test, however, nothing comes close the XPS 15 2-In-1. The Radeon RX Vega M GL pushing the pixels in this machine crushes everything else we tested, including the NVIDIA GeForce MX150.
PCMark 10 Benchmarks
Next, we'll move from pure content creation in Cinebench, to productivity and mixed usage with PCMark. We're representing all tests from the PCMark 10 benchmark suite, including the Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation and and total PCMark score. The Essentials test covers workloads like web browsing, video conferencing and app start-up times, while Productivity tests everyday office apps from spreadsheets to word processing. Finally, Digital Content Creation tests performance of a machine with respect to photo and video editing, as well as rendering and visualization workloads.
The XPS 15 2-In-1 put a hurting on all of the other machines we tested in three of the four benchmarks represented here. In the PCMark 10 Productivity and Digital Content Creation tests, the XPS 15 2-In-1 blew past every other machine, which is reflected in its dominant overall PCMark 10 score. In the Essentials test, the XPS 15 2-In-1 got edged out by the Acer Swift 3, but that sole 2nd place finish wasn't enough to drag down the overall score.
