**The XPS 17: A Desktop Replacement with a Portable Twist**

In recent years, Dell has been pushing the boundaries of what a laptop can do, and their latest creation, the XPS 17, is no exception. With its sleek design and impressive specs, this laptop is capable of handling anything from basic tasks to demanding creative workloads. The XPS 17 comes with a 11th gen Intel Tiger Lake CPU, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU with a decent 70 watt TGP, 64GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage. This combination of hardware makes it possible for the XPS 17 to serve as a proper desktop replacement and portable powerhouse.

The laptop's design is where things get really interesting. Measuring in at just 2.5 kilograms and weighing under 20 millimeters, this laptop is surprisingly light and compact for its size. The XPS 17 is also available in various screen sizes, including 15 and 17 inches, with the latter being the focus of this review. While not the most portable option, the 17-inch screen is a major highlight of the laptop's design. With a peak brightness of around 520 nits in HDR and 430 nits in SDRS, it's plenty bright enough for indoor use.

One area where the XPS 17 truly shines is in its color accuracy. Dell claims that this laptop has an "insanely good" color accuracy profile, with scores of 100 sRGB, 100 Adobe RGB, and 96 DCI P3. This makes it a great option for creators who need to produce high-quality visuals. However, the webcam on this laptop is a major letdown, with poor image quality considering the price and overall quality of everything else.

**Performance and Battery Life**

The XPS 17's performance is where things get really interesting. With its 11th gen Intel Tiger Lake CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, this laptop can handle demanding workloads with ease. During a 20-minute stress test, the laptop showed no appreciable drop in performance, even when temperatures rose to around 85 degrees Celsius. While this is impressive, it's worth noting that the laptop's top spec model comes with an I9-11900HK CPU and may provide slightly better performance for certain tasks.

One area where the XPS 17 falls short is in its battery life. The laptop comes with a 97 watt-hour battery, which is larger than what you get on the 15-inch version of this model. However, Dell claims that the 17-inch screen will only last around six hours with 4K and Touch usage. This is significantly less than our test, where we saw around an hour of YouTube playback using around 15% of the battery.

**The Competition**

So how does the XPS 17 stack up against its competition? For those looking for a similar laptop but in a smaller package, the Razer Blade 15 is worth considering. While it's heavier and more gaming-oriented than the XPS 17, it provides better performance for productivity tasks as well.

However, the most interesting competition to the XPS 17 comes from Apple's rumored upcoming MacBook Pro 16 refresh. With its new M1X or M2 chip, this laptop promises to deliver improved performance and power efficiency while maintaining a compact design. This battle between Windows and Mac laptops will be exciting to watch in the coming months.

**Verdict**

Ultimately, whether or not you'll want to buy the XPS 17 depends on your specific needs and budget. If you're looking for a laptop that can handle demanding workloads with ease and comes with a beautiful 17-inch screen, then this might be the perfect choice for you. However, if you prioritize portability over raw power, the Razer Blade 15 or other options might be more suitable.

One final note: while the XPS 17 is an impressive laptop in many ways, there are still some areas where Dell could improve. For example, standby battery life isn't great, and quality control issues can sometimes arise. With a bit of fine-tuning, the XPS 17 has the potential to be truly exceptional.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video is partly sponsored by avira free security for windows hey guys i'm tom of techchap and what's better than a dell xps 15 well i think you can fully guess where this is going how about a dell xps 17. this is the brand spanking new one the 9710 so it's the 2021 refresh as is this which you may have seen my review for a couple of days ago you can see the size difference between them uh visually identical other than the fact that we don't have a white version of the 17 and also well it's got a bigger screen but between the two this is basically just a bit bigger a bit more powerful and also more expensive so what's new well like the 15-inch we're also getting the latest intel 11th gen h45 series of cpus we're also getting nvidia's brand new rtx 3000 series of cards uh we get the option between 3050 and 360 as well as integrated graphics if you want to go for the entry level model faster ram now up to 3200 megahertz thunderbolt 4 ports up from thunderbolt 3 and it's about 100 grams lighter although you'd be hard-pressed to really tell but it's the exact same aluminium chassis that we're pretty used to on these dells now as well as the carbon fiber track pad which looks quite snazzy uh as i say unfortunately there is no arctic frost white version of this only on the 15 and also bizarrely uh there's no oled screen option on here again only on the 15. uh so you either go for a full hd plus non-touch 17 inch or a 4k plus touch which as you can see is what i have here and surprisingly that makes quite a difference to the weight it adds about 200 grams so we're topping out at 2.42 kilograms for the 4k down to 2.2 kilograms for the full hd plus so you really are getting a big screen experience on this laptop and as dell's marketing suggests this is kind of like a 17 inch screen in a 15 inch form factor because of those razor thin bezels and just how compact it is overall oh this is brilliant ports are nice and simple there's just four thunderbolt 4s along with a and a half mil headphone jack a v6 sd card reader that's a full size reader same lovely chiclet style keyboard no numpad on this 17 inch or anything they just use the extra space for slightly wider speaker grilles this is uh probably one of the better speakers i've heard on a laptop we get windows hello supported face unlocking in the webcam and also a fingerprint reader built into the power button and also this gargantuan precision touch pad which is just lovely to use although it's a very small niggle but i've noticed on this particular xps 17 i've got it's a bit kind of like clacky the left side of the touchpad it sort of makes a noise when you tap it whereas on the right side it doesn't again one of those famous dell quality control issues now before we get to the performance tests because really that is what this is all about uh it's pretty much a spec bump this year with those new graphics cards new processors faster ram uh but the big question is how much is this gonna cost and i'm sure you can guess it's not cheap so the 17 starts at about fifteen hundred and fifty dollars or eighteen hundred fifty pounds but it's about 250 more than the new xps 15. now having just reviewed the 15 we are getting a few extra options here in the uk store at least it doesn't seem to be the case for the us but we have this i9 11 980 hk option which is actually the fastest tiger lake cpu you can buy and it's also the only chip that's unlocked so you can go into intel's xtu and modify the clock multiplier and some other stuff but i'm not convinced this is really worthwhile in a laptop form factor like this i would probably just stick to the regular i7 or i9 and save a bit of money but really the biggest upgrade are these new gpu options and so you can either have intel's integrated graphics if you just want a 17-inch laptop to do some basic work or watch netflix but really you're going to want either the 3050 or the 3060 which i have in here and is a 70 watt tgp variant of the card and so not only are we getting an extra 2 gigs of vram over the 350 ti that we get in the 15 inch model but it's also that higher tgp 70 vs 45 so this should be on paper at least quite a bit more powerful than the 15 inch and also a good step up from last year's rtx 2060 max q which was a 65 watt tgp variant i've also specced this with 64 gigs of ram and one terabyte of storage although importantly you can upgrade these yourself if we open it up you'll see that we have the two ram slots and also two m2 ssds so there's quite a lot of room for expandability here and you can also see we have this big vapor chamber cooler okay just a quick mention of our lovely sponsors avira free security for windows the all-in-one cyber security solution for security privacy and performance all you have to do is download the avira free security for windows app which as it says on the 10 is completely free run their smart scan and it will show you any issues or threats on your pc and also suggest how you can improve performance we also get a handy password manager driver updater and a file shredder to delete sensitive stuff permanently plus you can use their free vpn to help keep you safe online so if you're after an all-in-one security hub that does everything you need then definitely give a vera free security for windows a try click the link in the description to get started the thing is though i don't think the 17 inch is as big of an upgrade this year as the 15 inch is which i'm using for some notes here uh because the difference is with the 15 we went from the gtx 1650 ti last year to the rtx 3050 ti which means we have all those extra rtx features like ray tracing which is a bit pointlessly on these kind of laptops but importantly dlss which makes a big difference to frame rates in games that support it and also nvidia broadcast and reflex all those kind of extra things on top of the raw performance increase however with the 17 we already had the rtx 2060 max q last year with those rtx features no doubt this will be faster and we'll test this now but i don't think it's going to be quite the same jump as we've seen with the 15. okay let's get to the good bit let's talk about performance and in terms of the processor we're looking at an average of about 20 optic uh between single core and multi-core and i haven't made any attempt to overclock this further and then in terms of graphics coming from the 2060 to the 30 60 we're looking at about 25 average boost so how does this translate to real world use well let's start with a few games because while you could argue this isn't a proper gaming laptop it certainly got the specs on paper and actually coming from last year we're looking at anything between a 3 and a 52 performance boost which is pretty insane considering both cards in both laptops have those rtx features like dlss and considering we're getting triple digits in three of the five games on test and even in cyberpunk at ultra settings although without ray tracing running at full hd plus we're getting over 60 fps for me though i spend about half my life in premiere pro editing videos so really that was the main reason i bought this and impressively the new 9710 knocked off about two and a half minutes or 26 off my 10 minute 4k h.264 export which is actually double the improvement i saw with the xps 15 coming from last year's one to the new one so quite a big improvement there so across the board we're looking at about a 25 to 30 boost over last year's xps 17 uh which is pretty nice although not really enough reason to chuck your old one in the bin and buy this but certainly if you're coming from a two or three year or older laptop then this is going to be a big upgrade for you however when it comes to cooling there's good and bad news on the outside it gets very toasty i recorded a peak of 60 degrees celsius above the keyboard which is about 10 degrees hotter than the new xps 15 with the keyboard and touch pad in the palm sweating mid 40s so hot on the outside but the vapor chamber does a good job of keeping throttling to a minimum on the inside a 20 minute time spy stress test showed no appreciable drop in performance with peak gpu temps hitting about 85 and while i wouldn't necessarily recommend that top spec i9 uh the 11 980 hk in here the fact that you can get that the fastest intel tiger-like cpu along with a 3060 with a decent 70 watt tgp in here with 64 gigs of ram and 2 terabytes of storage which you can then further expand yourself the 17 really can be a proper desktop replacement and a little sort of portable powerhouse and obviously at two and a half kilograms you will notice it in your backpack but it is still a sub 20 mil and not you know a proper thick ugly heavy gaming laptop and also the battery life is decent which is not something you get for most laptops obviously it will vary based on what screen you go for however the 17 does have an advantage over the 15 because all models come with the 97 watt hour battery which is a bit bigger than the 86 while in the 15 although bigger screen but that's the same regardless of whether you go for full hd or 4k because on the 15 if you go for the full hd then you get the much smaller 56 watt hour battery and that was one of my criticisms why can't i have full hd with the bigger batteries so it you know lasts forever so with this while i don't have the full hd version i would imagine that with this huge battery will give you probably a good 10 hours of life depending on how you use it although with this 4k plus touch version i have i'm getting about six hours of use uh an hour of youtube uses about 15 of the battery which is actually a little bit better than last year the same test used 19 but i'm sure you'll agree that as impressive as the specs are and what's going on under the hood the highlight for this really is that big beautiful 17-inch screen so i measured a peak brightness of about 520 nits in hdr or about 430 or so in sdrs so it's plenty bright enough but perhaps that's an area in the future that could be improved however color accuracy which of course is important for creators and if you're doing any kind of photo or video editing is insanely good we've got 100 srgb 100 adobe rgb and 96 dci p3 this is one of the most color accurate screens i've ever tested on a consumer laptop and then there's this webcam which is just terrible considering the price and you know the quality of everything else it's definitely one of the biggest issues i have with the laptop it's serviceable and obviously they had to squeeze it into the top bezel there but the quality is pretty poor so that is the new xps 17. same on the outside faster on the inside the latest ports still a terrible webcam which is probably my biggest criticism of this especially in this day and age also standby battery life isn't great way too often i come back to this a day or two later and it's completely out of charge plus there's still the odd quality control issue and also i think the same criticisms or comments from my 15 inch video apply here and i would like to have seen maybe an amd 5000 series version of this and also a quad hd screen would have been perfect i just think full hd is probably not going to be sharp enough on this 17 inch screen so you have to go for 4k which is great but then obviously that impacts your performance and your battery so quad hd would have been perfect on this between the 15 and the 17 well really comes down to how you're gonna use it and also how deep your pockets are they are both very expensive laptops uh but the 17 does take it to the next level um really this is proper desktop replacement level performance the 15's a bit more of a travel companion because of course it's lighter and smaller for similar money you could get the new razer blade 17 also with 11th gen and up to an rtx 3080 yes it's a touch heavier and more gaming oriented but the extra performance would be ideal for productivity as well but i think the most interesting competition to this would be the upcoming macbook pro 16 refresh rumored to come out probably in late september with apple's new m1x or m2 chip that is going to be an interesting uh battle between the best laptops from windows and mac so stay tuned for that and yeah what do you think of it would you be tempted to buy one or maybe the 15 or not the above let me know in the comments below thank you for watching and i'll see you next time right here on the tech chat drinkthis video is partly sponsored by avira free security for windows hey guys i'm tom of techchap and what's better than a dell xps 15 well i think you can fully guess where this is going how about a dell xps 17. this is the brand spanking new one the 9710 so it's the 2021 refresh as is this which you may have seen my review for a couple of days ago you can see the size difference between them uh visually identical other than the fact that we don't have a white version of the 17 and also well it's got a bigger screen but between the two this is basically just a bit bigger a bit more powerful and also more expensive so what's new well like the 15-inch we're also getting the latest intel 11th gen h45 series of cpus we're also getting nvidia's brand new rtx 3000 series of cards uh we get the option between 3050 and 360 as well as integrated graphics if you want to go for the entry level model faster ram now up to 3200 megahertz thunderbolt 4 ports up from thunderbolt 3 and it's about 100 grams lighter although you'd be hard-pressed to really tell but it's the exact same aluminium chassis that we're pretty used to on these dells now as well as the carbon fiber track pad which looks quite snazzy uh as i say unfortunately there is no arctic frost white version of this only on the 15 and also bizarrely uh there's no oled screen option on here again only on the 15. uh so you either go for a full hd plus non-touch 17 inch or a 4k plus touch which as you can see is what i have here and surprisingly that makes quite a difference to the weight it adds about 200 grams so we're topping out at 2.42 kilograms for the 4k down to 2.2 kilograms for the full hd plus so you really are getting a big screen experience on this laptop and as dell's marketing suggests this is kind of like a 17 inch screen in a 15 inch form factor because of those razor thin bezels and just how compact it is overall oh this is brilliant ports are nice and simple there's just four thunderbolt 4s along with a and a half mil headphone jack a v6 sd card reader that's a full size reader same lovely chiclet style keyboard no numpad on this 17 inch or anything they just use the extra space for slightly wider speaker grilles this is uh probably one of the better speakers i've heard on a laptop we get windows hello supported face unlocking in the webcam and also a fingerprint reader built into the power button and also this gargantuan precision touch pad which is just lovely to use although it's a very small niggle but i've noticed on this particular xps 17 i've got it's a bit kind of like clacky the left side of the touchpad it sort of makes a noise when you tap it whereas on the right side it doesn't again one of those famous dell quality control issues now before we get to the performance tests because really that is what this is all about uh it's pretty much a spec bump this year with those new graphics cards new processors faster ram uh but the big question is how much is this gonna cost and i'm sure you can guess it's not cheap so the 17 starts at about fifteen hundred and fifty dollars or eighteen hundred fifty pounds but it's about 250 more than the new xps 15. now having just reviewed the 15 we are getting a few extra options here in the uk store at least it doesn't seem to be the case for the us but we have this i9 11 980 hk option which is actually the fastest tiger lake cpu you can buy and it's also the only chip that's unlocked so you can go into intel's xtu and modify the clock multiplier and some other stuff but i'm not convinced this is really worthwhile in a laptop form factor like this i would probably just stick to the regular i7 or i9 and save a bit of money but really the biggest upgrade are these new gpu options and so you can either have intel's integrated graphics if you just want a 17-inch laptop to do some basic work or watch netflix but really you're going to want either the 3050 or the 3060 which i have in here and is a 70 watt tgp variant of the card and so not only are we getting an extra 2 gigs of vram over the 350 ti that we get in the 15 inch model but it's also that higher tgp 70 vs 45 so this should be on paper at least quite a bit more powerful than the 15 inch and also a good step up from last year's rtx 2060 max q which was a 65 watt tgp variant i've also specced this with 64 gigs of ram and one terabyte of storage although importantly you can upgrade these yourself if we open it up you'll see that we have the two ram slots and also two m2 ssds so there's quite a lot of room for expandability here and you can also see we have this big vapor chamber cooler okay just a quick mention of our lovely sponsors avira free security for windows the all-in-one cyber security solution for security privacy and performance all you have to do is download the avira free security for windows app which as it says on the 10 is completely free run their smart scan and it will show you any issues or threats on your pc and also suggest how you can improve performance we also get a handy password manager driver updater and a file shredder to delete sensitive stuff permanently plus you can use their free vpn to help keep you safe online so if you're after an all-in-one security hub that does everything you need then definitely give a vera free security for windows a try click the link in the description to get started the thing is though i don't think the 17 inch is as big of an upgrade this year as the 15 inch is which i'm using for some notes here uh because the difference is with the 15 we went from the gtx 1650 ti last year to the rtx 3050 ti which means we have all those extra rtx features like ray tracing which is a bit pointlessly on these kind of laptops but importantly dlss which makes a big difference to frame rates in games that support it and also nvidia broadcast and reflex all those kind of extra things on top of the raw performance increase however with the 17 we already had the rtx 2060 max q last year with those rtx features no doubt this will be faster and we'll test this now but i don't think it's going to be quite the same jump as we've seen with the 15. okay let's get to the good bit let's talk about performance and in terms of the processor we're looking at an average of about 20 optic uh between single core and multi-core and i haven't made any attempt to overclock this further and then in terms of graphics coming from the 2060 to the 30 60 we're looking at about 25 average boost so how does this translate to real world use well let's start with a few games because while you could argue this isn't a proper gaming laptop it certainly got the specs on paper and actually coming from last year we're looking at anything between a 3 and a 52 performance boost which is pretty insane considering both cards in both laptops have those rtx features like dlss and considering we're getting triple digits in three of the five games on test and even in cyberpunk at ultra settings although without ray tracing running at full hd plus we're getting over 60 fps for me though i spend about half my life in premiere pro editing videos so really that was the main reason i bought this and impressively the new 9710 knocked off about two and a half minutes or 26 off my 10 minute 4k h.264 export which is actually double the improvement i saw with the xps 15 coming from last year's one to the new one so quite a big improvement there so across the board we're looking at about a 25 to 30 boost over last year's xps 17 uh which is pretty nice although not really enough reason to chuck your old one in the bin and buy this but certainly if you're coming from a two or three year or older laptop then this is going to be a big upgrade for you however when it comes to cooling there's good and bad news on the outside it gets very toasty i recorded a peak of 60 degrees celsius above the keyboard which is about 10 degrees hotter than the new xps 15 with the keyboard and touch pad in the palm sweating mid 40s so hot on the outside but the vapor chamber does a good job of keeping throttling to a minimum on the inside a 20 minute time spy stress test showed no appreciable drop in performance with peak gpu temps hitting about 85 and while i wouldn't necessarily recommend that top spec i9 uh the 11 980 hk in here the fact that you can get that the fastest intel tiger-like cpu along with a 3060 with a decent 70 watt tgp in here with 64 gigs of ram and 2 terabytes of storage which you can then further expand yourself the 17 really can be a proper desktop replacement and a little sort of portable powerhouse and obviously at two and a half kilograms you will notice it in your backpack but it is still a sub 20 mil and not you know a proper thick ugly heavy gaming laptop and also the battery life is decent which is not something you get for most laptops obviously it will vary based on what screen you go for however the 17 does have an advantage over the 15 because all models come with the 97 watt hour battery which is a bit bigger than the 86 while in the 15 although bigger screen but that's the same regardless of whether you go for full hd or 4k because on the 15 if you go for the full hd then you get the much smaller 56 watt hour battery and that was one of my criticisms why can't i have full hd with the bigger batteries so it you know lasts forever so with this while i don't have the full hd version i would imagine that with this huge battery will give you probably a good 10 hours of life depending on how you use it although with this 4k plus touch version i have i'm getting about six hours of use uh an hour of youtube uses about 15 of the battery which is actually a little bit better than last year the same test used 19 but i'm sure you'll agree that as impressive as the specs are and what's going on under the hood the highlight for this really is that big beautiful 17-inch screen so i measured a peak brightness of about 520 nits in hdr or about 430 or so in sdrs so it's plenty bright enough but perhaps that's an area in the future that could be improved however color accuracy which of course is important for creators and if you're doing any kind of photo or video editing is insanely good we've got 100 srgb 100 adobe rgb and 96 dci p3 this is one of the most color accurate screens i've ever tested on a consumer laptop and then there's this webcam which is just terrible considering the price and you know the quality of everything else it's definitely one of the biggest issues i have with the laptop it's serviceable and obviously they had to squeeze it into the top bezel there but the quality is pretty poor so that is the new xps 17. same on the outside faster on the inside the latest ports still a terrible webcam which is probably my biggest criticism of this especially in this day and age also standby battery life isn't great way too often i come back to this a day or two later and it's completely out of charge plus there's still the odd quality control issue and also i think the same criticisms or comments from my 15 inch video apply here and i would like to have seen maybe an amd 5000 series version of this and also a quad hd screen would have been perfect i just think full hd is probably not going to be sharp enough on this 17 inch screen so you have to go for 4k which is great but then obviously that impacts your performance and your battery so quad hd would have been perfect on this between the 15 and the 17 well really comes down to how you're gonna use it and also how deep your pockets are they are both very expensive laptops uh but the 17 does take it to the next level um really this is proper desktop replacement level performance the 15's a bit more of a travel companion because of course it's lighter and smaller for similar money you could get the new razer blade 17 also with 11th gen and up to an rtx 3080 yes it's a touch heavier and more gaming oriented but the extra performance would be ideal for productivity as well but i think the most interesting competition to this would be the upcoming macbook pro 16 refresh rumored to come out probably in late september with apple's new m1x or m2 chip that is going to be an interesting uh battle between the best laptops from windows and mac so stay tuned for that and yeah what do you think of it would you be tempted to buy one or maybe the 15 or not the above let me know in the comments below thank you for watching and i'll see you next time right here on the tech chat drink\n"