Dell XPS vs Inspiron

MassiveJim

MassiveJim

MassiveJim

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I am led to believe that the internals of these 2 machiens are essentially the same and the difference is price is due to the premium materials used in the XPS outer shell, is that true ?

I ditched a 15" Lenovo laptop a while ago in favour of a 2nd hand Dell XPS 13" (3rd gen I7)
1 Major reason for doing so was the screen on the Lenovo was woeful (cheapo TN I assume)

I love the screen on the Dell however 1080p on a 13" screen is pushing my eyesight, secondly the I7 overheats quite easily, idles around 50ish and will easily get to 80/90 if I start doing anything remotely intensive CPU wise (not that I ever really do)


so I am potentially thinking of getting a 15" laptop but just trying to work out the best option, I certainly cant afford new so have been browsing ebay to see what is on offer, it seems I can get a 4th Gen I7 based XPS for £700/800 but most of them have a stupid QHD Screen which I don't particularly want (was 1080p an option on those ?)
Or I can jump up to around £1000 and get a newer 6th Gen based model.

I am not sure what the cooling is like on the 15" model though, the grills looks the same poor design as the 13" that I have now.

Any thoughts ?
 
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I've got one of the 4th gen haswell XPS 15's. The cooling is average at best. I took mine to bits and replaced the thermal paste which massively improved it, as it was hitting the thermal throttling whilst encoding videos. I've always used intel XTU to undervolt it too in order to run a bit cooler and increase the battery life. It is now coming up to 4 years old and all still working ok. I have the 3200x1800 panel, but run it at a lower resolution as dpi scaling is terrible and TBH, I don't actually notice the interpolation. There was a 1080 version available.

This is what it looks like. The two fans cool a pair of rather tiny heatsinks that have heatpipes running to the GPU and CPU. I have the SSD only version with the larger battery.
 
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go to a shop and have a look, I thought the dells especially the screens where poor compared to the competition. found the lenovos and especially the hps on average far nicer.
although for me the biggest difference was if they where glass screens or not, glass looks so much nicer on any model, but normally means buying the touch option.
 
Kei said:
I've got one of the 4th gen haswell XPS 15's. The cooling is average at best. I took mine to bits and replaced the thermal paste which massively improved it, as it was hitting the thermal throttling whilst encoding videos. I've always used intel XTU to undervolt it too in order to run a bit cooler and increase the battery life. It is now coming up to 4 years old and all still working ok. I have the 3200x1800 panel, but run it at a lower resolution as dpi scaling is terrible and TBH, I don't actually notice the interpolation. There was a 1080 version available.

This is what it looks like. The two fans cool a pair of rather tiny heatsinks that have heatpipes running to the GPU and CPU. I have the SSD only version with the larger battery.
Click to expand...

What CPU do you have and what idle temp does it run at ?

Why is windows scaling so bad :( I have a 2nd hand Macbook pro and the screen on that is vry nice, I just can't get on with the OS.
 
MassiveJim said:
What CPU do you have and what idle temp does it run at ?

Why is windows scaling so bad :( I have a 2nd hand Macbook pro and the screen on that is vry nice, I just can't get on with the OS.
Click to expand...
Mine has an i7 4702HQ which idles around 47-50 degrees. That's with a -65mV offset on the core, -50mV on cache and -30mV on the iGPU set in XTU operating in a 25 degree ambient.
 
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