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Dell XPS 13 Review

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Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#221

Post by gambiting »

e12e wrote: post #203
Encosia wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my Samsung ATIV (QHD+), I found that running the display at half the native resolution dramatically increased battery life and didn't seem to look any worse than a normal panel with a ~72 DPI native resolution.

How very odd... is it integrated graphics? I wonder if it's the display or the gpu/(v(ram)/cpu that makes consumes less resources.

Well....1920x1080@3 bytes per pixel@60Hz = 336MB/s, while 3200x1800@3 bytes per pixel@60Hz = 989MB/s. In QHD mode your laptop is sending nearly a gigabyte of data to the display...per second. It might not be very power hungry to compute those pixels with a modern GPU, but even simply sending that much data requires a lot more power than sending "only" 330MB/s.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#222

Post by 72deluxe »

aragot wrote: post #158
driverdan wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sigh Linux on good new laptops always tends to be 85-90% of the way there. I'd like to switch back to Linux from Apple products but it's never 100%.

If I pay 1900-2200$ for a deluxe laptop, I would be keen to pay about 300$ more and have a deluxe Linux. Please Canonical, charge me but give me the deluxe experience ;)

Install microcore - your machine will really fly.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#223

Post by SwellJoe »

ekianjo wrote: post #173
MetaCosm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was excited until I read 8GB max... that can't be right can it? What modern developer machine would have an 8GB cap?

I'm curious, but why do you need more than 8Gb for ? I can think of a few potential uses of more RAM (large video files edition, R on very, very big data sets) but 8Gb seems reasonable for most tasks. Are you really in a situation where you need 16Gb every single day ?

I run into the 8GB limit on my laptop pretty regularly. Mostly due to VMs for testing and building for other systems. But I also recently found that running Android Studio, plus the emulator, plus my usual stuff pretty much shuts my machine down. I had to use a VT to kill my mail client, the VMs, and some other processes, in order to get the mouse and keyboard responding in X again. Java memory usage is kinda crazy.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#224

Post by e12e »

gambiting wrote: post #221
e12e wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How very odd... is it integrated graphics? I wonder if it's the display or the gpu/(v(ram)/cpu that makes consumes less resources.

Well....1920x1080@3 bytes per pixel@60Hz = 336MB/s, while 3200x1800@3 bytes per pixel@60Hz = 989MB/s. In QHD mode your laptop is sending nearly a gigabyte of data to the display...per second. It might not be very power hungry to compute those pixels with a modern GPU, but even simply sending that much data requires a lot more power than sending "only" 330MB/s.

I'm not so sure. Given this random google hit (on 10gbps ethernet nics) -- I'm not sure it makes much difference: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~acr31/pubs/sohan-10gbpower.pdf

I couldn't find anything on hdmi/4k, but this seems to suggest it doesn't make much difference (compared to what I assume the backlight and screen draws): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)

At any rate, if we assume it takes 4 times as much power, and we know that phones do just fine with 1080p+ displays -- I doubt the signal is the problem. Maybe it's the RAM used for the videoframes?

I always assumed it was the screen that consumed power with HDPI displays (flipping more pixels) -- but maybe it's something else.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#225

Post by 72deluxe »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #190
pearjuice wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TheVerge is more like a lifestyle blog than an actual tech blog. They have this belief that Apple hardware is the best and any review - or any post really - will reference Apple if they get a chance. And if they don't get that chance they will work hard to create it. For a very specific cult of people thadt is OK, but it wouldn't work for an independent tech blog.

Isn't that because Apple is by far the biggest laptop manufacturer? Comparisons with the market leader are often useful.

I didn't think they were? I thought they had a very niche market and are outsold massively by Windows laptops? Unless that position has changed? I couldn't find any figures on the Internet (admittedly I didn't do an exhaustive search); someone else might do better.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#226

Post by 72deluxe »

jdonaldson wrote: post #23

I had been trying to find a decent developer's laptop for some time, and it led me to the xps 13 "developer edition" (the predecessor to this one). Keep in mind that I really wanted to like that laptop. However, in the end, I went back to my macbook air. There were just too many small headaches to deal with. I'll list them here. I'd like to know if there are any improvements this time around. I'd be curious to know i…

OSX has been certified Unix since Snow Leopard I believe?

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#227

Post by 72deluxe »

meddlepal wrote: post #123
jbk wrote: post #13

It seems great, but I really need a 16GB RAM option. (At least they have the 512GB SSD) With a couple of VMs, and a webbrowser, 8 GB can get tiny, and those machines don't evolve, so I'd like to plan for a couple of years...

My company recently gave me an Precision M4800. It's a beast to carry around, but I love it. The whole thing feels very solid. Once I updated the BIOS then Fedora 21 ran like a champ. If it didn't cost nearly $3,000 I would buy one as a personal laptop. 32GB of RAM and 2xSSD make working with a lot of VM's very easy.

That laptop sounds insane, particularly with that resolution! It does look like something from the mid 1990s unfortunately, but at least nobody will pinch it based on looks alone (more likely with Apple hardware sadly)

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#228

Post by gtaylor »

driverdan wrote: post #129
Alupis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SSD is just a hard drive, and they do die... You wouldn't tell people not to buy a Ford because you owned one once that got a flat tire...

Internal computer parts are not even close to comparable to a tire. A more reasonable comparison would be a clutch, which you'd expect to last more than a year if treated properly.

eh, I had a wheel bearing go bad on a brand new car after 8k miles.

The model/make reviewed excellently, and is still considered a great choice. Two years later, it's been reliable and gets us from point A to point B affordably.

Manufacturing is hard.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#229

Post by CalRobert »

I own the generation preceding this (xps 13 9333) and use Ubuntu 14.10 on it. In general I'm pretty happy with it, though the coil whine is an annoyance. The touchpad is good, though if I'm being completely honest it's not _quite_ on par with that of the MBPr I use for work. 128GB hasn't actually been a problem, but I pretty aggressively offload all media on to owncloud so I'm not storing movies, pictures, etc.

I bought a refurb on ebay so it wasn't terribly expensive, but at list price it would be a little difficult to justify compared to a MBA. I bought it because I wanted to use Ubuntu as my primary OS and am not completely thrilled about giving money to a company that loves walled gardens.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#230

Post by Tvorba »

tramjoe_ wrote: post #70
01Michael10 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, didn't realize you guys were using a 13.3" PC for real work. Yikes! I guess spoiled here to have separate PCs for work (two 21" displays), home (24" display plus TV as second display), and a laptop for portable use. Using a small display laptop as my main box would be to limiting for me. When I am running a VM or logged on to another PC remotely, I like to view it on a second display instead of switching back…

You do not understand, do you? We do work on these machines. Using VMs, mostly headless. I have 10 to 20 VMs running on my X220 while on the road - in my case mostly build environments - and _none_ of them is taking a sinlge pixel on my display.

I'm genuinely interested in why are you running 10 to 20 VMs at once. I come from a MS environment and I don't see any use cases in my daily work where this would make sense.
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