Dell XPS 15 OLED (9520) Review

The latest OLED-equipped model of the Dell XPS 15 (version 9520, which starts at $1,449; $2,299 as tested) joins a long line of the company's flagship laptops and shows the state of the art in desktop-replacement systems. Armed with Intel's newest 12th Generation processors, Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics, and a beautiful OLED touch screen, this is one notebook that offers unbeatable productivity with visuals to match. It's not only one of the best office PCs on the market, it's a great option for video editing and media work, too. The XPS 15 OLED easily repeats as an Editors' Choice winner among deluxe content creation laptops.

Keeping the XPS Design Legacy

Dell's designers and engineers have worked hard to make the XPS 15 the platonic ideal of a full-size laptop. When closed, the simple bare-metal lid and chassis offer a stark profile. And if Dell's Platinum Silver finish isn’t your style, you can always opt for Frost White, which gives the XPS an even more severe look but comes across as stylish, without being garish, in an office setting.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

When open, the XPS 15's OLED display offers an edge-to-edge picture with exceptionally narrow bezels surrounding it. The 16:10-aspect-ratio panel offers 3,456-by-2,160-pixel resolution, which Dell calls “3.5K” to indicate it's almost a match for 16:9 screens with a 4K (3,840-by-2,160) pixel count. The 15.6-inch panel offers everything you expect from OLED, including deep, rich blacks; extra-sharp detail; and vibrant color. It's also a touch screen, though you may want to keep a cloth handy to wipe off fingerprints and smudges.

Despite the thin bezels, the XPS 15 still finds room for a 720p webcam above the display with Windows Hello face recognition for secure logins. The camera lacks a sliding privacy shutter, but at least there's not a notch extending into the display area as there is on the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro.

The backlit keyboard is surrounded by stylish carbon fiber, a distinct design element of the XPS line. For a slim laptop with flat keys, the XPS 15 offers a decent typing feel, with good travel and a satisfying amount of resistance. It's no match for a standalone mechanical keyboard, but it'll do just fine for work on the go. There are stereo speakers on either side of the full-size keyboard, discreetly concealed behind subtle grilles.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Its advanced materials make the XPS 15 one of the thinner and lighter full-size laptops you can get, measuring 0.73 by 13.6 by 9.1 inches and weighing just 4.31 pounds—half a pound lighter than the MacBook Pro 16 and a full pound under the Asus ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED. Even better, the Dell manages to shed the weight without compromising on performance or battery life.

The Connectivity Mix: Better Bring a Dongle

The only area where the XPS 15 might be considered lacking is its port selection. With three USB-C ports (one of them USB 3.2, and two Thunderbolt 4) plus an SD card slot, the model 9520 isn't technically short on capability—even with the AC adapter plugged in, you'll still have a pair of speedy ports available. But you may miss a USB Type-A, Ethernet, or HDMI port.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The card slot is a nice touch for anyone shooting photos or videos with a traditional camera, but it's arguably not as important as a dedicated HDMI output or a wired Ethernet port. Thankfully, Dell bundles a USB-A and Ethernet adapter with the laptop. It's about the only compromise in the XPS 15's design, and it's a small one, but it's still an accessory you'll have to carry on the off chance you want to use an everyday peripheral.

The wireless connectivity is more flexible, with Wi-Fi 6E offering the best speeds available and Bluetooth 5.2 giving you access to all sorts of peripherals and headphones.

From Budget to Premium: The Configuration Options

As the big brother of the famous XPS 13 ultraportable, our XPS 15 test unit featured a 12th Generation Intel Core i7-12700H processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU. Equipped with 16GB of DDR5 memory and a 512GB solid-state drive, the 3.5K OLED model lists for $2,299.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

If you want something different, Dell is happpy to oblige. The $1,449 base model of the XPS 15 comes with a Core i5-12500H CPU, Intel integrated graphics, 8GB of RAM, the 512GB SSD, and a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel non-touch IPS screen. Taking it to the limit, you can configure a system with Intel's Core i9-12900HK, the same RTX 3050 Ti graphics card as our test unit, 64GB of memory, 2TB of solid-state storage, and a 4K IPS (note, not OLED) touch screen for $3,399.

Upgraded CPU, Upgraded Performance

For our benchmark comparisons, we pitted the XPS 15 (9520) against some of the finest 15- and 16-inch laptops available, including some with OLED displays and comparable silicon like the abovementioned Apple MacBook Pro 16 and Asus ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED. We also included the Asus Vivobook Pro 16X OLED and the Dell's predecessor from late 2021, the XPS 15 OLED (9510).

Productivity Tests

Our primary performance benchmark is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure a system's suitability for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's boot drive.

We then stress the CPU with a trio of processor-intensive, multithreaded tests. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses the Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene over and over in a 10-minute test run. Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates real-world apps like PDF rendering, speech recognition, and machine learning. We also use HandBrake 1.4 to transcode a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution, comparing how quickly systems handle this demanding media task.

Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window), which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Compared to last year's already impressive XPS 15, which used an 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processor, the model 9520 offers a step up in virtually every measure of performance, from handling media files to multitasking across a range of apps.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

But it's not always the top dog in these tests, frequently finishing behind laptops with top-tier CPUs from AMD or Apple. And the added oomph of a discrete Nvidia GPU is blunted by the system's power and thermal limitations, which let it far surpass laptops with integrated graphics but can't match the AAA gaming frame rates you'd get from a desktop GeForce card.

When it comes to testing graphics, we use two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We also run two tests from the cross-platform GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. Its 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively.

The new XPS 15 delivered modest improvements over last year's model, despite using the same Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti GPU. The boost seems to stem from the improved processor. But these numbers don't indicate a rip-roaring gaming laptop. Rather, they suggest a great system for content creation and productivity, with some room for after-hours gaming as long as you're ready to dial back the resolution and detail a little.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite colorimeter to measure the screen's coverage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 palettes or color gamuts and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Here we saw another respectable result, with the new XPS 15 providing more than 12 hours of unplugged runtime. While that doesn't rival the extreme efficiency of some ultraportables and the MacBook Pro, it's more than enough to let you leave the house without the charger. You should have no trouble getting in a full day of work without needing a wall outlet, provided you don't spend the day pushing the CPU and GPU with demanding apps like Photoshop or Premiere. 

The Dell's 3.5K OLED panel also matched some of the best you can buy, delivering nearly 400 nits of brightness and fantastic color that fully covered both the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts. For anything brighter, you'll have to give up the inky blacks of OLED and switch to a backlit IPS panel like the MacBook Pro's. But if you want a 15-inch laptop that's drop-dead gorgeous, the XPS 15 is hard to beat.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

In Love With OLED, Impressed by ‘Alder Lake'

When it comes to getting things done, plenty of laptops offer a mix of hardware and features that can crunch numbers and power through heavy workloads. But the Dell XPS 15 (9520) does it with style, combining near-workstation performance with a refined design that's easy to use on the go and ready to handle the varied demands of connected life and creative apps. It's the very model of a modern desktop replacement.