Dell XPS 17 (9720) Review

Dell’s flagship XPS laptops are frequent visitors to our testing benches, and it’s the XPS 17’s turn for a 2022 update. The new XPS 17 model 9720 (starts at $1,849; $3,049 as tested) is very similar to last year’s edition, but brings Intel’s 12th Generation “Alder Lake” processors to bear. This slim, premium-feeling chassis is home to an optional 4K touch panel and Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics in our review configuration, as well as plenty of RAM and storage. This combination costs a pretty penny, but the end result is a big-screen laptop for power users that has few true competitors. If you own a recent XPS 17, a CPU bump isn’t worth the upgrade, but those with a bigger budget seeking a shiny new desktop replacement can’t do much better.

The Design: Maintaining the XPS Style

We won’t spend too much time retreading ground on the design—we’ve seen many XPS laptops, and this new XPS 17 is the same as before in terms of its build. That’s not a bad thing, since this is one of our favorite designs, with top-notch build quality. But it largely repeats the design from the previous edition, so there isn’t much new to say.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The exterior is a premium-feeling aluminum, which alone separates it from the many plastic laptops around. When you open up the clamshell, the quality build continues on, from the carbon-fiber keyboard deck to the dazzling display. This is routinely one of the nicest general-use laptops around, and that is maintained here. If you’d otherwise be a MacBook user, this is the closest to Apple’s flagship in design quality.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

In terms of size, the XPS 17 measures 0.77 by 14.7 by 9.8 inches (HWD) and 5.34 pounds. (The non-touch version is lighter, at 4.87 pounds.) While you can find some extra-light 17-inch laptops, notably from LG, most are around this weight; screen size is the priority, and most laptop designers make it as portable as possible from there.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

But again, these assets are not new—the keyboard is solid, the touchpad is quite roomy, and the overall design is elegant. You can read the review of last year’s XPS 17 for slightly more on this laptop, but it’s well familiar to most by now.

Display and Connectivity: 4K and Thunderbolt Lead the Way

The display still warrants its own discussion, though. It’s a chief selling point of this laptop, because it’s consistently one of the nicest panels to come across our testing benches. The barely-there bezels (in Dell terms, InfinityEdge) really make the screen look bigger than it is, and at 17 inches, it’s already roomy.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The screen measures exactly 17 inches diagonally due to the 16:10 aspect ratio, not the more traditional 17.3 inches. Our particular model is the 4K touch option, so the shiny glass surface adds an attractive sheen (but it's reflective in the wrong lighting). Somewhat surprisingly, there is no OLED panel option, which is disappointing for this type of laptop.

If you’re willing to spend a hefty amount of money on this laptop, we’d recommend the jump to the 4K touch display for $300 more. It makes a big difference in quality, and if you’re someone who uses a lot of windows at once or big data sheets, you win more digital real estate.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

As for connectivity, this is a large laptop with a lot of room for ports, but it’s also a very modern, slim laptop. That means that most of the ports here are USB-C, with two on the left and two on the right, all with Thunderbolt 4 support. The right edge also holds a headphone jack and an SD card slot, and the USB-C ports take care of charging.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

XPS 17 Components: Welcome to ‘Alder Lake'

Our particular review unit is also a near-exact match for the 2021 XPS 17 we reviewed. The big upgrade is the 12th Generation Intel “Alder Lake” processor, which, in our testing, has generally shown across-the-board improvements. The new 2022 edition starts at $1,849, which nets you a Core i5-12500H processor, 8GB of memory, Intel UHD integrated graphics, a 512GB SSD, and a full HD+ display (1,920 by 1,200 pixels, due to the 16:10 ratio).

Our test unit is configured way up to $3,049, though, a superior and much pricier configuration. For that price, you get a Core i7-12700H processor, 32GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, a 1TB SSD, and the 4K touch display. Those are noteworthy upgrades in every category, increasing speed, graphics performance, storage capacity, and display resolution significantly. The Core i7-12700H is a 14-core/20-thread CPU, with six P-Cores and eight E-Cores, per the 12th Gen chip architecture.

Just how fast is this machine? Let’s see how it did on our benchmark tests. Below are the systems against which we will compare the new XPS 17. This includes the previous-edition XPS 17, a couple of creative-professional laptops in the Asus Vivobook Pro 16X OLED and the Gigabyte Aero 16, and a workstation in the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 4.

Productivity Tests

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, 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 storage.

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, 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.

The new XPS 17 and its Alder Lake chip perform well here, at or near the top of the pack on these tests despite some stiff Ryzen 9 and Core i9 competition. It especially excels on the multi-core tests like Cinebench and Geekbench, likely due to the 12th Gen architecture, though its relatively slow Handbrake result is surprising.

Still, it’s a general step up over the 11th Gen XPS 17, and has a particularly high ceiling for the most demanding tests. These are the types of scenarios a desktop replacement laptop will chiefly be used for, and the Alder Lake XPS 17 is up to the task.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We test Windows PCs' graphics with 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). Two more tests from GFXBench 5.0, run offscreen to allow for different display resolutions, wring out OpenGL operations.

In addition, we run three real-world game tests using the built-in benchmarks in the titles F1 2021, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege. These represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive esports shooter games, respectively. We run Valhalla and Siege twice at different image-quality presets, and F1 2021 with and without Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing. We run these tests at 1080p resolution so results can be compared fairly among systems.

These results are less surprising—we test these GPUs in many contexts, and roughly know what to expect—but the RTX 3060 doesn’t disappoint. It provides solid midrange graphics power, trailing the more potent RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 GPUs in the Aero 16 and ThinkPad as expected.

You could argue that an RTX 3060 is underwhelming in a laptop at this price, versus what you could get in a like-priced gaming laptop, but that’s not where the cost is coming from in this system. The CPU and RAM, the premium design, the fancy screen, and the capacious storage are the big contributors to the cost here, while the GPU is included for those who do need graphics power or want to play some games. There are other ways to get more bang for your buck, as far as a GPU is concerned; gaming laptops will prioritize this over design extras and fancy features.

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) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

The battery life is good enough, even if it’s not a chart topper. We expect a larger laptop with a 4K screen to drain power quickly, but cruising over 11 hours means you can use this system all day for most tasks without worrying about where the next outlet is. Some tasks will drain the battery more quickly, of course, but it should last a long time on general productivity tasks.

The display’s above-average quality is quantified here, with excellent color coverage and upper-echelon brightness. This is good news for professional use cases, though more specialized creator laptops may still make an overall better pick for those users.

One of the Best Big-Screens Gets Better

The updated XPS 17 is much like the previous edition, marrying everything we loved before with a faster processor. This is a relatively simple update to judge: If you own the XPS 17 (9710), the bump in performance isn’t worth upgrading, given the relative lack of change on other fronts. But if you have an older or smaller laptop and want the latest big-screen experience, the XPS 17 is just that. Our configuration is pricey but premium, and from the lower end of its configuration range to the loadout of our test model, this is still the 17-inch power-user laptop to beat.