Dell XPS 9310: Still at the forefront of the ultraportable market

Last year, the mid-2020 version of Dell's 13.4-inch XPS 13 received rave reviews, being named by ZDNet editorial staff as the best laptop for workers who need a full design combo. , functionality, performance, autonomy and usability. Under these conditions, how can we do better? This is what the latest model 9310 should attempt.

While it doesn't make drastic changes, it updates Intel Core processors to the latest 11th Gen ⁽ Tiger Lake) and adds a variant with a 3.5K OLED touchscreen. We reviewed a Core i7 model with a 4K+/UHD+ IPS touchscreen, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. The XPS 13 9310 is an excellent ultraportable, but there's plenty of competition in the 13-inch space – not only Windows-based rivals including from Lenovo and HP, but also Apple's M1-based MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.

Design

In terms of design, the XPS13 9310 is identical to last year's model, with a compact footprint (295.7mm wide by 198.7mm deep) and slim profile (14.8mm rear , tapering forward). The weight, as before, varies from 1.2 kg, for models without touchscreen, to 1.27 kg, for variants with touchscreen. The unit under review featured a silver aluminum chassis and a black carbon fiber composite material surrounding the keyboard and touchpad. This material has a woven finish and is attractive, tactile and durable.

The XPS 9310 is slightly difficult to open. There's no indentation on the keyboard section on the front (like you find on a MacBook, for example), so it's hard to get a purchase between the lid and the keyboard sections with your finger – d especially since the hinges are solid (as they should be). For the rest, the device is elegant and compact, and the build quality is excellent.

Features

As noted above, the major change in the XPS 9310 is the upgrade to 11th Gen Core ⁽ Tiger Lake) processors with integrated Iris Xe graphics.

The screen features minimal bezels (hence Dell's InfinityEdge branding), resulting in a screen-to-body ratio of 91.5% – although our measurements put it at 88.7% (which is still impressive). The 720-pixel webcam, which sits in the top bezel, supports Windows Hello facial recognition. But, unlike some of its competitors, it does not have a privacy component. Biometric authentication is also available via the fingerprint reader, which is integrated into the power button, in the upper right corner of the keyboard.

The tested device featured the highest resolution display available, 4K+/UHD+ (3840 x 2400 pixels, 338 ppi). The IPS touchscreen, which is protected by Gorilla Glass 6, boasts a peak brightness of 500 nits, is DisplayHDR 400 certified, and supports 100% sRGB color gamut and 90% DCI-P3 gamut. Despite an anti-reflective coating, it's moderately bright, but I wasn't bothered by glare in home testing, where a 60% brightness setting was perfectly adequate, even near a window.

In terms of connectivity, the XPS 13 9310 has a fairly minimal – albeit updated – selection: two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, one on each side (either can charge the 52Wh battery), a MicroSD card slot on the left side and a 3.5mm combo audio input/output. For wireless, there's the Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 and Bluetooth 5.1, but no mobile broadband option.

Performance

The Core i7-1165G7/16GB RAM/512GB SSD tested proved to be very fast in general use, especially when running typical workloads, such as creating and editing documents or sheets computing and photo editing. Graphics performance, powered by Intel's integrated Iris Xe graphics card, was also decent and a marked improvement over the previous generation Iris Plus model.

However, processor performance, as measured by the cross-platform Geekbench 5 benchmark, fell short of Apple's SoC M1, falling behind scores by 18% for single-core and 57% for multi-core. The XPS 13 fared better in Cinebench R15's OpenGL test, where its Iris Xe graphics propelled it to 101 fps compared to the MacBook Air M1's 85 fps. Keep in mind, however, that the MacBook Air ran this test using the Rosetta 2 translation rather than a native M1 app.

To get an overall picture of the XPS 13 9310's performance, we turned to PCMark 10, which delivers an overall score as well as subsidiary scores for different types of workloads: Essential (app startup, web browsing, video conferencing) , Productivity (writing, spreadsheets, photo editing) and Digital content creation (video editing, rendering and visualization). Here are the XPS 13 scores as well as the ones PCMark recommends as a "good" score.

Dell's ultraportable clearly exceeds the recommendation in all categories, making it a particularly suitable platform for knowledge workers. It's also capable of handling moderately graphically demanding applications, but power users and creators will have to look elsewhere.

Autonomy

The battery life of the previous generation XPS 13, based on a Core i7-1065G7 with a 4K+/UHD+ display, was around 12.5 hours under typical productivity workloads.

With a similar mix of workloads – periodic PCMark 10 runs, a bit of idle time with Wi-Fi on, and media streaming – we recorded battery life of just under nine hours. The screen brightness was set to 50% and the default ("Dell") power plan was applied. All-day battery life is possible with the high-resolution display, depending on what you're doing, but barely. If that's an issue, you might want to consider a model with a lower resolution FHD+ (1920 x 1200) display.

Ease of use

Once performance and battery life are factored in, a laptop's usability largely depends on its screen, keyboard, and port locations. We've already talked about the high-resolution, minimal bezel IPS 4K+/UHD+ touchscreen display, which is a joy to use, and the same can be said for the keyboard.

The keyboard is backlit and can be activated by a key in the Fn row. It offers a high quality feel and responsive action, without being too loud in operation. We're used to giving well-deserved praise to keyboards on Lenovo's ThinkPads, but this one ranks among the best.

Still, there will always be aspects of a laptop's key layout that irritate people, at least until they get used to it; here it may be the location of the power/fingerprint sensor in the upper right corner, which limits the Delete key one space to the left. The touchpad is a decent size, and works well too.

Laptop speakers were not unanimous until now, but this is no longer the case. With more and more telecommuters spending time on video calls, and needing to unwind with streaming media during downtime, a good audio subsystem is a must for a usable laptop these days. The XPS 13 9310 offers plenty of volume, given its compact chassis, although bass is inevitably less rich compared to systems with larger physical volume.

Findings

Dell's XPS 13 has long been a popular ultraportable, and the Intel Evo-branded 9310 version, based on 11th Gen Core processors ⁽ Tiger Lake), is no exception. It's not perfect, though: there's a trade-off between screen resolution and battery life, processor performance has been surpassed by Apple's SoC M1, and there are a couple of small defects of use.

Source: ZDNet.com