Dell XPS 13 OLED (2021) Review
Verdict
The Dell XPS 13 OLED is ane of the best laptops I've ever reviewed, with the jaw-dropping OLED screen proving a fantastic choice for Netflix fans and content creators. Simply be mindful of the battery life, which falls curt of the bulk of ultrabooks.
Pros
- The accented best laptop screen for the toll
- Speedy productivity operation
- Form-leading laptop design
- Lots of configuration options
Cons
- Short battery life
- Stingy port offering
Availability
- UK RRP: £1348.99
- USA RRP: $1549.99
Key Features
- 3.5K OLED display: One of the best screens you'll find on a laptop, with superb contrast and color accuracy.
- 11th Gen Intel processor: With Intel's latest chips, this laptop tin can blaze through day-to-day tasks with ease.
- Ultra-portable design: With a skinny frame and 1.27 kg build, this is an idea design for on-the-go use.
Introduction
Dell already had the bragging rights to the very best laptop in the market, yet the Dell XPS 13 OLED raises the bar even higher with a jaw-dropping OLED screen.
Upgrading to an OLED screen has additional the laptop'south contrast, brightness and colour accuracy, resulting in essentially amend motion picture quality. If you picket the likes of Netflix on your laptop, the improvements will be immediately obvious.
But every bit Switch OLED pessimists may tell you, just adding an OLED screen looks like a minor upgrade on newspaper. Dissimilar Nintendo's portable, information technology's genuinely hard to see what else Dell could have improved. The XPS 13 OLED features an 11th Gen Intel Core processor, a gorgeous lightweight design and a surprisingly affordable price (from £1249), considering the spec canvas.
With the fantastic new addition of an OLED panel, Dell has further strengthened its atomic number 82 over the competition, even compared to the revolutionary MacBook Air M1. This is one of the all-time laptops ever made, but is it the correct choice for you?
Design
- Edge-to-edge screen however looks incredible
- Very skinny and lightweight build is corking for portability
- Lack of USB-A port makes you lot reliant on adaptors
The Dell XPS xiii has been the benchmark for laptop design for the past few years now. The wafer-sparse bezel gives the laptop a fashionable await, while too affording more space for the screen. Laptops with a chunky bezel, such as the MacBook Air M1, look woefully outdated past comparison.
The patterned interior deck, made of carbon fibre, adds some actress flair to the laptop. This nicely contrasts the argent aluminium casing, which y'all can see on both the chapeau and the trim that features all of the ports. By using aluminium, the Dell XPS thirteen has a sturdier build than the magnesium LG Gram sixteen or the plastic Chromebooks. That said, the XPS thirteen still has a slight flex in the deck when you push down on the keyboard so information technology's not perfect in this regard.
The XPS thirteen OLED is a very thin laptop, with Dell claiming it measures just 14.8mm. This also results in an impressively lite build, weighing a dainty 1.27kg. You tin find cheaper laptops that weigh even less – such equally the Acer Swift 5 – simply they won't feel or wait every bit premium as the XPS xiii laptop does.
But in that location is a big drawback to existence then skinny equally Dell has been unable to fit some of the usual port options on the XPS 13. You become 2x Thunderbolt iv, a MicroSD bill of fare reader and a headphone jack but that'due south it.
Information technology's a poor offering, especially since Dell hasn't been unable to fit a USB-A port onboard, which is required for flash drives and peripherals. Dell does at to the lowest degree include a USB-C to USB-A adapter in the box, merely using an adapter is still an undeniable faff that can be avoided with other laptops.
I tin can't mistake the keyboard though, which provides satisfyingly snappy feedback that'southward ideal for keen out long essays. In that location'south no number pad here, but that ways Dell hasn't needed to squash downwardly the size of its keys. A fingerprint scanner has been embedded into the power push button in the summit-correct corner of the keyboard. It's very responsive and piece of cake to reach, speeding upward the process of signing into Windows.
The trackpad is fantabulous too, as it's comfortably large enough for all of my swipes, feels satisfyingly smooth and provides instant responsiveness.
I area Dell sadly didn't improve upon is the webcam. Information technology's however stuck at 720p resolution, resulting in a visibly grainy video feed. That said, it's absolutely fine to apply for both casual and professional video calls and information technology's a marvel that Dell has even been able to fit information technology in the superlative bezel. I'm glad information technology didn't copy the Huawei and Honour trick of installing the webcam in the keyboard.
Screen
- OLED is a large upgrade on standard laptop screens
- 3.5K resolution results in a noticeably sharp display
- Elevation-notch colour accuracy for content creators
Every bit the proper noun suggests, it'southward the new OLED panel that separates the Dell XPS xiii OLED from the previous model.
The main do good of an OLED screen is that every pixel can produce its ain light and it can individually plough off pixels to replicate deep black levels. This results in superior contrast and improved colour coverage compared to standard laptop screen applied science.
I put my Razer Blade Stealth (with a 1080p LCD panel) next to the Dell XPS 13 OLED and the difference was astounding. While the sometime does not have a bad screen by any means, information technology was immediately obvious that the Dell'southward film quality was substantially better.
Watching Netflix'south 'Our Planet' nature documentary, I could encounter that the Dell XPS thirteen produced more than natural and varied colours, picking upwards extra detail such as the ripples of the body of water and the bister sunlight peeking over the coastal rocks. In comparison, the ocean and sky lacked depth with the Razer, resulting in a uniform pale blue that makes the scene look done out.
On left: Razer Blade Stealth. On right: Dell XPS thirteen OLED
Dell has also cranked the screen upward to a 3.5K resolution, which is a pregnant comeback on standard Full HD panels. I could meet the benefits of the extra pixel count in Our Planet, with the Dell presenting the rocky surface of a cliff in far better item than the Razer. You'll need to spotter 4K videos to make the most out of the sharper brandish, only the likes of Netflix and Disney Plus accept lots on offering these days.
As well as having superb contrast, the Dell XPS 13 OLED features a 392-nit effulgence, which is well above the average and ensures you'll yet be able to meet the screen in bright conditions.
With all that considered then, I'm confident that the Dell XPS 13 OLED boasts the absolute best xiii-inch laptop screen on the marketplace for entertainment purposes. Furthermore, it's also a fantastic screen for professional-grade work, with our colorimeter recording colour coverage results of 90% for sRGB, 94.vii% for Adobe RGB and 97.4% for DCI-P3. This means the screen can produce enough colours to accurately brandish photos and videos, which is crucial for media professionals.
Performance
- Superb productivity functioning
- Integrated GPU is ideal for entry-level creation and gaming
- Lots of configuration options for RAM and storage
The Dell XPS 13 OLED comes with two processor choices: Intel Core i5-1135G7 or Intel Core i7-1185G7. Dell sent me the latter.
These are the verbal same chips found with the preceding model of the XPS thirteen, so don't look a performance leap here. But by using Intel's latest generation of mobile chips for ultrabooks, at that place isn't really whatever room for upgrades unless Dell switched over to AMD.
The performance is competitive with all Windows ultrabooks, seeing some of the best criterion scores for a thirteen-inch laptop I've seen this year. This means the Dell XPS 13 OLED hands blazes through productivity tasks and fifty-fifty dabbles with more than taxing creative duties such as Photoshop and Premiere Pro.
| Dell XPS 13 OLED | Surface Laptop 4 | MacBook Air M1 | |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-1185G7 | Intel Cadre i5-1135G7 | Apple M1 |
| Geekbench 5 single-cadre | 1465 | 1307 | 1731 |
| Geekbench 5 multi-core | 5424 | 4844 | 7308 |
| PCMark 10 | 5042 | 4088 | NA |
| 3DMark Time Spy | 1459 | 1493 | NA |
However, the MacBook Air M1 remains the fastest ultrabook with far superior benchmark results compared to the XPS 13 OLED. It would exist unfair to criticise Dell for this, but information technology's withal something to be aware of if high-speed performance is your priority.
The XPS 13 OLED also comes in three RAM flavours – 8GB, 16GB and 32GB – simply is restricted to the integrated Xe graphics. This means it can handle entry-level gaming such as Fortnite with low graphics settings, but y'all'll want a beefier laptop with a defended GPU if yous desire to play AAA games such equally Cyberpunk 2077.
Dell also offers multiple SSD configurations ranging from 256GB to 2TB. I recommend avoiding the base of operations-level option, equally yous'll probable find yourself running out of storage space very quickly. Plus, the upgrade to 512GB currently only costs an extra £50, so information technology's definitely worth the bound.
I was also pleased to see the Dell score very high criterion results for the SSD, with a read score of 3181 MB/s and a write score 2982 MB/south. These numbers mean the XPS 13 OLED is ane of the fastest ultrabook laptops available for saving and loading data on the bulldoze. This can include anything from transferring videos to an external hard drive to saving your progress in a game.
Battery
- Battery life is a less than ideal 7 hours and 22 minutes
- Power adaptor is meaty, with LED indicator
Having a 3.5K resolution and OLED display are undoubtedly large upgrades on standard Total Hard disk drive laptops, but the bound in moving-picture show quality does have a compromise, with the actress pixels causing a greater power bleed.
Most modern laptops comfortably surpass the 10-hour marker in our PCMark 10 office battery test, which simulates twenty-four hour period-to-day tasks until the cell runs dry. However, the Dell XPS 13 OLED only managed to hit 7 hours and 22 in this test, which is ane of the poorer results I've seen in 2021.
That's even worse than the 4K Dell XPS xiii (Tiger Lake) model from concluding year, which lasted ix hours and 52 minutes in the same test. This means the OLED panel is really having a negative consequence on battery life. OLED technology has been known to improve bombardment life for some devices since black colours don't require an active backlight, but that'due south sadly non the case here.
That all said, I reckon the 7 hours and 22 minutes battery life is still just about practiced enough for a laptop, just falling shy of completing a full day of work abroad from the mains. But if you're consistently working on the go and need the lengthiest battery life possible, then information technology's probably best y'all look elsewhere.
On the plus side, I'g impressed by how small the power adapter is, making it easy to send in a purse. The lead even features an LED indicator to permit you know whether y'all've remembered to turn on the switch at the plug.
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Best Offers
Should you buy it?
You want the absolute best screen quality:
The screen on the Dell XPS thirteen OLED is jaw-droppingly good, with incredibly high dissimilarity, nearly-perfect colours and a 3.5K resolution that adds detail to supported videos. You won't detect a better laptop display for the price.
You lot want a long battery life:
Unfortunately, that OLED screen has an adverse effect on bombardment life, shortening information technology to a concerning vii hours and 22 minutes. If you're oft working on the go, and so information technology may be worth opting for the Full Hard disk not-OLED model instead.
Last Thoughts
The Dell XPS thirteen OLED is the best ultrabook laptop I've ever reviewed. It'due south non perfect, with a stingy offering of ports and poor battery life, but it's still miles alee of the competition in almost every other regard.
How we examination
Every laptop nosotros review goes through a series of uniform checks designed to gauge key things including build quality, performance, screen quality and battery life.
Used equally our master laptop for the review period
Tested for at least a calendar week
Used consistent benchmarks for off-white comparisons with other laptops
Reviewed using respected industry benchmarks and existent earth use
FAQs
Can you use it for gaming?
The Dell XPS 13 OLED can handle entry-level games, such as Fortnite and Minecraft with low graphics settings, merely information technology cannot handle AAA games at a reasonable performance.
Does it feature a touchscreen?
Yes, the Dell XPS 13 OLED does characteristic a touchscreen. Simply it doesn't take a ii-in-ane form factor.
Does it have a USB-A port?
The Dell XPS 13 OLED does not feature the rectangle USB-A port used with wink drives and peripherals. Nonetheless, Dell provides a USB-C to USB-A adaptor in the box.
Trusted Reviews Test Information
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PCMark 10
Geekbench 5 single cadre
Geekbench five multi cadre
3DMark Time Spy
CrystalDiskMark Read speed
CrystalMarkDisk Write Speed
Effulgence
Blackness level
Contrast
White Visual Colour Temperature
sRGB
Adobe RGB
DCI-P3
PCMark Battery (office)
Battery Life
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Specs
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United kingdom RRP
United states RRP
CPU
Manufacturer
Screen Size
Storage Capacity
Front Camera
Battery
Size (Dimensions)
Weight
ASIN
Release Date
First Reviewed Date
Resolution
HDR
Refresh Charge per unit
Ports
Sound (Power output)
GPU
RAM
Connectivity
Colours
Display Technology
Screen Technology
Touch Screen
Convertible?
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Jargon buster
OLED
Organic Light Emitting Diode is console technology that allows each private pixel to produce light rather than relying on a backlight. This enables the screen to accurately display blacks by turning off the pixel, resulting in improved dissimilarity compared to conventional LCD panels.
Thunderbolt
Thunderbolt is a port technology that enables faster data transfer speeds than standard USB-C ports, while also allowing for multiple other functions such every bit outputting images to external monitors, power commitment and connecting to an Ethernet network.
USB-C
The modern USB connector you'll discover on near Android phones, new laptops, cameras and games consoles. It's reversible and used for charging along with data-transfer.
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